Spy novels can’t stay ahead of headlines
There was a moment during the recent Senate Intelligence Committee hearings in the U.S. that made thriller writers like me sit up and take notice. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions if he liked spy novels. The implication was that the motives for the alleged activities of the Trump administration and campaign were outstripping even the most extravagant plot-lines one might find in a Washington conspiracy thriller.
But this raises the inevitable question: in an age of the surpassingly strange – possible election meddling and business favour-peddling and the firing of a real-life director of the FBI – how can a writer like me hope to compete?
Spy novels, and suspense novels in general, start with a tear in the fabric of our usual lives, and often, by story’s end, deliver the promise of a restoration of the normal. An assassination plot is averted, a traitor is exposed. Terrorists have stolen a nuclear device and the hero takes the necessary measures, impeded by a timorous bureaucracy. An apocalyptic threat is averted and the status quo is restored.
But what if you’re living in a non-normal time, the age of the strange?
Take one of the old standby plots of the Cold War thriller: the mole, the sleeper agent who attains high rank – perhaps even the Oval Office itself! When the president’s campaign is suspected of collusion with the Kremlin, that no longer seems quite so shocking a premise. We’ve grown accustomed to conspiratorial and counter-conspiratorial claims.
Since the birth of the thriller, spy novelists have prided themselves on their ability to presage disaster. An 1871 story The Battle of Dorking, which anticipated an invasion of England by a German power, inspired hundreds of invasion novels, including the first literary thrillers, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers and later The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan.
Then came the First World War. As the spy novel developed, its specialty, it turned out, was an uncanny knack for capturing the ambient anxieties of the moment. In the years that led to the next war, great spy fiction like Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear dealt with shadowy business interests agitating for armed conflict.
During the Cold War, spy fiction tended to echo the widespread paranoia about Soviet communism. Washington and London were seen as imperiled fortresses doing battle with the Kremlin, under threat from without or within. In Ian Fleming’s thrillers, James Bond fends off assassination plots by SMERSH, the Soviet counterintelligence agency. In John le Carré’s novels, George Smiley searches for a Soviet mole inside the Circus, the British secret service, MI6.
But along with anti-communism came anti-anticommunism, the fear of homegrown despotism. We worried not just about Stalinism but also about McCarthyism. So we had novels about Soviet conspiracies as well as ones where the real villains exploited Cold War anxiety to seize power themselves. Le Carré’s ambivalent spies persevered in a slow simmering corrupt reality, always with a sense of gentle futility. Then there was Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Advise and Consent, with a bad guy who’s secretly a communist agent. In Richard Condon’s satirical The Manchurian Candidate, the scion of a prominent political family is brainwashed into becoming a communist assassin.
Watergate and related scandals of the 1970s gave rise to a slew of thrillers of paranoia and disenchantment – paranoia, that is, about the U.S. government, which was portrayed as deeply, irredeemably corrupt. From James Grady’s sly novel that became the Robert Redford movie Three Days of the Condor, to Robert Ludlum’s playgrounds of paranoia (The Bourne Identity, The Matarese Circle), the most terrifying enemy wasn’t the man in Moscow, but the one who infiltrated our ranks and lurked within.
The age of Reagan gave us Tom Clancy’s technothrillers and his fantasies of a re-heroized America. Sept. 11 begot an age of suspense fiction dealing with the threat of terrorism; the Pentagon even convened some thriller writers to come up with out-of-the-box plots, figuring that we could predict what’s next, or at least hazard a respectable guess.
The keynote of the Trump administration is the wrangling over truth. Conspiracy theories, once the novelist’s stock in trade, emanate from the Internet like methane from a marsh. The battle is over the truth itself – what it is, who gets to authorize it, which institutions are deemed credible, what’s fake and what isn’t.
Chances are, the tensions over truth are going to play out in fiction, too. The strangeness of these times have given novelists all kinds of new material for thrillers. You’re gonna love it, believe me.