The top 10 classic spy novels

From Joseph Conrad to John le Carré, intelligence historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones picks the fiction that best reveals the secrets of espionage

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
Wed 26 June 2013

In 1972, a friend gave me a tip about the then-unknown Somerset Maugham papers in Yale University Library. "You're interested in labour spies," he said, "so why don't you take a look at this novelist guy who spied for the UK and USA at the time of the Russian Revolution?" I took his advice, and turned to the study of foreign intelligence.

So my selection of novels reflects the interests of a historian, and draws on both domestic and foreign espionage. They are "classics" in being of some antiquity, and because, in addition to being of literary merit, they tell us something of their era.

1. The Spy; or, A Tale of the Neutral Ground by James Fenimore Cooper (1821)
A factually-based account of the exploits of Harvey Birch, a secret agent in the American War of Independence. The impecunious spy "belonged to a condition in life which rendered him the least reluctant to appear in so equivocal a character". Birch's case officer, the future president George Washington, hears complaints after the war that the retired spy might prove to be loose-tongued – the new United States had no hold on him, as it had never paid him a salary. Birch inverted that logic in his explanation of why they could rely on his silence: "Tell them I would not take the gold!"

2. The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service Recently Achieved by Erskine Childers (1903)
If you enjoyed Swallows and Amazons, check this out. Negotiating the Frisian coast in his yacht Dulcibella, Arthur Davies is accompanied by his Foreign Office chum Carruthers. They obtain evidence to prove that Germany is planning an invasion of England. Childers debunkers pointed out that Frisian waters were too shallow for warships and the hinterland had no warehousing facilities to serve the needs of an invasion. A footnote: on the eve of the war, the Anglo-Irish Childers used his own yacht to smuggle German arms to Ireland to help the cause of independence. In 1922 he suffered death by firing squad in the course of the Irish civil war, telling his American-born wife on the eve of his execution that he still loved England.

3. The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad (1907)
Mr Verloc, the protagonist of his novel, is an avowed anarchist, but also an agent provocateur for the thinly-disguised Russian embassy in London. His controller, Mr Vladimir, tasks him with blowing up the Greenwich Observatory. The cast includes the Professor, a specialist in infernal machines who at all times carries a bomb in readiness for a suicide attack. Verloc was a precursor to the anti-hero of the modern novel.

4. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
The John Buchan Way is a lovely undulating walk alongside the Tweed Valley. Don't let it fool you. The action in this most Scottish of thrillers takes place further west, in the remote heatherlands of Galloway. Richard Hannay pursues the Black Stone spy ring even as he is being hunted down by German spies and misguided policemen. "The Presbyterian Cavalier" to his biographer Andrew Lownie, Buchan is a little too hot in his pursuit of sinners. His account was at odds with MI5's contemporary claim that it had mopped up all German spies at the start of the war. But why let history get in the way of a good read?

5. Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W Somerset Maugham (1928)
Maugham was already an established novelist when a senior intelligence figure dropped in at his Long Island residence. Would he care for a little patriotic adventure? Maugham signed up to serve in Switzerland then revolutionary Russia, where he narrowly escaped extermination by the Bolsheviks. With mind-boggling audacity, he decided that the best cover for his spying would be that he was writing a series of short stories about spies. Maugham becomes Ashenden in the rather authentic published work. Ashenden rebukes his uncouth controller, "In my youth I was always taught that you should take a woman by the waist and a bottle by the neck".

6. The Informer by Liam O'Flaherty (1925)
O'Flaherty declares in this novel: "Informer! A horror to be understood fully only by an Irish mind". The book reminds us that espionage is not limited to international intrigue. Gypo Nolan, O'Flaherty's protagonist, informs on a left-wing friend in the Irish civil war for the paltry sum of £20. An unintelligent man, he is pitilessly hunted down by the intellectual Commandant Dan Gallagher. The Informer occupies a position of iconic significance in Irish literature.

7. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
"We had another drink". One has escaped in a single bound the Wee Free manse that spawned John Buchan. One enters instead the amoral realm of a master of the short sentence not to mention short words like "moll". Hammett was the pioneer of the "hardboiled" detective novel. Earlier, until he left in disgust at their labour espionage work and became a communist, he worked for the Pinkerton detective agency. Red Harvest is a spy's repentance. Hammett's Continental Op (a thinly disguised Pinkerton operative) arrives in Personville, aka Poisonville, a town in the American West. Mining capitalist Elihu Wilsson owns it in every respect until his revolutionary workers go on strike. Wilsson introduces professional strikebreakers and one murder follows another, 20 of them committed by the Op himself.

8. Wanderer by Sterling Hayden (1963)
At least in being so well written, this is a novel masquerading as autobiography. Hayden served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US wartime intelligence agency. Postwar he was a movie actor, with roles in The Ashphalt Jungle and Dr Strangelove. In his Hollywood years he flirted with communism when it was in vogue; then betrayed his comrades under McCarthyism; then denounced McCarthyism when the sheep turned in that direction. It's all in his account, and he's honest about his weakness. And about others' frailties. In Cairo where the Americans wanted to ape the British, OSS headquarters was "a bastard version of the Taj Mahal". But the Brits guarded their patch: "a secretary entered with tea – which made it quite clear that this was a British Theatre of War".

9. The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955)
Greene dismissed his own spy fiction as "entertainment". He wanted us to admire The Power and the Glory not The Quiet American. Be that as it may, The Quiet American had insight into the frailties of the early 1950s CIA and the untenability of US intervention in Vietnam. Alden Pyle, its protagonist, is a recognisable prototype of the Ivy League "best and brightest" who got America stuck in a Southeast Asian quagmire. Pyle jousts with his worldly and tolerant British counterpart over the delectable Phuong. Enter the US economic attaché "who keeps his friends because he uses the right deodorants".

10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré (1974)
The former CIA Inspector General, Fred Hitz, sees Tinker as underscoring "the underlying distaste, widely felt in the SIS [MI6], for the American role in intelligence-gathering" in the early Cold War. In that sense, Le Carré had his finger on the dying pulse of the special intelligence relationship. Tinker is my least original selection as most readers or moviegoers will know about George Smiley's struggle with Moscow's presiding intelligence genius Karla. "Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided".

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