Spy Fiction

I

Introduction

Spy Fiction, the fictional treatment of espionage in literature.

II

Origins

The earliest novels to feature spies were two books set at a time of revolutionary upheaval, The Spy (1821) by James Fenimore Cooper, about an American who is wrongly suspected of spying for the British during the American War of Independence, and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens, set in Europe at the time of the French Revolution. The Reign of Terror was also the setting for The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) by Baroness Orczy in which the English aristocrat Sir Percy Blakeney disguises his identity to save innocent French nobles from execution.

In Britain, at the dawn of the 20th century, there was a popular vogue for sensational stories in which the nation was threatened by a foreign enemy. The first of these invasion novels to feature espionage was William Le Queux’s The Great War in 1897 (1894), which foretold of a French attack on Britain led by a Russian spy. Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim were two of the most popular writers of formula spy thrillers of the pre-war years.

In his final novel Kim (1901), Rudyard Kipling depicted an orphan’s initiation into the rites of espionage by the British secret service in pre-independence India, while in The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) by G. K. Chesterton, a spy plot about the infiltration of an anarchist conspiracy metamorphoses into religious allegory.

Three novels can lay claim to being the precursor of the modern espionage novel. The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers portrayed the unmasking of secret German plans to invade Britain. The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad takes its title from its spy protagonist, the Russian agent provocateur of an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Greenwich Observatory. In The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), by Scottish author John Buchan, an unwitting English hero Richard Hannay finds himself at the centre of an international conspiracy on the eve of World War I. The Thirty-Nine Steps was the first of a trio of bestselling adventure spy novels featuring Hannay, also including Greenmantle (1916) and Mr Standfast (1919). Buchan’s contemporary, “Sapper”, the pen-name of H. Cyril McNeile, created the character Bulldog Drummond, which was later acknowledged by Ian Fleming as the prototype of James Bond. A prominent theme in the novels of “Sapper” and Buchan was the threat of Bolshevism. The atmosphere of suspicion that pervaded in the lead up to World War I was also reflected in the final Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle, “His Last Bow” (1917), in which Holmes turns the tables on a German spy.

III

Pre-World War II

In the years prior to World War II, more realistic portrayals of espionage began to emerge. At the forefront of this trend was W. Somerset Maugham, who distilled his experiences of serving as a British agent during World War I into his novel Ashenden: or The British Agent (1928). Eric Ambler, who made films for the British army during World War II, is typically credited with being the pioneer of the modern spy novel. In his morally ambiguous, sceptical early novels, Epitaph for a Spy (1938), The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), and Journey into Fear (1940), he reflected the uncertainty and paranoia of pre-war Europe by casting his amateur heroes adrift in the murky underworld of international espionage. In a similar vein was Geoffrey Household’s dark fugitive thriller Rogue Male (1939). Graham Greene also contributed to the genre with his thriller and “entertainment” The Confidential Agent (1939), about an agent on a mission to England from a civil war-riven foreign land. The Scottish-born author Helen MacInnes published the first of her many espionage novels, Above Suspicion, in 1939, in which a husband and wife are recruited by British intelligence to carry out a perilous mission on the eve of World War II. Beginning with the World War I thriller Drink to Yesterday (1940), Manning Coles, pseudonym of the British writing duo Adelaide Frances Oke Manning and Cyril Henry Coles, the latter a former British intelligence officer, wrote a series of bestselling spy adventures featuring the British agent Tommy Hambledon.

IV

The Cold War

Relief from the anxiety of the Cold War came in the escapist form of the suave agent with a licence to kill, James Bond, created in the 1953 novel Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, who had worked in British naval intelligence during the war. Up until his death in 1964, Fleming wrote a dozen popular adventure novels featuring the spy, all of which were later filmed, and although their escapist plots often revolved around the foiling of a larger-than-life megalomaniac villain, they were nevertheless imbued with the prevailing mood of Cold War tension.

The attrition of the Cold War also produced a new impetus in realist spy fiction, led by the British author John Le Carré. Le Carré, pseudonym of David Cornwell, who had served in the British Foreign Service, articulated a sense of moral and ideological ambiguity in his bleakly authentic novels, such as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963). His most famous creation, the world-weary spymaster George Smiley, who featured in such novels as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and Smiley's People (1980), was the antithesis of the classic 007-type adventure hero. Graham Greene, who had been active in the British intelligence service in the 1940s, depicted the covert operations of the Western powers in developing nations, in pre-revolutionary Cuba (Our Man in Havana, 1958) and Vietnam (The Quiet American, 1955), and the mundane reality of the British secret service in The Human Factor (1978).

Popular spy writers who worked in the realist vein were Len Deighton, author of the so-called “Harry Palmer” novels beginning with The Ipcress File (1962), and the trilogies Berlin Game (1983), Mexico Set (1984), and London Match (1985) and Spy Hook (1988), Spy Line (1989) and Spy Sinker (1990); Adam Hall, pseudonym of Elleston Trevor, who wrote a series of novels featuring the British agent Quiller, beginning with The Berlin Memorandum (1965); Frederick Forsyth (The Odessa File, 1972); Jack Higgins, pseudonym of Harry Patterson (The Eagle Has Landed, 1975); and Ken Follett (Triple, 1979).

In the 1970s and 1980s, among the American bestselling authors of the genre were Trevanian, pseudonym of Rodney William Whitaker (The Eiger Sanction, 1972), Ross Thomas (The Cold War Swap, 1966), Robert Ludlum (The Scarlatti Inheritance, 1971), Robert Littell (The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, 1973), Charles McCarry (The Tears of Autumn, 1974), Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, 1981), and Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October, 1984).