spy fiction

spy fiction, One of the most popular forms of fiction over the last hundred years, the British spy novel emerged during the international tensions of the years preceding the First World War. Scandals like the Dreyfus Affair in France highlighted the activities of spies and the intelligence services that employed them, while armaments rivalries such as the Anglo-German naval race fuelled a volatile mood of jingoism and xenophobia receptive to novels of espionage, intrigue, and violence, in which secret agent heroes battled against the evil machinations of villainous spies.

Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903), a suspenseful tale of two amateur British agents foiling a German invasion plot, is often described as the first spy novel, and has become a classic. But the first spy writer to spring to public fame was William Tufnell Le Queux (1864–1927), whose highly successful The Great War in England in 1897 (1893) heralded a cascade of best-sellers over the next three decades, all of which employ a series of heroic male agents cut from sturdy patriotic cloth who save the nation from the plots of foreign spies. Setting an enduring trend in spy fiction, Le Queux—who fantasized about being a spy himself—deliberately blurred the line between fact and fiction to make spurious claims of authenticity and realism, and his fiction was often thinly disguised propaganda for strengthened national security. Le Queux's great Edwardian rival was E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946), who wrote a succession of novels featuring glamorous seductresses and society high life that continued until the Second World War; amongst the best known are The Kingdom of the Blind (1916) and The Great Impersonation (1920). The year 1920 also saw the creation by Sapper of the unabashed xenophobe and anti-Semite Bulldog Drummond, a muscular agent who over the next two decades robustly thwarted the plots of the communist arch-villain Carl Peterson and assorted foreigners in such titles as The Black Gang (1922), The Final Count (1926), and The Return of Bulldog Drummond (1932).

Yet from this inaugural period the writer who has best endured is J. Buchan, whose secret agent hero Richard Hannay first appeared in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), a novel its author described as ‘a romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible’, which defines much other spy fiction as well. There followed such classics as Greenmantle (1916), Mr Standfast (1919), and The Three Hostages (1924). Hannay and his adventures set their stamp on the imagination of a generation and beyond. Recurrent criticism of the hearty clubland ethos of Buchan's fiction provides exasperated testimony of how popular his novels have remained to this day.

The sombre inter-war climate saw the emergence of a new generation of spy writers who broke sharply with the patriotic orthodoxies of their predecessors. Some, such as Compton Mackenzie and Maugham, had worked for British wartime intelligence and painted a far less glamorized and more realistic picture of the secret agent's life, such as in Maugham's influential collection of short stories Ashenden (1928). Mackenzie, prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for indiscretions in his third volume of wartime memoirs, Greek Memories (1932), took his revenge in his classic parody of the bureaucratic absurdities of the Secret Service, Water on the Brain (1933).

Building on the foundations laid by Maugham and Mackenzie, Eric Ambler crafted plots of considerable technical skill and authenticity, combined with a leftist outlook that featured innocent protagonists caught up in the machinations of ‘merchants of death’ and other capitalist villains. His best-known and most successful novel of this period was The Mask of Dimitrios (1939). Ambler's ideological outlook was shared by G. Greene, whose Stamboul Train (1932), The Confidential Agent (1939), and The Ministry of Fear (1943) presaged his even better-known spy novels that appeared after the Second World War when he worked as a British intelligence officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6): The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1959), and The Human Factor (1978), which struck a typically Greene-ish theme in its reflections on betrayal, loyalty, and trust.

The dominating figure of the immediate post-war years was I. Fleming, whose Casino Royale (1953) introduced the iconic figure of James Bond, undoubtedly the most famous fictional secret agent of all time. By the year of Fleming's premature death his eleven Bond spy novels, including such classics as From Russia with Love (1957) and Goldfinger (1959), had sold over 40 million copies and his hero was beginning to appear in blockbuster movies that continue to this day. The Bond adventures were updated versions of Le Queux and Buchan designed for the Cold War consumer boom and changed sexual mores of the 1950s and 1960s; the enemy is Moscow or, in later novels such as Thunderball (1961), megalomaniacs of international ambition such as the unforgettable Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Outraged critics deplored the novels as both cause and symptom of cultural decay, and for their sex, snobbery, and violence. Others praised their technical skill and robust good fun. They also provided intriguing texts for their times, for Fleming had wartime intelligence experience and was a practising journalist with an acute and perceptive eye for the cross-currents of tradition and change that revolutionized Britain and its place in the post-war world.

Such change had already cast its post-imperial shadow by the time of Fleming's death. The 1961 building of the Berlin Wall brought a serious chill to the Cold War climate, and in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) John Le Carré marked out the territory that was to dominate spy fiction until the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Making an explicit and conscious break with Bond, he created the anti-heroic figure of George Smiley, the protagonist of several of his novels that culminate in Smiley's People (1980), an eternally middle-aged and all too human intelligence officer who grapples with the ambiguities and moral maze of real-life Cold War espionage. However noble the end, Le Carré's spy fiction proclaims, those who work in intelligence always risk their humanity. The Looking-Glass War (1965) is a particularly bleak dissection of a Cold War operation, while Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), explores the theme of the Soviet ‘mole’ within the service. Here, Le Carré was firmly in tradition, for he too had worked for British intelligence and drew heavily (as he continued to do in the 1990s) from personal knowledge. Exploring similar terrain in this period were writers like Len Deighton (1929– ) who made his name with The Ipcress File (1962) and Funeral in Berlin (1964), the former intelligence officer Ted Allbeury (1917– ), and the highly productive William Haggard (pseudonym of Richard Henry Michael Clayton, 1907–93).

Yet even as Le Carré and others explored the moral ambiguities of Cold War espionage, Frederick Forsyth (1938– ) was marking yet another shift in mood. In thrill-packed and highly successful blockbusters such as The Day of the Jackal (1971) and The Odessa File (1972), and continuing through The Fourth Protocol (1984) and The First of God (1994), he returned to adventure stories on a global scale in which tough male heroes save the world from a variety of disasters, a trend reflected too in the novels of Ken Follett (1949– ) such as The Eye of the Needle (1978) and The Man from St Petersburg (1982).

The spy novel has always been a hybrid form, sliding over into the detective, crime, or even romance novel. Yet whether the end of the Cold War and superpower confrontation will terminally affect its health remains to be seen.