While sales of spy fiction have been consistently strong over many decades, recent successful adaptations for streaming platforms — such as Slow Horses and The Night Manager — as well as the emergence of several new writers, demonstrate a spike in popularity. This recent surge of interest has coincided with a surge in anxiety about our fragmenting geopolitical world. Is this correlation or causation? Any half decent spy will tell you to be suspicious of coincidence. If we are drawn to spy fiction at times of geopolitical anxiety why is this so? What do such novels offer us?
Historically spying has been looked down on as a dubious profession. Only in the modern era have spies attained their reputation as glamourous international figures, damaged maybe, and still operating out of view, but now heroes of their stories. In the US, spy fiction can be traced back to 1821’s American Revolutionary War story, The Spy, by James Fenimore Cooper. In the UK the hero spy can be traced back to the Edwardian novels of William Le Queux, whose hero battled against German spies planning to invade England in the 1900s (The Daily Mail’s owner Lord Northcliffe serialized his work convinced invasion scaremongering was well suited for the average Briton’s liking for a “good hate”).
The deceptive nature of spies has historically contrasted with the transparent valour of the warrior
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Before Le Queux, philosopher Immanuel Kant, described espionage as “that infernal art” because it necessarily involves deception. Kant believed the deception undermined the trust of belligerents in wartime and undermined interwar peace. The deceptive nature of spies has historically contrasted with the transparent valour of the warrior.
Even those who have recognised the need for espionage saw it more as a necessary evil than a gallant activity. In ancient China Sun Tzu claimed that a ruler is under an obligation to attempt to avoid conflict as it will result in the loss of life of his subjects. Given the only way to acquire knowledge of his enemy’s intentions is by using spies, a sovereign who refuses to do so is, therefore, “devoid of humanity.” In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes agreed, using the analogy of a spider’s web, claiming: “Without intelligence agents, sovereigns have no more idea what orders need to be given for the defence of their subjects than spiders can know when to emerge and where to make for without the threads of their webs.” There is a moral duty on rulers to better understand the uncertainty they face and therefore the consequences of their actions and those of potential enemies, but the spy is an arachnid to the warrior’s lion.
When the spy novel took off in the twentieth century, with British writers such as John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carré leading the way, the heroes could not quite shake off the suspicion that they are damned for practicing their infernal art, whether it was the nature of the art or because of the nature of their character that was attracted to the art.
During the post-war years these writers reflected the egotistical anxieties of an empire losing its prominence and then the existential anxieties of an ideological war that intelligence agencies were fighting to keep cold to avoid the searing heat of nuclear conflict. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s many predicted the death of the espionage thriller, but new anxieties were quick to provide new material, and today with the collapse of the post-war international order, acceleration of technological change and the disintegration of political and economic cohesion, there are arguably even more anxieties to mine — both our place in the world and the catastrophic ways it could be destroyed — than at any other time since the Cold War golden era of espionage fiction.
Espionage novels use these anxieties as a source. In doing so they allow us to make sense of big and frightening news stories, be it terrorism, war, pandemic, corrupt elites, political extremism, or, cyber or nuclear apocalypse. Spy novels can educate the reader on complex geopolitical situations, but also make sense of these issues, guiding the reader through the labyrinth of global disorder, plot clue by clue. They can fulfil a similar role to conspiracy theories: fictional stories that help us make sense of our world.
Conspiracy theories also thrive in times of uncertainty, when our world is turned upside down. During my time serving in Iraq, I heard lots of conspiracy theories. Many concerned exaggerated capabilities of the equipment we had, such as one that claimed Army-issued sunglasses gave the troops X-ray vision. One bizarre theory claimed we had deployed carnivorous honey badgers to terrorise the locals in Basra. Conspiracy theories are stories that are intuitively “true” to some people, in a way that disordered, messy, reality cannot be. They strive to provide the comfort of coherence, not necessarily describe the world as it is. In Iraq, the theory that the coalition had released the badgers took hold to the point that a military spokesman had to confirm, “we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.” Honey badgers had returned to Basra, killing livestock and frightening the locals, but they were historically native to Basra. The re-flooding of marshes that Saddam’s regime had drained was likely causing them to edge closer to populated areas after a long absence.
More than creating a story that makes sense, both conspiracy theories and spy fiction provide comfort by assigning human agency to events beyond our control. It is better for our collective ego to believe our situation is of our own making rather than the result of a remorseless natural world or complex interactions we are unable to influence. If humans are responsible, it also suggests that humans can find a solution. The comfort provided is that there are those behind the chaotic scenes, conflicted and damned but ultimately morally good, countering the evils we see on our daily newsfeeds and even delivering justice to the fictitious proxies of faceless distant enemies.
This assignment of agency often involves the creation of a secret global network. This resolves the paradox many conspiracy theories have of claiming governments are simultaneously capable of high levels of secrecy and logistical and administrative expertise, whilst at the same time being massively incompetent. It provides reassurance that there are those of greater capability behind the scenes pulling the strings of those fumbling in front of the cameras. Interestingly, many of the recent spy novels have their heroes as ex-intelligence officers. They have special skills from their training and the experience of having worked for those organisations, but are outsiders fighting corrupt elites within their own former organisations as much as criminals, terrorists or foreign powers (Mick Herron’s Slow Horses is a variation of this — still inside the organisation but pushed to its fringes). Whether in or out, it is more often than not members of the intelligence community pulling the strings in conspiracy theories as well as in spy novels.
The most convincing fictions are those most closely based on truths
Intelligence officers, from creating the legend of who they are when working covertly, to the cover stories they give an agent to explain why he is meeting the officer, to the reasons why an agent should complete a certain task, to deceptions created to mislead adversaries, intelligence officers are always trying to create the most compelling fiction. The most convincing fictions are those most closely based on truths. Spy writers, many of whom have served in the intelligence services, are attempting to do the same thing for different purposes. In doing so they perform a balancing act between authenticity and fantasy, for as Greene states in his introduction to The Human Factor: “A novel based on life in any Secret Service must necessarily contain a large element of fantasy, for a realistic description would almost certainly infringe some clause or other in some official secrets act.”
Real life spies, however, also perform this balancing act: a life in any Secret Service contains the use of fantasy, the balancing act can become trying to grasp what is fantasy, both of your creation and your adversaries, and what is the truth as layers of fiction accumulate. This can infringe on one’s sense or reality. This is cleverly explored in Charles Beaumont’s debut novel, A Spy Alone, when an ex-spy stumbles upon a potential spy ring in Oxford. Is he uncovering a true conspiracy or if he is an increasingly paranoid man losing his balance.
It is not just the disorienting impact of the fantasies they weave that cause fictional spies to stumble but also the burden of carrying secrets and the weight of moral choices. They take on these loads so we do not have to. If we accept Dostoevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor in his novel The Brothers Karamazov, in doing so they are doing us a great favour. The Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus that men are too weak to bear the gift of freedom. All they really want is their earthly needs met. They will worship any authority that delivers their daily bread. He informs Jesus they have amended his teaching, “And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted from their hearts.” Freedom of choice in a morally ambiguous world can create much anxiety. Spy novels provide us with a safe space to explore moral complexity, as the tragedies did for the Greeks, and can comfort us with a belief that there are others dealing with this complexity on our behalf. We can return to the real world at the end of the story, absolved from further consideration of such complexity.
James Wolff (the pseudonym of an ex-intelligence officer) sees a religious element to espionage. He tells me that, “we read spy fiction to make sense of a nonsensical world, and in that context we think of spies in the same way that believers in times gone by might have thought of angels and demons — as invisible agents of good and evil. In other words, there’s a metaphysical, even spiritual, element to our interest in spy fiction.” Wolff’s excellent first novel, Beside the Syrian Sea, was reminiscent of Greene’s spy novels weaving faith, human frailty and doubt with action and tradecraft, while saturating the story with an earthly sense of exotic place.
In his highly original new novel, Spies and Other Gods, the narrator is the soul of the intelligence community or the “spirit of spying”. Wolff’s heroine, historical researcher Aphra McQueen, challenges Sir William Rentoul, head of Wolff’s fictional intelligence agency with Luther’s rallying cry of “sola fide”. By doing so she likens Sir William’s claims of the complexity of the intelligence world to the church of Luther’s time that said that uninitiated ordinary people couldn’t understand the Bible. As priests were required to act as intermediaries between us and God, now intelligence officers fill that priestly role of keeper of our secrets and moral arbiters. This is convenient in fiction and dangerous in reality. In fiction checks and balances are often portrayed as bureaucratic hindrances enforced by those lacking the “on the ground” context and daring of the intelligence officer, but an objective outside view is essential to provide oversight to those immersed in the messy emotional work of operations, driven by all too human responses to pressures of performance and ambition, danger, and the hubris that comes from believing their own mythology (spies read and watch spy fictions too).
Part of spy fiction’s enduring popularity, through times of uncertainty and times of relative stability, as well as their ability to provide entertaining escapism, is what it has to say about our purely terrestrial relationships with each other. Le Carré claimed, “Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader’s daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.” We do so through deploying multiple versions of ourselves, some almost unrecognisable from each other. In Chris Merritt’s, forthcoming gritty, well-paced, page-turner, Octagon, ex-spook Stella McRae, whilst unravelling a far-right doomsday conspiracy, acknowledges that, “Nobody had just one identity,” when choosing how she will “bump” a target, to manufacture an introduction.
Spying allows unethical behavior — such as lying and deception — in pursuit of higher goals. It involves difficult questions around who one should be loyal to: your family, your employer, your state, your moral compass? Through the different everyday roles we play — employee, patriot, spouse, friend, moral being — we face similar if less obvious dilemmas. At the heart of these considerations is often the intersection of the morality of one-to-one interactions and a wider political or ethical morality. Spy novels let us explore some of these dilemmas acting as extreme modern parables for more everyday quandaries. As the Greek audience empathised with Antigone as she grappled with questions of loyalty to kin or country on the battlefield of Thebes, modern readers of le Carré will sympathise with George Smiley’s grappling of similar issues.
Merritt tells me that, “spy thrillers are fundamentally about secrets and betrayal — two powerful psychological experiences that people simultaneously love/are fascinated by and fear (just look at how the nation is glued to The Traitors).” We are all intrigued by lies and deception, as we recognise elements of our own behaviours that we suppress or hide.
More than fascination there can be an addiction. There is an intoxicating freedom of not being yourself, being licensed to lie. Intelligence officers understand this intoxication better than most. Le Carré had what he described as a “galaxy of inappropriate affairs”, throughout his marriages, using tradecraft he learnt as an intelligence officer to cover his tracks. When you leave the intelligence services or the military it is hard to match some of the excitements of the job on civvie street. Le Carré is not alone in attempting to replicate the thrill of secrecy, the tension of getting caught and the guilt-ridden pleasure of getting away with it. During my time in service in an evasive driving training one colleague, who after being praised for doing a particularly aggressive J-turn, marvelled at how he was now being praised for things he used to get into trouble for. There is a reverse to this when you leave.
After I left writing helped me make sense of my experiences witnessing the failed attempts at societal change in Iraq and Afghanistan. These experiences led me to a belief in coincidence or cock-up, over a conspiracy of highly capable secret elites. My novel, Land of the Blind, a fictional account of an intelligence officer’s tour in Afghanistan, tried to capture the humour, chaos and tragedy of a war where no-one really understood what was happening. It does not fit neatly into the category of “spy fiction”, yet as Charles Cumming, the author of the excellent Box 88 series — the fourth instalment of which comes out this summer — notes, there is a rich variety of spy novels. Cumming highlights that, “The genre runs the gamut from the psychological and social realism of le Carré all the way to the escapist fantasies of Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum. En route you encounter Mick Herron’s Slough House series, which often seem to be sending up the high seriousness of le Carré, and Len Deighton’s great thrillers from the 1960s and 70s which were as much concerned with the British class system as they were with the mechanics of espionage.”
Across all the full spectrum of the genre there are British writers producing new work exploring the anxieties of our times, giving us diverting comfort in a fragmenting world, exposing universal but often hidden elements of our nature and providing entertaining escapism, in mysterious and exotic worlds that the average person does not normally have access to. Our intelligence services may not have the influence they once had. We are still, however, producing spy writers who are best in the field.
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