Why Do Writers Make the Best Spies?

In which I select my favorite next chapter from Life of Crime chaps. 13-17 and choose not to summarize the rest, because...I love reading about spies!

Some books lead you to more books—and occasionally, to asking questions you didn’t realize have occupied valuable brain space and deserve to be answered.

I’m not going to waste your time. The reason several notable authors—W. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene—were spies is that their status as authors gave them cover for traveling to exotic places and sometimes, for hiding messages in manuscripts sent through the mail. Why would a person put up with endless travel diarrhea and painfully long train and ferry rides unless she were either gathering intelligence or doing research for books?

The sign I read on a tiny ferry in Myanmar before eating a $1 curry that made me sicker than I’ve ever been in my entire life. But boy that curry was tasty! (It took six months for my daughter and I to recover fully. Iron-gut Brian was fine.)

More on Maugham and Greene soon, but first, we’ll turn back to some less commonly known pioneers.

In The Life of Crime, the big “history-of-the-genre” book we are tackling in small bites here at Present Tense, Martin Edwards starts his chapter on early spy fiction by telling us about some mostly forgotten authors who actually did important spy-ish things even without instruction from the government—like William LeQueux, who carved a niche in “invasion fiction” by writing about the perils of British invasion by France, Russia, and Germany.

Over time, LeQueux gravitated from possible hyperbole to realism. His 1906 novel, The Invasion of 1910, which sold over a million copies¹, was the result of hiring a naval expert and traveling around the country mapping out potential German invasion routes. Edwards credits this moment in history for alerting the Secret Services that recruiting writers might be a good idea. Look how much LeQueux told them, for free!

The rest of Life of Crime chapter 13 will continue to swell your TBR list—for example, by drawing your attention to Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) which portrays a double agent named Verloc. The book did such a good job exploring the subtle nature of terrorism that it fascinated American Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

And now…on to Maugham, one of my favorite authors due to my early obsession with travel-inspired fiction.

Did Somerset Maugham have a nickname? “Summy?” Actually, he went by “Willie.” How will I ever finish this newsletter if I can’t stop Googling?

Maugham’s spying inspired no novels, only a series of “cynical, credible short stories” collected in Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1927), which Edwards recommends. These same stories, despite being relatively obscure now, inspired John LeCarre, whom we will be getting to, momentarily.

I’m always impressed by how much novelists used to dabble in, in addition to dirty side jobs. The opium! (Greene.)The affairs! (Maugham, with a male lover, but also with a female lover who was married, and with whom he had a child, before he ended up back with the male lover, a man Haxton.) Edwards quips that Maugham might have welcomed spying as an escape route from all that domestic drama.  

As for Graham Greene, online sources say he was recruited by his sister into MI6 in 1941. Edwards provides only three paragraphs and a confusing timeline (was Greene really recruited in 1939, not 1941? And why is Edwards calling out his West Africa assignment as the inspiration for The Ministry of Fear, set in London, when the time in Africa is more worth mentioning as inspiration for The Heart of the Matter, which takes place in Sierra Leone?)

Graham Greene was investigated by the FBI—this article explains why—but at the very same time, the CIA was helping to turn his Vietnam novel, The Quiet American, into a film! Meanwhile, our U.S. agents weren’t too careful with the facts. They got Greene’s birthday wrong and described him as twenty pounds heavier than he was—enough to irritate the writer when he got access to his FBI file. The nerve!

Graham Greene, 1954. The look of a man who cares about accurate measurements! (Unlike the FBI.)

Completely by chance, I read Ministry of Fear earlier this month after a used paperback I’d bought at some point floated to the top of a living room stack. The premise involves a man who wins a cake at a charity fete—a cake meant for someone else, possibly with a secret message inside—and that odd happenstance sends him tumbling into a series of odd events, being accused of murder, and finding himself in an amnesiac state in a mental asylum. The middle part of the book lost me a bit. But I kept going, feeling oddly reminded of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island, an even bigger mind-bender-of-a-book.

Of the two, I recommend Shutter Island (as does Caitlin) for its smoothly handled unreliability and satisfying twists, but the one thing Greene does better than anyone is conveying what the London Blitz felt like. I’ve never read any historical fiction that comes close. Neighborhood to neighborhood, building to building, Greene conveys the surreal look and psychological atmosphere of a city half in ruin and the people trying to keep living—some even refusing to withdraw to the ubiquitous air raid shelters. And others, you know…buying cakes! (And attending seances.) As I read, my mind kept wandering from London in the forties to Gaza now, imagining the everyday stories happening in-between the bombings, and hoping some novelist is out there chronicling it.

From there, my mind wandered to the question: have any spy novels or mysteries been set in Gaza? Because some of us would like to read one.

(…pause for search…)

Running in Place (2019) by Palestinian author Atef Abu Saif, which Haaretz, Israel’s longest-running newspaper, called an “excellent detective story set in Gaza.” From what I can tell, it hasn’t been translated into English. The only Goodreads page links to an Arabic edition. Surely it’s been picked up by now. But if not, is anyone from Soho Crime reading this?

Some authors write first, write+spy later. Others spy, then write.

John LeCarre fits in the second camp, retiring from the secrets business once he reached bestseller status. Life of Crime will get to LeCarre in a few hundred pages, but I won’t wait to make this quick rec: Errol Morris’s melancholy 2023 documentary, The Pigeon Tunnel (Netflix). To be honest, the documentary reveals more about how the legendary author was influenced by his despicable con-artist father than it reveals about the specifics of LeCarre’s MI5 and MI6 work, though LeCarre’s general psychology comes across. If you are left wanting, spare some time for this Teri Gross interview. Fun fact: LeCarre not only invented the phrase “to come in from the cold,” he also introduced the term “mole.”

And now that we’ve wandered prematurely from early 20th century to modern times and from books to TV, can I bring your attention to Slow Horses, the Apple TV series based on Mick Herron’s spy series²? Season three is so good!

Every episode, I probably annoy my spouse by pointing out again that Herron’s group of spies, led by Gary Oldman in his best role of all time, are so much more credible than typical screen spies. You won’t catch Tom Cruise playing a role where he repeatedly farts, expresses apathy about the murder of a colleague, and generally looks as unhealthy and disheveled as possible while actually managing to foil fiendish master plots.

Slow Horses has tons of action—in this latest season especially—but we are spared those endless scenes of spies jumping rooftops and steering motorcycles at breakneck speed down staircases.

We all know: Real spies take taxis.

Tell us your favorite spy novel or series, from any era!

1. I’m sorry. But a million copies? It was so much easier to sell books in the early 20th century!

2. Want to read Mick Herron instead of watch? Here’s his Soho Press page.