Spy fiction
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Spy fiction is a genre of literature involving
History
Commentator William Bendler noted that "Chapter 2 of the Hebrew Bible's Book of Joshua might count as the first Spy Story in world literature. (...) Three thousand years before James Bond seduced Pussy Galore and turned her into his ally against Goldfinger, the spies sent by General Joshua into the city of Jericho did much the same with Rahab the Harlot.[4]"
Nineteenth century
Spy fiction as a genre started to emerge during the 19th Century. Early examples of the espionage novel are The Spy (1821) and The Bravo (1831), by American novelist James Fenimore Cooper. The Bravo attacks European anti-republicanism, by depicting Venice as a city-state where a ruthless oligarchy wears the mask of the "serene republic".
In nineteenth-century France, the
At least two
Twentieth century
The major themes of a spy in the lead-up to the First World War were the continuing rivalry between the European colonial powers for dominance in Asia, the growing threat of conflict in Europe, the domestic threat of revolutionaries and anarchists, and historical romance.
The
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) by Baroness Orczy chronicled an English aristocrat's derring-do in rescuing French aristocrats from the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution (1789–99).
But the term "spy novel" was defined by
During the First World War
During the War,
Inter-war period
After the
Spy fiction was dominated by British authors during this period, initially former
In the book Literary Agents (1987), Anthony Masters wrote: "Ashenden's adventures come nearest to the real-life experiences of his creator"'.[8] John Le Carré described Ashenden stories as a major influence on his novels as praised Maugham as "the first person to write anything about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality".[8]
At a more popular level, Leslie Charteris' popular and long-running Saint series began, featuring Simon Templar, with Meet the Tiger (1928). Water on the Brain (1933) by former intelligence officer Compton Mackenzie was the first successful spy novel satire.[9] Prolific author Dennis Wheatley also wrote his first spy novel, The Eunuch of Stamboul (1935) during this period.
In the sham state of Manchukuo, spies often featured in stories published in its government-sponsored magazines as villains threatening Manchukuo.[10] Manchukuo had been presented since its founding in 1931 as an idealistic Pan-Asian experiment, where the officially designated "five races" of the Japanese, Han Chinese, Manchus, Koreans and Mongols had come together to build a utopian society.[11] Manchukuo also had a substantial Russian minority who initially been considered as the "sixth race", but had been excluded.[11] The spy stories of Manchukuo such as "A Mixed Race Woman" by the writer Ding Na often linked the willingness to serve as spies with having a mixed Russian-Han heritage; the implication being that people of "pure" descent from one of the "five races" of Manchukuo would not betray it.[12] In "A Mixed Race Woman", the villain initially appears to Mali, the eponymous character who has a Russian father and a Han mother, but she ultimately is revealed to be blackmailed by the story's true villain, the foreign spy Baoerdun, and she proves to be loyal to Manchukuo after all as she forces the gun out of Baoerdun's hand at the story's climax.[13] However, Ding's story also states that Baoerdun would not dare to have attempted his blackmail scheme against a Han woman and that he targeted Mali because she was racially mixed and hence "weak".[14]
When Japan invaded China in 1937 and even more so in 1941, the level of repression and propaganda in Manchukuo was increased as the state launched a "total war" campaign to mobilise society for the war.[15] As part of the "total war" campaign, the state warned people to be vigilant at all times for spies; alongside this campaign went a mania for spy stories, which likewise warned people to be vigilant against spies.[15] Novels and films with a counterespionage theme became ubiquitous in Manchukuo from 1937 onward.[16] Despite the intensely patriarchal values of Manchukuo, the counter-spy campaign targeted women who were encouraged to report anyone suspicious to the police with one slogan saying, "Women defend inside and men defend outside".[17] The spy stories of Manchukuo such as "A Mixed Race Woman" often had female protagonists.[17] In "A Mixed Race Woman", it is two ordinary women who break up the spy ring instead of the Manchukuo police as might be expected.[13] The South Korean scholar Bong InYoung noted stories such as "A Mixed Race Woman" were part of the state's campaign to take over "...the governance of private and family life, relying on the power of propaganda literature and the nationwide mobilization of the social discourse of counterespionage".[16] At the same time, she noted "A Mixed Race Woman" with its intelligent female protagonists seemed to challenge the patriarchal values of Manchukuo which portrayed women as the weaker sex in need of male protection and guidance.[16] However, Bong noted that the true heroine of "A Mixed Race Woman", Shulan is presented as superior to Mali as she is Han and the story is one "...of female disempowerment in that Mali is completely subordinate to the racial order Shulan sets".[18]
Second World War
The growing support of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain, and the imminence of war, attracted quality writers back to spy fiction.
British author
Above Suspicion (1939) by Helen MacInnes, about an anti-Nazi husband and wife spy team, features literate writing and fast-paced, intricate, and suspenseful stories occurring against contemporary historical backgrounds. MacInnes wrote many other spy novels in the course of a long career, including Assignment in Brittany (1942), Decision at Delphi (1961), and Ride a Pale Horse (1984).[19]
Manning Coles published Drink to Yesterday (1940), a grim story occurring during the Great War, which introduces the hero Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon. However, later novels featuring Hambledon were lighter-toned, despite being set either in Nazi Germany or Britain during the Second World War (1939–45). After the War, the Hambledon adventures fell to formula, losing critical and popular interest.[citation needed]
The events leading up to the Second World War, and the War itself, continue to be fertile ground for authors of spy fiction. Notable examples include Ken Follett, Eye of the Needle (1978); Alan Furst, Night Soldiers (1988); and David Downing, the Station series, beginning with Zoo Station (2007).[citation needed]
Writers on World War II: 1939–1945
Author(s) | Title | Publisher | Date | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
Mashbir, Sidney | I Was an American Spy: published 1953, republished as 65th Anniversary Edition in 2019 | Horizon Productions | 1953, republished 2019 | American intelligence agent who played a significant role in both WWI and WWII. Colonel Mashbir is included in the Army Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame. He is a pioneer of military intelligence and is one of two men who first created the framework for the C.I.A. |
Babington-Smith, Constance | Air Spy: The Story of Photo Intelligence in World War II | 1957 | ||
Berg, Moe | The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg | Vintage Books | 1994 | — Major league baseball player and OSS Secret Intelligence (SI) spy in Yugoslavia |
Bryden, John | Best-Kept Secret: Canadian Secret Intelligence in the Second World War | Lester | 1993 | — |
Doundoulakis, Helias | Trained to be an OSS Spy | Xlibris | 2014 | OSS Secret Intelligence (SI) spy in Greece |
Hall, Virginia | The Spy with the Wooden Leg: The Story of Virginia Hall | Alma Little | 2012 | SOE and OSS spy in France |
Hinsley, F. H. and Alan Stripp | Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park | — | 2001 | — |
Hinsley, F. H. | British Intelligence in the Second World War | — | 1996 | Abridged version of multivolume official history. |
Hohne, Heinz | Canaris: Hitler's Master Spy | — | 1979 | — |
Jones, R. V. | The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945 | — | 1978 | — |
Kahn, David | Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II | — | 1978 | — |
Kahn, David | Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes, 1939–1943 | — | 1991 | FACE |
Kitson, Simon | The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France | — | 2008 | |
Leigh Fermor, Patrick | Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation in Crete | New York Review Books | 2015 | SOE spy who abducted General Kreipe from Crete |
Lewin, Ronald | The American Magic: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan | — | 1982 | — |
Masterman, J. C. | The Double-Cross System in the War of 1935 to 1945 | Yale | 1972 | — |
Persico, Joseph |
Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage | — | 2001 | — |
Persico, Joseph | Casey: The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey-From the OSS to the CIA | — | 1991 | — |
Pinck, Dan | Journey to Peking: A Secret Agent in Wartime China | US Naval Institute Press | 2003 | OSS Secret Intelligence (SI) spy in Hong Kong, China, during WWII |
Ronnie, Art | Counterfeit Hero: Fritz Duquesne, Adventurer and Spy | — | 1995 | ISBN 1-55750-733-3
|
Sayers, Michael & Albert E. Kahn | Sabotage! The Secret War Against America | — | 1942 | — |
Smith, Richard Harris | OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency | — | 2005 | — |
Stanley, Roy M. | World War II Photo Intelligence | — | 1981 | — |
Wark, Wesley | The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 | — | 1985 | — |
Wark, Wesley | "Cryptographic Innocence: The Origins of Signals Intelligence in Canada in the Second World War" in Journal of Contemporary History 22 | — | 1987 | — |
West, Nigel | Secret War: The Story of SOE, Britain's Wartime Sabotage Organization | — | 1992 | — |
Winterbotham, F. W. | The Ultra Secret | Harper & Row | 1974 | — |
Winterbotham, F. W. | The Nazi Connection | Harper & Row | 1978 | — |
Cowburn, B. | No Cloak No Dagger | Brown Watson, Ltd . |
1960 | — |
Wohlstetter, Roberta | Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision | — | 1962 | — |
Cold War
Early
The metamorphosis of the Second World War (1939–45) into the Soviet–American
The "secret world" of espionage allowed a situation when writers could project anything they wanted onto the "secret world". The author Bruce Page complained in his 1969 book The Philby Conspiracy:
"The trouble is that a man can hold almost any theory he cares to about the secret world, and defend it against large quantities of hostile evidence by the simple expedient of retreating behind further and further screens of postulated inward mystery. Secret services have in common with Freemasons and mafiosi that they inhabit an intellectual twilight-a kind of ambiguous gloom in which it is hard to distinguish with certainty between the menacing and the merely ludicrous. In such circumstances the human affinity for myth and legend easily gets out of control".[20]
This inability to know for certain about what is going on in the "secret world" of intelligence-gathering affected both non-fiction and fiction books about espionage. The Cold War and the struggle between Soviet intelligence-known as the KGB from 1954 onward-vs. the CIA and MI6 made the subject of espionage a popular one for novelists to write about.[21] Most of the spy novels of the Cold War were really action thrillers with little resemblance to the actual work of spies.[21] The writer Malcolm Muggeridge who had worked as a spy in World War Two commented that thriller writers in the Cold War took to writing about espionage "as easily as the mentally unstable become psychiatrists or the impotent pornographers".[21] The city that was considered to be the "capital of the Cold War" was Berlin, owing to its post-war status as the city was divided between the two German states while Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States all had occupations zones in Berlin.[22] As a result, Berlin was a beehive of espionage during the Cold War with the city full of American, British, East German, French, Soviet and West German spies; it was estimated that there was an average of about 8,000 spies in Berlin at any given moment during the Cold War.[22] Because Berlin was a center of espionage, the city was frequently a setting for spy novels and films.[23] Furthermore, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 made the wall into a symbol of Communist tyranny, which further increased the attraction for Western writers of setting a Cold War spy novel in Berlin. Perhaps the most memorable story set in Berlin was The Spy Who Came In From The Cold which in both the novel and the film ended with disillusioned British spy Alec Leamas and his lover, the naïve young woman Liz Gold being shot down while trying to cross the Berlin Wall from East Berlin into West Berlin.[23]
British
With Secret Ministry (1951), Desmond Cory introduced Johnny Fedora, the secret agent with a licence to kill, the government-sanctioned assassin. Ian Fleming, a former member of naval intelligence, followed swiftly with the glamorous James Bond, secret agent 007 of the British Secret Service, a mixture of counter-intelligence officer, assassin and playboy. Perhaps the most famous fictional spy, Bond was introduced in Casino Royale (1953). After Fleming's death the franchise continued under other British and American authors, including Kingsley Amis, Christopher Wood, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz. The Bond novels, which were extremely popular in the 1950s, inspired an even more popular series of films starting in 1962. The success of the Bond novels and films has greatly influenced popular images of the work of spies even though the character of Bond is more of an assassin than a spy.[24]
Despite the commercial success of Fleming's extravagant novels,
"Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colorful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonymity and his safety. His fear makes him servile—he could embrace the shoppers who jostle him in their impatience and force him from the pavement. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes.
But this fear, this servility, this dependence had developed in Smiley a perception for the colour of human beings: a swift, feminine sensitivity to their characters and motives. He knew mankind as a huntsman knows his cover, as a fox the woods. For a spy must hunt while he is hunted, and the crowd is his estate. He could collect their gestures, record the interplay of glance and movement, as a huntsman can record the twisted bracken and broken twig, or as a fox detects the signs of danger".[27]
Like Le Carré, former British Intelligence officer
MI6 was outraged by Our Man In Havana with its story of James Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba, recruited to work for MI6 who bamboozles his employers by selling them diagrams of vacuum cleaners, which he persuades MI6 are really diagrams of Soviet missiles.[29] MI6 pressed for Greene to be prosecuted for violating the Official Secrets Act, claiming that he revealed too much about MI6's methods in Our Man in Havana, but it decided against charging Greene out of the fear that prosecuting him would suggest the unflattening picture of MI6 in Our Man in Havana was based on reality.[21] Greene's older brother, Herbert, a professional con-man had briefly worked as a spy for the Japanese in the 1930s before his employers realised that the "secrets" that he was selling them was merely information culled from the newspapers.[29] The bumbling vacuum cleaner salesman Wormold in Our Man in Havana seems to been inspired by Herbert Greene.[29] In The Human Factor, Greene portrayed MI6 again in a highly unsympathetic light, depicting the British government as supporting the apartheid regime of South Africa because it was pro-Western while the book's protagonist, the MI6 officer Maurice Castle, married to a black South African woman, provides information to the KGB to thwart MI6 operations.[29][30] Much of the plot of The Human Factor concerned a secret plan by the British, American and West German governments to buy up South African gold in bulk in order to stabilise the economy of South Africa, which Greene presented as fundamentally amoral, arguing that the Western powers were betraying their values by supporting the white supremacist South African government.[29] Much controversy ensued when shortly after the publication of The Human Factor it emerged that such a plan had in fact been carried out, which led to much speculation about whether this was a coincidence or whether Greene had more access to secret information than he let on.[29] There was also much speculation that the character of Maurice Castle was inspired by Philby, but Greene consistently denied this.[28] Other novelists followed a similar path. Len Deighton's anonymous spy protagonist of The IPCRESS File (1962), Horse Under Water (1963), Funeral in Berlin (1964), and others, is a working-class man with a negative view of "the Establishment".[31]
Other notable examples of espionage fiction during this period were also built around recurring characters. These include James Mitchell's 'John Craig' series, written under his pseudonym 'James Munro', beginning with The Man Who Sold Death (1964); and Trevor Dudley-Smith's Quiller spy novel series written under the pseudonym 'Adam Hall', beginning with The Berlin Memorandum (US: The Quiller Memorandum, 1965), a hybrid of glamour and dirt, Fleming and Le Carré; and William Garner's fantastic Michael Jagger in Overkill (1966), The Deep, Deep Freeze (1968), The Us or Them War (1969) and A Big Enough Wreath (1974).[citation needed]
Other important British writers who first became active in spy fiction during this period include Padraig Manning O'Brine, Killers Must Eat (1951); Michael Gilbert, Be Shot for Sixpence (1956); Alistair MacLean, The Last Frontier (1959); Brian Cleeve, Assignment to Vengeance (1961); Jack Higgins, The Testament of Caspar Schulz (1962); and Desmond Skirrow, It Won't Get You Anywhere (1966). Dennis Wheatley's 'Gregory Sallust' (1934-1968) and 'Roger Brook' (1947-1974) series were also largely written during this period.[citation needed]
Notable recurring characters from this era include Adam Diment's Philip McAlpine as a long-haired, hashish-smoking fop in the novels The Dolly Dolly Spy (1967), The Great Spy Race (1968), The Bang Bang Birds (1968) and Think, Inc. (1971); James Mitchell's 'David Callan' series, written in his own name, beginning with Red File for Callan (1969); William Garner's John Morpurgo in Think Big, Think Dirty (1983), Rats' Alley (1984), and Zones of Silence (1986); and Joseph Hone's 'Peter Marlow' series, beginning with The Private Sector (1971), set during Israel's Six-Day War (1967) against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In all of these series the writing is literary and the tradecraft believable.[citation needed]
Noteworthy examples of the journalistic style and successful integration of fictional characters with historical events were the politico-military novels The Day of the Jackal (1971) by Frederick Forsyth and Eye of the Needle (1978) by Ken Follett. With the explosion of technology, Craig Thomas, launched the techno-thriller with Firefox (1977), describing the Anglo–American theft of a superior Soviet jet aeroplane.[32]
Other important British writers who first became active in spy fiction during this period include
Philip Gooden provides an analysis of British spy fiction in four categories: professionals, amateurs, dandies and literary types.[33]
American
During the war
Major General
The Nick Carter-Killmaster series of spy novels, initiated by Michael Avallone and Valerie Moolman, but authored anonymously, ran to over 260 separate books between 1964 and the early 1990s and invariably pitted American, Soviet and Chinese spies against each other. With the proliferation of male protagonists in the spy fiction genre, writers and book packagers also started bringing out spy fiction with a female as the protagonist. One notable spy series is The Baroness, featuring a sexy female superspy, with the novels being more action-oriented, in the mould of Nick Carter-Killmaster.
Other important American authors who became active in spy fiction during this period include
The first American techno-thriller was
Other important American authors who became active in spy fiction during this period include
Soviet
The culture of Imperial Russia was deeply influenced by the culture of France, and traditionally spy novels in France had a very low status.[38] One consequence of the French influence on Russian culture was that the subject of espionage was usually ignored by Russian writers during the Imperial period.[38] Traditionally, the subject of espionage was treated in the Soviet Union as a story of villainous foreign spies threatening the USSR.[39] The organisation established to hunt down German spies in 1943, SMERSH, was an acronym for the wartime slogan Smert shpionam! ("Death to Spies!"), which reflected the picture promoted by the Soviet state of spies as a class of people who deserved to be killed without mercy.[39] The unfavorable picture of spies ensured that before the early 1960s there were no novels featuring Soviet spies as the heroes as espionage was portrayed as a disreputable activity that only the enemies of the Soviet Union engaged in.[39] Unlike in Britain and the United States, where the achievements of Anglo-American intelligence during the Second World War were to a certain extent publicized soon after the war such as the fact that the Americans had broken the Japanese naval codes (which came out in 1946) and the British deception operation of 1943, Operation Mincemeat (which was revealed in 1953), there was nothing equivalent in the Soviet Union until the early 1960s.[39] Soviet novels prior to the 1960s to the extent that espionage was portrayed at all concerned heroic scouts in the Red Army who during the Great Patriotic War as the war with Germany is known in the Soviet Union who go on dangerous missions deep behind the Wehrmacht's lines to find crucial information.[39] The scout stories were more action-adventure stories than espionage stories proper and significantly always portrayed Red Army scouts rather than Chekisty ("Chekists") as secret policemen are always called in Russia as their heroes.[39] The protagonists of the scout stories always almost ended being killed at the climax of the stories, giving up their lives up to save the Motherland from the German invaders.[39]
In November 1961, Vladimir Semichastny became the chairman of the KGB and sent out to improve the image of the Chekisty.[39] The acronym KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti-Committee of State Security) was adopted in 1954, but the organisation had been founded in 1917 as the Cheka. The frequent name changes for the secret police made no impression with the Russian people who still call any secret policeman a Chekisty. Semichastny felt that the legacy of the Yezhovshchina ("Yezhovz times") of 1936-1939 had given the KGB a fearsome reputation that he wanted to erase as wanted ordinary people to have a more favorable and positive image of the Chekisty as the protectors and defenders of the Soviet Union instead of torturers and killers.[39] As such, Semichastny encouraged the publication of a series of spy novels that featured heroic Chekisty defending the Soviet Union.[40] It was also during Semichastny's time as KGB chairman that the cult of the "hero spies" began in the Soviet Union as publications lionised the achievements of Soviet spies such as Colonel Rudolf Abel, Harold "Kim" Philby, Richard Sorge and of the men and women who served in the Rote Kapelle spy network.[40] Seeing the great popularity of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels in Britain and the United States, Soviet spy novels of the 1960s used the Bond novels as inspiration for both their plots and heroes, through Soviet prurience about sex ensured that the Chekisty heroes did not engage in the sort of womanising that Bond did.[40] The first Bond-style novel was The Zakhov Mission (1963) by the Bulgarian writer Andrei Gulyashki who had commissioned by Semichastny and was published simultaneously in Russian and Bulgarian.[41] The success of The Zakhov Mission led to a follow-up novel, Zakhov vs. 007, where Gulyashki freely violated English copyright laws by using the James Bond character without the permission of the Fleming estate (he had asked for permission in 1966 and was denied).[41] In Zakhov vs. 007, the hero Avakoum Zakhov defeats James Bond, who is portrayed in an inverted fashion to how Fleming portrayed him; in Zakhov vs. 007, Bond is portrayed as a sadistic killer, a brutal rapist and an arrogant misogynist, which stands in marked contrast to the kindly and gentle Zakhov who always treats women with respect.[41] Zakhov is described as a spy, he more of a detective and unlike Bond, his tastes are modest.[41]
In 1966, the Soviet writer Yulian Semyonov published a novel set in the Russian Civil War featuring a Cheka agent Maxim Maximovich Isaуev as its hero.[41] Inspired by its success, the KGB encouraged Semyonov to write a sequel, Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny ("Seventeen Moments of Spring"), which proved to one of the most popular Soviet spy novels when it was serialized in Pravda in January–February 1969 and then published as a book later in 1969.[42] In Seventeen Moments of Spring, the story is set in the Great Patriotic War as Isayev goes undercover, using the alias of a Baltic German nobleman Max Otto von Stierlitz to infiltrate the German high command.[42] The plot of Seventeen Moments of Spring takes place in Berlin between January–May 1945 during the last days of the Third Reich as the Red Army advances onto Berlin and the Nazis grew more desperate.[43] In 1973, Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny was turned into a television mini-series, which was extremely popular in the Soviet Union and turned the Isayev character into a cultural phenomena.[42] The Isayev character plays a role in Russian culture, even today, that is analogous to the role James Bond plays in modern British culture.[38] As aspect of Seventeen Moments of Spring, both as a novel and the TV mini-series that has offended Westerners who are more accustomed to seeing spy stories via the prism of the fast-paced Bond stories is the way that Isayev spends much time interacting with ordinary Germans despite the fact these interactions do nothing to advance the plot and are merely superfluous to the story.[41] However, the point of these scenes are to show that Isayev is still a moral human being, who remains sociable and kind to all people, including the citizens of the state that his country is at war with.[41] Unlike Bond, Isayev is devoted to his wife who he deeply loves and despite spending at least ten years as a spy in Germany and having countless chances to sleep with attractive German women remains faithful towards her.[44] Through Isayev is a spy for the NKVD as the Soviet secret police was known from 1934 to 1946, it is stated quite explicitly in Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny (which is set in 1945) that he left the Soviet Union to go undercover in Nazi Germany "more than ten years ago", which means that Isayev was not involved in the Yezhovshchina.[45]
Later
The June 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its neighbours introduced new themes to espionage fiction - the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, against the backdrop of continuing Cold War tensions, and the increasing use of terrorism as a political tool.
Writers on Cold War era: 1945–1991
Author(s) | Title | Publisher | Date | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
Ambrose, Stephen E. | Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Intelligence Establishment | — | 1981– | — |
Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin | The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB | Basic Books | 1991, 2005 | ISBN 0-465-00311-7
|
Andrew, Christopher, and Oleg Gordievsky | KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev | — | 1990 | — |
Aronoff, Myron J. | The Spy Novels of John Le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics | — | 1999 | — |
Bissell, Richard | Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs | — | 1996 | — |
Bogle, Lori, ed. | Cold War Espionage and Spying | — | 2001– | essays |
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin | The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World | — | — | — |
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin | The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West | Gardners Books | 2000 | ISBN 978-0-14-028487-4
|
Colella, Jim | My Life as an Italian Mafioso Spy | — | 2000 | — |
Craig, R. Bruce | Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter Spy Case | University Press of Kansas | 2004 | ISBN 978-0-7006-1311-3
|
Dorril, Stephen | MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service | — | 2000 | — |
Dziak, John J. | Chekisty: A History of the KGB | — | 1988 | — |
Gates, Robert M. | From The Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents And How They Won The Cold War | — | 1997 | — |
Frost, Mike and Michel Gratton | Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments | Doubleday Canada | 1994 | — |
Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr | Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America | — | 1999 | — |
Helms, Richard | A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency | — | 2003 | — |
Koehler, John O. | Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police | — | 1999 | — |
Persico, Joseph | Casey: The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey-From the OSS to the CIA | — | 1991 | — |
Murphy, David E., Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey | Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War | — | 1997 | — |
Prados, John | Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II | — | 1996 | — |
Rositzke, Harry. | The CIA's Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage, and Covert Action | — | 1988 | — |
Srodes, James | Allen Dulles: Master of Spies | Regnery | 2000 | CIA head to 1961 |
Sontag Sherry, and Christopher Drew | Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage | Harper | 1998 | — |
Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies and Secret Operations | Greenwood Press[ISBN missing] | 2004 | — |
- Anderson, Nicholas NOC Enigma Books 2009 – Post-Cold War era
- Ishmael Jones The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, Encounter Books 2008, rev. 2010
Writers of other nationalities
- Michael Ross, The Volunteer: The Incredible True Story of an Israeli Spy on the Trail of International Terrorists McClelland & Stewart 2007, rev. 2008
- Jean-Marie Thiébaud, Dictionnaire Encyclopédique International des Abréviations, Singles et Acronyms, Armée et armament, Gendarmerie, Police, Services de renseignement et Services secrets français et étrangers, Espionage, Counterespionage, Services de Secours, Organisations révolutionnaires et terrorists, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2015, 827 pFrench journalist Gérard de Villiers began to write his SAS series in 1965. The franchise now extends to 200 titles and 150 million books.
- White Russian spy in the USSR; Max Otto von Stierlitz, a Soviet mole in the Nazi High Command, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka. In his novels, Semyonov covered much Soviet intelligence history, ranging from the Russian Civil War (1917–1923), through the Great Patriotic War(1941–45), to the Russo–American Cold War (1945–91).
- Swedish author Coq Rougeseries, featuring Swedish spy Carl Hamilton, during this period, beginning in 1986.
Post–Cold War
The end of the Cold War in 1991 mooted the
In the US, the new novels Moscow Club (1991) by
In 1993, the American novelist Philip Roth published Operation Shylock, an account of his supposed work as a Mossad spy in Greece.[37] The book was published as a novel, but Roth insisted that the book was not a novel as he argued that the book was presented only as a novel in order to give it deniability.[37] At the end of the book, the character of Philip Roth is ordered to publish the account as a novel, and it ends with Roth the character saying: "And I became quite convinced that it was my interest to do that...I'm just a good Mossadnik".[37]
In the UK, Robert Harris entered the spy genre with Enigma (1995). Other important British authors who became active during this period include Hugh Laurie, The Gun Seller (1996); Andy McNab, Remote Control (1998); Henry Porter, Remembrance Day (2000); and Charles Cumming, A Spy By Nature (2001).
Post–9/11
The terrorist attacks against the US on 11 September 2001, and the subsequent
Important British writers who wrote their first spy novels during this period include Stephen Leather, Hard Landing (2004); and William Boyd, Restless (2006).
New American writers include
Swede
Recognising the importance of the thriller genre, including spy fiction, International Thriller Writers (ITW) was established in 2004, and held its first conference in 2006.
Insider spy fiction
Many authors of spy fiction have themselves been intelligence officers working for British agencies such as MI5 or MI6, or American agencies such as the OSS or its successor, the CIA. 'Insider' spy fiction has a special claim to authenticity and overlaps with biographical and other documentary accounts of secret service.
The first insider fiction emerged after World War 1 as the thinly disguised reminiscences of former British intelligence officers such as
Notable British examples from the Cold War period and beyond include Ian Fleming, John le Carré, Graham Greene, Brian Cleeve, Ian Mackintosh, Kenneth Benton, Bryan Forbes, Andy McNab and Chris Ryan. Notable American examples include Charles McCarry, William F. Buckley Jr., W. E. B. Griffin and David Hagberg.
Many post-
, Zero Day: China's Cyber Wars (2017).British examples include The Code Snatch (2001) by Alan Stripp, formerly a cryptographer at Bletchley Park; At Risk (2004), Secret Asset (2006), Illegal Action (2007), and Dead Line (2008), by Dame Stella Rimington (Director General of MI5 from 1992 to 1996); and Matthew Dunn's Spycatcher (2011) and sequels.
Spy television and cinema
Cinema
Much spy fiction was adapted as
English-language spy films of the 2000s include The Bourne Identity (2002), Mission: Impossible (1996); Munich (2005), Syriana (2005), and The Constant Gardener (2005).
Among the comedy films focusing on espionage are 1974's S*P*Y*S, 1985's Spies Like Us, and the Austin Powers film series starring Mike Myers.
Television
The American adaptation of Casino Royale (1954) featured Jimmy Bond in an episode of the
In 1973, Semyonov's novel
However, the circle closed in the late 1970s when The Sandbaggers (1978–80) presented the grit and bureaucracy of espionage.
In the 1980s, US television featured the light espionage programmes
Television espionage programmes of the late 1990s to the early 2010s include
In 2015, Deutschland 83 is a German television series starring a 24-year-old native of East Germany who is sent to the West as an undercover spy for the HVA, the foreign intelligence agency of the Stasi.
For children and adolescents
Books and novels
In every medium, spy thrillers introduce children and adolescents to deception and espionage at earlier ages. The genre ranges from action-adventure, such as Chris Ryan's Alpha Force series, through the historical espionage dramas of Y. S. Lee, to the girl orientation of Ally Carter's Gallagher Girls series, beginning with I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You.
Leading examples include the Agent Cody Banks film, the Alex Rider adventure novels by Anthony Horowitz, and the CHERUB series, by Robert Muchamore. Ben Allsop, one of England's youngest novelists, also writes spy fiction. His titles include Sharp and The Perfect Kill.
Other authors writing for adolescents include A. J. Butcher, Joe Craig, Charlie Higson, Andy McNab and Francine Pascal.
Films and shows
Spy-related films that are aimed towards younger audiences include movies such as the
Video games, tabletop roleplaying games and theme parks
In contemporary digital video games, the player can be a vicarious spy, as in
The
Top Secret, TSR, Inc., (1980) is a contemporary espionage-themed tabletop role-playing game[49]
Activision published Spycraft: The Great Game (1996), notable for the collaboration with former CIA director William Colby and former KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin, who also appear in the game as themselves.
The Spyland espionage theme park, in the Gran Scala pleasure dome, in Zaragoza province, Spain, opened in 2012.
Subgenres
- Spy comedy: usually parody the clichés and camp elements characteristic to the espionage genre.
- Spy horror: spy fiction with horror fiction.
- Spy-fi: spy fiction with elements of science fiction.
- Spy thriller: the most common subgenre of spy fiction
Notable writers
Deceased
- Edward Aarons
- Eric Ambler
- Desmond Bagley
- Kenneth Benton
- John Buchan
- William F. Buckley Jr.
- Leslie Charteris
- Erskine Childers
- Tom Clancy
- Andrew Britton
- Brian Cleeve
- Manning Coles
- Jonathan de Shalit
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Joseph Conrad
- James Fenimore Cooper
- Desmond Cory
- Ian Fleming
- Vince Flynn
- Bryan Forbes
- David Hagberg
- Colin Forbes
- John Gardner
- William Garner
- Michael Gilbert
- Graham Greene
- Adam Hall
- Donald Hamilton
- Jack Higgins
- Reginald Hill
- E. Howard Hunt
- Rudyard Kipling
- Stieg Larsson
- John le Carré
- Gaston Leroux
- Paul Linebarger
- Robert Ludlum
- Charles McCarry
- Helen MacInnes
- Ian Mackintosh
- Alistair MacLean
- Norman Mailer
- Somerset Maugham
- James Munro
- Manning O'Brine
- E. Phillips Oppenheim
- Baroness Orczy
- Anthony Price
- William le Queux
- Ibn-e-Safi
- Raymond Harold Sawkins
- Desmond Skirrow
- Cordwainer Smith
- Craig Thomas
- Ross Thomas
- Gérard de Villiers
- Dennis Wheatley
- Alexander Wilson
- Charlie Flowers
- W. E. B. Griffin
- Jason Matthews
- Ted Bell
- Qazi Anwar Hussain
Living
- David Baldacci
- Brett Battles
- Raymond Benson
- Alex Berenson
- William Boyd
- Sean Buckley
- A. J. Butcher
- Ally Carter
- Stephen Coonts
- Gene Coyle
- Joe Craig
- Charles Cumming
- Jeffery Deaver
- Jim DeFelice
- Len Deighton
- Nelson DeMille
- Adam Diment
- David Downing
- Matthew Dunn
- Tatsuya Endo
- Barry Eisler
- Duane Evans
- Joseph Finder
- Richard Ferguson
- Ken Follett
- Frederick Forsyth
- Brian Freemantle
- Alan Furst
- Charles E. Gillen
- Ellis Goodman
- James Grady
- John Griffin
- Jan Guillou
- Robert Harris
- Mick Herron
- Charlie Higson
- T. H. E. Hill
- R J Hillhouse
- Joseph Hone
- Anthony Horowitz
- Noel Hynd
- David Ignatius
- Joseph Kanon
- Hugh Laurie
- Stephen Leather
- Y. S. Lee
- Robert Littell
- Gayle Lynds
- Andy McNab
- Kyle Mills
- David Morrell
- Robert Muchamore
- Thomas F. Murphy
- James Patterson
- James Phelan
- Henry Porter
- Mike Ramsdell
- Stella Rimington
- Chris Ryan
- Gerald Seymour
- Daniel Silva
- Olen Steinhauer
- Alan Stripp
- Khaled Talib (Smokescreen)
- Ron Terpening
- Brad Thor
- T.L. Williams
See also
- History of espionage
- Spy-fi
- Spy film
- List of fictional secret agents
- List of thriller writers
- Thriller (genre)
- List of genres
- Category:Spy films
- Category:Espionage television series
- Category:Espionage television series by country
Notes
- ^ Brett F. Woods, Neutral Ground: A Political History of Espionage Fiction (2008)[ISBN missing]
- ^ Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Third Edition (1991) pp. 908–09.
- ^ Drabble, Margaret. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Sixth Edition (2000) pp. 962–63.
- ^ William C. Bendler, "The Bible as Literature", p. 55, 87, referencing The Book of Joshua, Ch. 2 and Ian Fleming's novel Golfinger.
- ^ Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms (1983) p. 95.
- ISBN 0-19-815952-8p. 40-41
- ^ a b Polmar & Allen 1997, p. 336.
- ^ a b c d e f g Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 336.
- ^ " Water On the Brain". Fantastic Fiction. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
- ^ Bong 2014, p. 171.
- ^ a b Bong 2014, p. 137-138.
- ^ Bong 2014, p. 169-170.
- ^ a b Bong 2014, p. 170.
- ^ Bong 2014, p. 178.
- ^ a b Bong 2014, p. 172.
- ^ a b c Bong 2014, p. 174.
- ^ a b Bong 2014, p. 172-173.
- ^ Bong 2014, p. 181.
- ^ Smith, Kyle Wishart (2015). "Pre Cold War British spy fiction, the "albatross of self" and lines of flight in Gravity's Rainbow". Orbit (Brighton, England). 3 (1): 1–43.
- ^ Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 500.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 337.
- ^ a b Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 60.
- ^ a b Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 61.
- ^ Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 381.
- ^ a b Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 332.
- ^ Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 230.
- ^ Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 229-230.
- ^ a b c Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 242.
- ^ a b c d e f g Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 243.
- ^ "Review of The Human Factor". Kirkus Reviews. 1 March 1978. Retrieved 10 February 2021.
- ^ Polmar & Allen 1997, p. 337.
- ^ Holland, Steve (13 April 2011). "Craig Thomas obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 October 2021.
- ^ Gooden, Philip. (2023). "Shadowing Bond." The Book Collector 72 (Summer): 173-187.
- ^ Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 205.
- ^ Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 268.
- ^ Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 337-338.
- ^ a b c d Polmar & Allen 1998, p. 338.
- ^ a b c Jens 2017, p. 38.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Jens 2017, p. 39.
- ^ a b c Jens 2017, p. 39-40.
- ^ a b c d e f g Jens 2017, p. 40.
- ^ a b c Jens 2017, p. 38-40.
- ^ Jens 2017, p. 40-41.
- ^ Jens 2017, p. 43.
- ^ Jens 2017, p. 42.
- ^ a b "Wes Britton's SpyWise". Archived from the original on 19 July 2012. Retrieved 9 February 2018.
- ^ Shane, Scott (15 March 2005). "Ex-Spies Tell It All". The New York Times.
- ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 March 2010. Retrieved 12 January 2010.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ "The History of TSR". Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 24 September 2008. Retrieved 20 August 2005.
- ISBN 978-0879756536.
References
- Aronoff, Myron J. The Spy Novels of John Le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics (1999).
- Bong, InYoung (Spring 2014). "A "White Race" without Supremacy: Russians, Racial Hybridity, and Liminality in the Chinese Literature of Manchukuo". Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. 26 (1): 137–190.
- Britton, Wesley. Spy Television. The Prager Television Collection. Series Ed. David Bianculli. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2004. ISBN 0-275-98163-0.
- Britton, Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2005. ISBN 0-275-98556-3.
- Britton, Wesley. Onscreen & Undercover: The Ultimate Book of Movie Espionage. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2006. ISBN 0-275-99281-0.
- Cawelti, John G. The Spy Story (1987)
- Jens, Erik (June 2017). "Cold War Spy Fiction in Russian Popular Culture: From Suspicion to Acceptance via Seventeen Moments of Spring". Studies in Intelligence. 61 (2): 37–47.
- Polmar, Norman; Allen, Thomas (1998). The Spy Book The Encyclopedia of Espionage. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-70249-0.
- Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (2003).
- Ripley, Mike (2017). Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed. London: HarperCollins. ISBN 9780008172237.