7 - Spy fiction

Summary

The spy story is a close but distinct variation on the tale of detection with the difference that there is no discrete crime involved but rather a covert action which, as John Cawelti and Bruce Rosenberg argue, transgresses conventional, moral, or legal boundaries. The action is self-evidently political since it involves national rivalries and constantly veers towards a paranoid vision of 'violation by outside agencies' and 'violation of individual autonomy by internal agencies'. A further distinction from the detection genre is that the investigator is often himself an agent and therefore, unlike Todorov's ideally detached detective, is implicated in the very processes he is investigating. And since the genre is defined by its international subject, the novels can only be partly explained through formalist analyses like that of Bruce Merry. Espionage fiction became popular in two periods - the turn of the century and the 1960s - when popular anxieties were growing over the credibility of government processes. Its narratives therefore manifest what Michael Denning calls ‘cover stories’ where the surface action screens a complex play of ideology. Initially spying contrasted unfavourably with an ethic of open courage. Reviewing Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden in 1928, D. H. Lawrence declared: ‘Spying is a dirty business, and Secret Service altogether is a world of under-dogs, a world in which the meanest passions are given play’. However, by 1966 this distaste had become replaced by a perception of centrality. A character in Kingsley Amis’s The Anti-Death League (1966) can plausibly claim that the spy is a ‘uniquely characteristic and significant figure of our time’. The history of spy fiction is one of a gradual shift from the margins to the sixties when espionage novels flooded the market and serious critical attention began to be paid to the genre. Even Jacques Barzun, in the course of a lofty and largely negative meditation on spy fiction, admits that ‘the soul of the spy is somehow the model of our own; his actions and his trappings fulfil our unsatisfied desires’.