In a week when Anthony Horowitz apologised for a remark about who could play James Bond and it was revealed that Frederick Forsyth worked for MI6, spy fiction’s close links to nation and empire become clear
There are few genres with a hold on the public imagination like spy fiction. This year especially it seems that spies are everywhere, whether in the form of Kit Harington brooding his way through the gritty, Bourne-style movie Spooks: The Greater Good, Daniel Craig’s once-more dependable 007 in the forthcoming Spectre, or played for laughs in Spy by Melissa McCarthy, Miranda Hart and Jason Statham. This week the new James Bond novel is published – entitled Trigger Mortis and written by Anthony Horowitz in the style of Ian Fleming (see review on page 11): the latest in a line of nostalgic additions to the Bond canon after Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and William Boyd have already tried their luck.
This popularity is, of course, nothing new. The figure of the spy has lurked in the background of all types of literature for a couple of millennia, but it was around the turn of the 20th century that spy fiction became more closely associated in Britain with nation and empire, and grew into a commercially successful genre in its own right. Against a backdrop of public anxiety over Anglo-German tensions in Europe, espionage novels such as Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) gripped the nation and helped launch the careers of William Le Queux and, later, John Buchan. They joined other apparently more serious authors such as Rudyard Kipling, whose Kim (1901) fictionalised the “Great Game” of espionage in colonial India; and Joseph Conrad, who explored the underbelly of fin-de‑siècle London in The Secret Agent (1907). In the interwar years Eric Ambler, Manning Coles, Graham Greene and others continued to develop many of spy fiction’s conventions. It was in the aftermath of the second world war, however, that the genre made its transition from national to global phenomenon.
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This popularity is, of course, nothing new. The figure of the spy has lurked in the background of all types of literature for a couple of millennia, but it was around the turn of the 20th century that spy fiction became more closely associated in Britain with nation and empire, and grew into a commercially successful genre in its own right. Against a backdrop of public anxiety over Anglo-German tensions in Europe, espionage novels such as Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) gripped the nation and helped launch the careers of William Le Queux and, later, John Buchan. They joined other apparently more serious authors such as Rudyard Kipling, whose Kim (1901) fictionalised the “Great Game” of espionage in colonial India; and Joseph Conrad, who explored the underbelly of fin-de‑siècle London in The Secret Agent (1907). In the interwar years Eric Ambler, Manning Coles, Graham Greene and others continued to develop many of spy fiction’s conventions. It was in the aftermath of the second world war, however, that the genre made its transition from national to global phenomenon.
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