The Writers with the Golden Gun: British Spy Novelists
When it comes to espionage and fiction, the British have a license to thrill.
Name a fictional spy.
Odds are that one of the names that popped into your head belonged to a British character — James Bond, George Smiley, Harry Palmer. Britain has dominated the spy fiction genre, particularly after World War II. Onstage September 6 through October 14, 2018 at Lantern Theater Company, Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood is another entry in the spy genre with its covert operations, secret agents, and double crossing in Cold War-era London.
Spy stories took a uniquely British turn at the beginning of the 20th century — Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) associated the genre with the UK and gave it some literary clout. In the years following World War II, the British clamor for espionage stories exploded. The war took a heavy toll: the empire was dissolving and the British economy weakened. Spy fiction offered an outlet for Cold War anxiety and, according to Sam Goodman in The Guardian, the secret agent’s global heroics “mitigated the fear of international decline in an era of swinging cuts to British armed forces and costly conflicts.” They also offered excitement and thrills to a British populace suffering under post-war austerity.
The character most synonymous with “secret agent” is Ian Fleming’s James Bond. First introduced in the 1953 novel Casino Royale, Bond’s continent-spanning, martini-drinking, bed-hopping stories of intrigue and action have become the prime example of spy fiction in general, and British spy fiction specifically. Fleming, who worked as a naval intelligence officer during World War II, based Bond on a number of spies and commandos he knew during the war, combining one’s suavity with another’s steel nerves, and giving him Fleming’s own preferences and physical traits. Fleming wrote twelve Bond novels and two short-story collections before his death in 1964; eight other authors have since written authorized Bond stories. The books have sold over 100 million copies, and the big-budget movies — the longest running movie series of all time — have grossed over $7 billion worldwide.
Bond offered a distinctly pro-British espionage story, one in which MI6 and its agents proudly save the world under the Union Jack. Fleming was a staunch pro-Empire conservative, and Bond reflected the support for British Imperialism in dialogue and in deed. This proved popular to an anxious British populace looking for stability in an uncertain time.
Like Fleming, John le Carré also writes his spy stories from experience. Under his real name of David Cornwell, he was an officer in both MI5 and MI6, and wrote under his pen name in order to keep his job. He infiltrated left-wing groups looking for Soviet agents, interrogated sources, and tapped telephones before leaving the service when notorious double agent Kim Philby betrayed his cover to the KGB.
Unlike the Bond stories, le Carré’s spy fiction takes a decidedly murkier approach to the genre. In works like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, spies are less the dashing hero and more tragic or morally compromised pawns in a broader global conflict. He intended Tinker Tailor…’s George Smiley — a decidedly unglamorous bureaucrat — to be an anti-Bond, one who uses manipulation and cunning to achieve his ends rather than Bond’s gadgets and derring-do. Le Carré considered Smiley a real spy, especially compared to Bond, who he called “an international gangster.”
Murkier still are the novels of Len Deighton, beginning with The IPCRESS File. His spy — unnamed in the novels but called Harry Palmer in the films — was a cynical anti-hero tied up with petty rivalries between British civil and secret service agencies. He is working class, and the specifics of his work are highly detailed, lending the stories a more naturalistic and darkly comic tone. Thrills and intrigue are juxtaposed with incompetent superiors and expense reports. According to Deighton, “When I started writing I had rules. One was that violence must not solve the problem, and I cannot have the hero overcome violence with a counterweight of violence.”
Deighton did not work as a spy, but one modern British espionage writer certainly did: Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, who has become a spy novelist in her retirement. Her nine novels, beginning with 2004’s At Risk, feature Liz Carlyle, a woman in her 30s. Though it’s tempting to read the novels as autobiographical, Rimington says Carlyle “clearly isn’t me, but has elements of me when I was her age. I certainly allow her to think and say things that I said.” Or, thanks to the changes in the service since Rimington’s time as an officer: “Probably didn’t say, but thought.”
How well do you know British spy fiction? Test your covert credentials with this quiz!
Hapgood is onstage at the Lantern September 6 through October 14, 2018. Visit our website for tickets and information.
