This is the world of the debonair, high-living agent with a taste for the best in food and champagne, an irresistible allure for beautiful women and a license to kill. The third approach, which became the most popular of all, is in many ways the least ‘realistic’. The idea of the amateur becoming involved in espionage is given a darker twist by Eric Ambler most famously in The Mask of Demetrios and Epitaph for A Spy – which has striking similarities with the early Smiley title, A Murder of Quality. Passing onto John Buchan’s Richard Hannay – the gifted amateur of The Thirty-Nine Steps who becomes more professional in Greenmantle as he enters the Great Game – a confrontation already explored by Kipling in Kim. On the other hand, Erskine Childers in The Riddle of the Sands presents us with a couple of daring amateurs (though Carruthers is a minor official in the Foreign Office) who manage to thwart the Germans through cunning, luck and derring-do. In many ways this thread of almost squalid realism is the most successful, for it leads through Somerset Maugham (the Ashenden stories) and Graham Greene ( The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Tailor of Panama etc.) to the convincingly credible world of John le Carré, George Smiley and his colleagues at The Circus. Joseph Conrad’s seminal The Secret Agent, for instance, presents us with a down-at heel, desperate and grubby London where Verloc the pornographer, employed by the Russian embassy, tries to blow up the Greenwich observatory with tragic results. This seems to be an apt moment to do so as the most recent James Bond film No Time to Die is released at last, at much the same time as John le Carré’s final novel, Silverview hits the bookshelves.Ī whistlestop tour of early English espionage literature seems to present us with several themes that have carried on through the ‘Golden Age’ of the Cold War in the early 1960’s and into more modern works. The purpose of this article is to express some personal thoughts about spy novels and the experiences of characters within the fictional espionage world, finally bringing a central focus onto John le Carré’s George Smiley.
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