Can Contemporary Spy Novels Ever Live Up to the Cold War Classics?

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Is it possible to write a contemporary spy novel that lives up to the Cold War classics? This may seem an odd idea for someone in my line of work to entertain, let alone allow through the front door, but it keeps coming back like an uninvited guest. At times it wants to sit by the fire, put its feet up and talk about the past: did the Cold War give rise to a set of conditions uniquely favourable to spy writers? At other times it rolls up its sleeves and gets straight down to business: what ingredients are required to create a modern classic? In the middle of the night it jabs an accusing finger: you’re wasting your time, it says. Well? Am I?

The Cold War had it all, or so it seems: ideologies people actually believed in, the threat of nuclear annihilation, even the most ominously picturesque of backdrops. It’s no wonder that so many spy writers have tunnelled their way into East Berlin over the years. Hanging over this world was a mood of paranoia made all the more thrilling by the fact that the threat that was not just out there – it was right here, right where we live. A Cold War protagonist might watch a German businessman through binoculars or surveil a Russian diplomat around a European capital, but they would just as likely find the enemy closer to home. No one trusted anyone – colleagues, friends and lovers could all turn out to be double-agents. This generous gift to the period’s novelists came courtesy of the Cambridge Five and the revelation that Britain’s ruling classes were riddled with Soviet agents. Even the Director General of MI5 between 1956 and 1966, Sir Roger Hollis, was at one point suspected (although later cleared) of being a Russian spy.

There will always be those who choose to switch sides, but I wonder whether betrayal of this scale and magnitude is possible today. Do our spies stalk the corridors of Langley and Thames House looking askance at their superiors? In the 1940s and 1950s there was a clear ideological motive for betrayal – the belief that international socialism was the most effective bulwark against fascism – that doesn’t exist today. It would be a peculiar circle of high-level insiders who chose to betray their country because they believed in what Putin’s Russia stood for.

It’s also the case that Western intelligence agencies have built more robust defences. The end of the ‘tap-on-the-shoulder’ method of recruitment means that candidates are judged on merit rather than assumed to be decent chaps because of the colour of their school tie. This is another ingredient of classic Cold War fiction, that in addition to battling a physical enemy, the protagonist is forced to struggle against an invisible class system. In his seminal book ‘Story’, Robert McKee points out that in narrative terms ‘Nothing moves forward…except through conflict.’ The more layers and varieties of conflict are embedded within a story, the more compelling it will read.

Consider Bernard Samson in Len Deighton’s Berlin Game (‘There was an open bottle of champagne in the ice bucket… “Are we celebrating something?” I asked as I took off my coat and hung it in the hall. “Don’t be so bloody bourgeois,” said Tessa’), or Alec Leamus in Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (‘If he were to walk into a London club the porter would certainly not mistake him for a member’). Both classics have at their heart protagonists who chafe against the sense of entitlement displayed by their privileged but less competent superiors.

No one would claim that Britain has shed its class system. But it is true that an increasing number of today’s senior spies went to state schools and attended universities other than Oxford and Cambridge. It is also the case that diversity is at the centre of the intelligence community’s recruitment strategy, in part because a profession that exists to operate covertly within a population must reflect that same population in class, colour, sexuality and gender. The current Chief of MI6 has stated his pronouns of choice on his Twitter profile, which puts him firmly – and laudably – in the progressive camp. Today’s spies have access to wellbeing workshops and ethics counsellors. Can anyone see Alec Leamus wanting to explore the morality of his profession?

After all, accepting – even embracing – moral ambiguity is a central feature of Cold War stories. It can be summarised thus: that the game of espionage is grubby, that lives are damaged and even lost, that in order to defeat your ruthless and unprincipled enemy you may have to hold your nose and stoop to their level. But if we look at the target of much modern spying, namely the terrorist, the same rich and murky moral equivalence is hard to imagine. If your opponent is a balaclava-clad teenager who cuts the heads off aid workers, how exactly could you find yourself reduced to their moral level?

There is an obvious riposte to this, of course, which is that you might drop a bomb on them that kills innocent bystanders. But since we are talking about books here, it is reasonable to ask how satisfying a drone strike can ever be as a purely literary experience. How do you want your stories to end? With a midnight spy swap on a bridge? With a fleeing agent astride the Berlin Wall? Or with a missile strike triggered by a bored soldier sitting in a shipping container outside Las Vegas?

This literary aspect is key. By any yardstick an attempt to thwart a terrorist plot is more urgent than much of what went on in the Cold War, but for some reason that doesn’t automatically translate into a more thrilling story. What’s that about? Why would so many of us choose a Cold War story in which nothing is at stake other than the life of a single agent behind enemy lines above a story about a terrorist plot to kill thousands?

Perhaps the answer is that the realities of the Cold War forced the period’s novelists into a slower, more nuanced and more literary mode, and it’s this that we respond to as readers. It’s not about a class system or a society gripped by paranoia, as expertly as those themes were exploited by the period’s novelists. A story about terrorists – and I say this as someone who has written two terrorism-themed novels – runs the risk of taking you in the opposite direction, towards us-and-them, black-and-white, and a headlong rush to stop the unthinkable happening. Almost by accident, a Cold War story just feels more real, because it is one in which the distinction between good and evil is blurred, in which the people who hurt us most are those closest to us, in which no one lets us down as badly as we do ourselves. At the end of the day, isn’t that what life is like?

There’s hope for us, that’s what I’m trying to say. As with all books, it’ll come down to the writing. The new spy fiction landscape might be more diverse and less coherent but that’s simply a reflection of today’s more confusing world. We have moved on from one vast conflict that encompassed everything to hundreds of smaller conflicts that can be difficult to understand. In writing about them we will need to explore new territories, to pit new protagonists against new antagonists, to reflect new ways of thinking about loyalty and betrayal. This new landscape may be disconcerting at times, but it’s also more capable of taking us by surprise, and in the race to write a modern classic that can only be a good thing.

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