Reading undercover: The highs and lows of spy fiction

In 1953 Ian Fleming published his first spy novel, “Casino Royale”, which reflected not only London’s post-War society with its focus on consumerism and entertainment, but also relied on Fleming’s own experiences as a spy. In 1933 Fleming had worked in the Soviet Union as a Reuters correspondent and had supplied the British Foreign Office with information. Fleming then went on to work for British Naval Intelligence during World War II, and even wrote a report on the German economy for the Foreign Office prior to the country’s occupation. Although James Bond, who sips champagne as frequently as he enjoys the company of women, defines the genre of the spy fiction to this day, he was not its first representative.

Male spies are clearly the majority in spy fiction

So what exactly is a spy novel? Literary scholars have to this day been unable to agree on a generally accepted definition. Usually, the genre is pigeonholed under criminal literature and distinguished from detective novels. At times, a distinction is also made between thrillers (such as Fleming’s) and novels that focus more strongly on a realistic representation of the secret services. With a few exceptions, spies in literature are, moreover, men, another aspect where they part company with reality.

Maurice Castle, the protagonist of Graham Greene’s “The Human Factor” (1978), takes far greater care of his wife and child. He is a colorless, conscientious man, who officially works for the Foreign Office in London but whose job there is to process news from Africa of relevance to the intelligence services. He wishes at all costs to avoid attracting attention, since Castle, as becomes apparent in the course of the novel, is the person MI6 is hunting because of leaked information to the Soviet Union, which had previously helped him to extract his later wife unharmed from South Africa. Castle, who has long since reached pensionable age, is tired of it all and regularly drowns his sorrows and fears in a tumbler of whisky to keep depression at bay. 

Greene was following in the footsteps of possibly the best-known author of spy novels: John le Carré, who had published “The Spy who Came in From the Cold” in 1963. The protagonist here is Alec Leamas, a British agent who offers to work as a double agent for the Stasi in order to upend his archenemy there. In the prior months, several of his contacts were murdered by the other side, which prompts him to lock down his emotions ever more strongly. 

Or they are reserved for women. To this day, female secret agents are rare in spy novels and where they do feature as protagonists, they sooner or later get caught up in a love story. In Ian McEwan’s “Sweet Tooth” (2012), the author has Serena, a young woman in the 1970s, recruited by MI5, where she initially has a desk job before being deployed on a major mission: She is supposed to don the cloak of a literary agent and woo a young author for a literary magazine (bankrolled by the MI5), which regularly prints texts by writers loyal to the government.

Here and there, McEwan resorts a bit too heavily to cliches: “Did I have doubts or moral qualms about the project? Not at that stage. I was pleased to have been chosen. I thought I could do the job well. I thought I might earn praise from the higher floors in the building – I was a girl who liked to be praised,” Serena narrates at one point shortly before falling in love with the writer she is supposed to ‘run’ and starting a relationship with him. The code name for the mission, “Sweet Tooth” also says it all, as it alludes to the female agent as candy who appeals to the male target’s sweet tooth to get information: a task that reduces the female agent to her attractiveness – and is also a product of literary fantasy.

For example, Dirk Brauns in his “Die Unscheinbaren” (Engl. “The Inconspicuous”, 2019) tells the story of a boy who is forced to watch his parents being arrested by the Stasi because they spied for West Germany, a story based on his own experiences. This is also the case with Eugen Ruge, whose novel “Metropol” (2019) describes his grandmother’s life: In the 1930s she worked for the Komintern news agency in Moscow. And the same goes for Ulla Lenze’s “Der Empfänger” (Engl. “The Receiver”, 2019), in which the author draws on her grandfather’s role working for the German secret service in America during World War II.

Although the novels frequently share similar structures and figures, irrespective of whether they are American, British, or German, it still remains difficult to distinguish them sharply from literature in other genres. Jost Hindermann, an expert on spy fiction, states insightfully in his study of British spy novels: “A spy novel is a novel that revolves around spying.”