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The key elements of thriller writing: mystery, artful deception, twists and turns (Victoria Strukovskaya/Unsplash)

Spy novels and unicorn hunting

Seeking perfection among the dead ends, red herrings and lost causes, a lover of espionage lists the must-haves.

Mark Pierce

7 March 20244 min read

“I wasted time and now time doth waste me.” Shakespeare’s rueful admonition (from Richard II) should nag at all of us who have expended energy on dead ends, red herrings or lost causes. The rebuke is even sharper directed at someone like me, who has sought perfection not in musical harmonies, political platforms or mathematical equations but in the form of a flawless spy novel.

Milton Cockburn recently suggested to readers of The Interpreter a well-informed, broad-church list of his ten best spy novels. He did, however, omit the story that I regard as close to perfection in the genre.

Watching and waiting are said to be basic job requirements for a spy, but they quickly grow tedious in print. James Bond never wastes time hanging around.

That unicorn is named The Russia House, its author John le Carré, its happy fate to endure as a film every bit as gripping and moving as the original story. Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, Barley Blair and Katya Orlova, Goethe and Palfrey, all live on resplendently in print or on screen. Could there be a second, similarly magical unicorn?

Nobody might agree with me on The Russia House, let alone with any list of the essential attributes of a good spy tale. In our home, in picking spy novels or crime thrillers, we abide by certain elementary rules. Thrillers and police procedurals, for instance, do not enter our household if they deal with serial killers, offences against children, or deservedly cold cases with cumbersome dual narratives.

Those bans are easy to enforce, even while we seek out and rely on other stock elements of thriller writing. Mystery is indispensable, as is artful deception of the reader. Twists and turns, but only so many of them, and without any contrived Dickensian coincidences, are the heart of the matter.

A spy novel must have the capacity to provide an insight into how the world really works, especially the vagaries of human nature (Dmitry Ratushny/Unsplash)

By contrast, a perfect spy novel requires one essential ingredient alone. Murders and mayhem are just superfluous padding. Mystery is overrated, although spies’ skills at seducing and misleading their targets are analogous to those of a gifted author with her readers. Watching and waiting are said to be basic job requirements for a spy, but they quickly grow tedious in print. James Bond never wastes time hanging around. Even George Smiley pushes himself occasionally out into the field. Oddly, spies’ watching and waiting does work in two excellent espionage movies, The Lives of Others and The Conversation.

Some spy writers were professionally trained in espionage, but they do not have to have been conspicuously successful – certainly no more than Vladimir Putin was in East Germany. (Stella Rimington is a obvious exception.) Night Heron by Adam Brookes, The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, and The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli make Beijing, Pyongyang and Moscow vividly, eerily alive through feats of the imagination rather than memories of tradecraft. If readers hankered for a spy novelist with an authentically dramatic life, as well as a bad end, they could return to one of the pioneers of the genre, Erskine Childers and his The Riddle of the Sands.

There we were, two unicorn hunters, on a quest for that perfect novel.

The single key component in a spy novel is the capacity to provide an insight into how the world really works, especially the vagaries of human nature. The author most demonstrates an intimate acquaintance with what the French call “les engrenages”, the grease and guts of human and social machinery.

In turn, that study of human nature must revolve around one facet only: betrayal. Every good spy story demands a character like Othello’s Iago. In understanding motives and intentions – the key task for any spy – an awareness of duplicity is indispensable. Le Carré’s ground-breaking success with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold vindicated his decision to focus on successive double-crosses, in addition to a recognition that spying, like life, does not admit many happy endings.

One morning in Amsterdam, I needed a le Carré quote to insert in an article. Finding a second-hand bookshop on a canal, I asked the owner if I might consult the novel without buying it. “Only,” he replied, “if you nominate the best all-around spy writer.” I stuck by Charles McCarry. The Dutch bibliophile agreed, and I copied out the required text.

Other addicts would extol the virtues of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, Len Deighton or Tim Ayliffe. Purists might cast their nets as far back as Somerset Maugham (for Ashenden) or Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. The Amsterdam colloquy would have weighed those worthy contenders. There we were, two unicorn hunters, on a quest for that perfect novel “where passion and precision are one”.

Main image by Upslash user Victoria Strukovskaya.

About the author

Mark Pierce

Mark Pierce was a diplomat and is now a writer who has spent years living in France and Germany.

Topics

Intelligence & security