The trouble with spy fiction is that it gets no respect. There were no birthday celebrations on its hundredth anniversary (count from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim published in 1901, or Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands in 1903— take your pick). Mordecai Richler took two of spy fiction’s great popularizers, John Buchan (our Governor General!) and Ian Fleming, to literary court as covert antisemites. The genre’s master craftsmen (remember Graham Greene?) are stood up for the Nobel Prize. Its doyen, John Le Carré, is famously attacked as a hack by none other than Salman Rushdie. Fans of this hugely popular genre are forced to hunt down the latest titles shelved among crime and detective fiction, for heaven’s sake, as if there was something to hide.
What’s going on? The answer is partly that spy fiction, despite its long pedigree, has never quite managed to escape from various denigrating tags—escapist, thriller, pop culture. Those tags reveal, beyond...
Wesley Wark is an expert on intelligence and security issues who teaches at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He served as an expert witness for the defence at the sentencing hearing for Jeffrey Delisle. He is one of the editors of Secret Intelligence: A Reader (Routledge, 2009).
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