 While a junior reporter, Crankshaw had been summoned by Guy Burgess of the Foreign Office to be criticised for being "too soft towards Russia"; after Burgess was unmasked as one of the Cambridge Five spies (for the Soviet Union), and fled to Moscow, Crankshaw met him there several times, though he did not report on Burgess for "The Observer", and ended up liking the spy.Crankshaw died on 30 November 1984 in Hawkhurst, Kent.Crankshaw wrote around 40 books on Austrian ("Vienna"; "Vienna, the Image of a Culture in Decline"; "Fall of the House of Habsburg"; "Gestapo.