Spy Ficton and Other Thrillers

Fleming's Bond novels are (mostly) good and not much like the movies. The first, Casino Royale, is pretty terrific.

one of these days i want to go on a graham greene binge. i've never read ANY greene. i feel this is something i must rectify.

The three Le Carre books "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", "The Honourable schoolboy" and "Smiley's People" are excellent, and form a sort of trilogy about first the hunt for a mole in the British Secret Service and then the consequences.

Then again, I feel like that a lot.

Except when I read the Bourne trilogy by Ludlum. Those books I liked AND I didn't feel like there were underlying brilliant insights that I was oblivious to. They were just entertaining (and completely absurd) stories.

Anyway.

I second the Eric Ambler recommendation.

does anyone up in this bitch fuck w ross thomas?

just read 'the porkchoppers' and there were things i liked a lot about it. it's not a spy story, but a lot of it is political and abt dirty campaign tactics and mild espionage. and there's a hit man. at first i thought there were WAY TOO MANY CHARACTERS but once you hit the midway point he stop introducing new ppl and things come into clearer focus -- i mean, the book starts w the focus on the hitman and it's not until a bit later you realize it's honing in on union president donald cubbin particularly. i think it would benefit from a re-read. i did see the final twist coming -- there were a few pretty significant hints dropped but in what most ppl would consider 'throwaway' scenes. in as much as their significance does not become apparent until later.

are lawrence block's Evan Tanner books worth reading? i have a few kicking around but when i started one it didn't thrill me like his Matt Scudder and JP Keller books.

Have a Ross Thomas at home that I need to read. Had the same problem with Tanner myself. Too bad you didn't meet Mr. Fine Wine on Saturday, you could have discussed Scudder.

The gimmick with Tanner- that he doesn't need to sleep so he can learn. all this stuff, like Foreign Languages, etc.- didn't grab me.

huh, i have met that guy a few time in passing (last time was a 78rpm thing at the bell house i think?) but did not know he was a fan of detective fiction.

will rep for Alan Furst mentioned up thread, and of course Spy Who Came In From the Cold is alltime

I liked the Matt Scudder books quite a bit, but yeah I've tried Tanner and I'm not really feeling him

He's not a big fan as far as I know, ian, but he does like Scudder and Inspector Montalbano.

Anyway, the thing that makes Scudder and Keller appealing, the mundane everyday detail, is in short supply given the international derring-do of Tanner.

Come to think of it, never got into the Bernie Rhodenbarr books either, although there I am more hopeful.

Yeah, I really like Bernie and Keller--need to try the Scudders.

And veg is spot-on--Alan Furst is fantastic.

Furst really feels like something from another era, it's very 'classic' in the old LeCarre way, where nothing is over-explained and everyone's meeting on trains

i'm a sucker for oldfashioned spy stuff

will stop clogging up the WHAT ARE YOU READING thread

i thought greenmantle was pretty amazing; i think i'd just given up on my first attempt at the seven pillars around then
i'm curious about arbuthnot's being 'based on' t.e. lawrence, like what exactly is the time scale here

think the timescale *just* works. Checking this I was astonished to find that Greenmantle was 1916 - a lot earlier than I realised. point being tho, both Buchan and Lawrence were alpha Oxford/political males. inconceivable given London "society" they wdnt have known of each other, by reputation at least, certainly Buchan wd hear of the glamourous, up and coming TEL. Buchan postgrad at Brasenose in 1895, TEL undergrad at Jesus 1907.

What's interesting about this is that the Hannay sequence almost starts to feel like a spy roman a clef - A Dance to the Crump of Big Guns if you like. That's a definite genre "thing", when you consider Tinker, Tailor for instance - pen name authors + documentary-fiction analysis of the politics of political/civ service bureaucracy.)

Buchan's speed of production here (one year between 39S and GM) makes it more likely that contemporary characters find a place.

As I say I didn't realise Greenmantle was so early. That makes his political clarity p impressive and brings him closer to Erskine Childers than I'd really previously considered. (ie political point-maker and narrative tactician).

This belongs in the spy fiction thread, right? But I wanted to talk about the mystifying Anthony Price on that. (a clef/feather name if ever I saw one).

― Fizzles, Friday, August 23, 2013 7:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feel like i read one of his. 'other paths to glory'?

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, August 23, 2013 11:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so yeah, 1916! i'd remembered even earlier and thought it was eerie that he'd managed to predict lawrence's whole thing. but like i guess what arbuthnot and lawrence have in common in terms of project was an idea somewhat up in the air already. i don't know.

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, August 23, 2013 11:25 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, I think the battle for the east was a realpolitik 'thing' probably born out of The Great Game - you can see i know my stuff here. What's the earliest spy story are we saying? when do adventures of disguise and concealment and political intrigue (I'm thinking Dumas pere maybe) become thrillers/spy stories? Feels like context is important - incipient notions of terrorism - anonymous, greatcoated terrorism by the solitary individual - give The Secret Agent as a handy start point maybe. Kim fits in nicely to The Great Game territory. First world war, the imposition of passports feel like the beginning of the true environmental niche for the spy thriller.

I'll check out Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia, re that link on What Are You Reading. Haven't seen it yet, so dunno if it mentions Buchan, but delves pretty deeply into Lawrence's pre- and post-WWI years. I'll also try that World's Classics edition of Greenmantle, with the good notes and intro. I seem to recall Pynchon (in the Slow Learnerintro, prob) mentioning Buchan as an influence or inspiration--also The Riddle of the Sands? Think so, and maybe Helen MacInnes.
Graham Greene said he wondered about the potential reception for truly post-WWI thrillers, not taking pro-Empire/Establishment feelings as one of the givens in creating suspense, re Buchan etc. But then he read Michael Innes, was convinced he could succeed. I recently came across an Innes omnibus: The Case of the Journeying Boy, Hamlet, Revenge!, and Appleby's End Good?

Kipling's Kim has elements of being a spy story, but not in the modern form.

Although governments have been spying since the beginning, I get the impression that Britain had the first extensive intelligence-gathering bureaucracy, with formal recruitment of agents, development of methodologies, and highly systematic record keeping. It's such bother to maintain a world empire these days. Of course, it's entirely possible the Chinese got there well ahead of the brits and we just never hear about it.

Adam Curtis always good for this sort of fun:

William Le Queux was a popular novelist in the early part of the twentieth century. He was half French, half British and he wrote books with wonderful titles like Strange Tales of a Nihilist.

http://static.bbc.co.uk/programmeimages/480xn/images/p01dw406.jpg

Le Queux had started off as a journalist on the Daily Mail - but then had travelled around Europe getting to know lots of famous and infamous people. But as he did so he became convinced that many of the European countries, but most of all Germany, envied Britain and wanted to get their hands on the wealth of the Empire.

The trouble was that the British people didn't realise this. So Le Queux set out to warn them - above all by telling them that the Germans were sending spies to Britain to prepare for an invasion.

http://static.bbc.co.uk/programmeimages/480xn/images/p01dtzfd.jpg

But the ruling classes in Britain laughed at Le Queux. They said it was just fiction - which it was. Plus he wasn't really British and he hadn't been to a proper school, he was far too vulgar and insistent in his patriotism. In short he was a bore.

So Le Queux did what anyone in their right mind would do in such a situation. He turned to the Daily Mail.

He wrote a gripping account of a future German invasion of Britain and took it to Lord Northcliffe who ran the Mail. It was called "The Invasion of 1910" and it described how the Germans landed in East Anglia and marched on London.

Northcliffe loved it - but the Mail's circulation department said that many of the towns on Le Queux's invasion route didn't have many actual or potential Daily Mail readers in them.

So Lord Northcliffe changed the route of the invasion to make sure that all the towns that were sacked and pillaged had lots of Daily Mail readers. Here is the map of the invasion as agreed with the circulation department.

http://static.bbc.co.uk/programmeimages/560xn/images/p01dtzjm.jpg

The serialisation was an enormous success. The prime minister got up in the House of Commons and said Le Queux was "a pernicious scaremonger" and that the story was "calculated to alarm the more ignorant public opinion at home."

Result.

Then things started getting out of control. Thousands of Daily Mail readers sent Le Queux letters telling him that they had spotted people acting suspiciously - which meant they must be German spies.

The letters were mirror images of what Le Queux had written in his books. But rather than making him suspicious, Le Queux decided that this proved that what he had written as fiction must actually be true. There was a gigantic German spy ring in Britain.

Thousands of Daily Mail readers couldn't be wrong.

The man whose job it was to uncover spies in Britain was very excited by all this. He was called Colonel Edmonds. He had a tiny budget and two assistants - and noone on the General Staff bothered with him.

But now Col. Edmonds saw his chance. He teamed up with Le Queux and together they bombarded the Committee for Imperial Defence with the evidence from the Daily Mail readers. Edmonds said that the government should set up a "secret service bureau" to combat the threat.

The head of the Committee - Lord Haldane - said this was ridiculous. But even he couldn't stand against the wave of spy fever that was sweeping the country. He gave in - and MI5 was set up - created in large part by the dreams of a socially excluded novelist, and the paranoid imaginings of the readers of the Daily Mail.

I think Le Queux probably has good credentials to be a start point, especially with the MI5 tie-in, and that peculiar habit of some early spy stories to be dramatisations of the warnings their authors had given the government but which the government would not heed.

and the questionable relationships between spy fiction writers and spooks and their co-role in disseminating propaganda/misinformation for the Powers that Be, at arms length of course

ha, I was going to wonder which English spy writers of recent years are closest to the spooks, but of course

Great anecdote about spook-author relationships in this Le Carre interview from this weekend's FT

Le Carré explains that some years ago The Times had published an “ungrateful” photo of him, alongside a story that he’d clobbered a small Polish theatre company by asking for an exorbitant royalty. He wrote to the then editor to seek a correction, which brought a dismissive reply to the effect that he was big enough to take the rough with the smooth. So he wrote directly to Murdoch, requesting “a big apology, a contribution to the theatre, and lunch”. He was amazed to receive an instant and simple reply: “Your terms accepted, Rupert.” This put him in a funk, like a naughty schoolboy whose bluff had been called. Lunch was at Ronnie’s favourite, the Savoy Grill – Murdoch’s suggestion. What an odd couple they must have made. Murdoch then amazed him again, with a question that came out of the blue. “Who killed Robert Maxwell?”, he asked quietly. “A gorgeous moment,” le Carré says. “Rupert, the man of hard fact, imagining that I knew what had become of Maxwell!”

Jerry Westerby writes spy fiction in a semi-official capacity in Le Carre's universe iirc

and the questionable relationships between spy fiction writers and spooks and their co-role in disseminating propaganda/misinformation for the Powers that Be, at arms length of course

― Cap'n Save-a-Co. (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 10 September 2013 14:02 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, I was going to wonder which English spy writers of recent years are closest to the spooks, but of course

― woof, Tuesday, 10 September 2013 14:08 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, the continual presentation of omnicompetence, and the single individual battling inchoate large-but-dumb organisations of destruction. It's total bollocks of course, but with the support of the media seems to have been largely successful. Every time I hear of new 'terror raids', I just think it's bollocks. Their organisations are much like most organisations, dedicated largely to internal preservation and administration, and what work does get done is usually slower and less competent than it probably should be with large amounts of bad done deliberately and what good there is done, done accidentally.

It's why I always liked Eric Ambler, as his plots are often close to farce, his spies are often useless, damaged or deluded, outcomes accidental or unintentional and never really clean.

Sort of what i like about Le Carre often, too: they're often really novels about petty office politics, which just happen to have the lives of real people being destroyed as the outcome