Cold Reading

In an interview with Prospero, Olga Sobolev explains how global military conflicts shaped the literature of the US and the Soviet Union:

The response to the first world war was great literature like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but after the second world war the response was mostly pulp fiction, thrillers and spy novels. The novel is very much based on an individual view of the world, but, because there was such strong propaganda against Communism, there was a group-consciousness response based on stereotypes that fitted into this genre of formula fiction of spy novels and thrillers.

She goes on to provide context for the birth of James Bond:

So readers on both sides of the Iron Curtain were consuming these ideological patterns and stereotypes?

Yes, but in slightly different ways.

In the Soviet Union it came from the top down, but in the West the propaganda was regulated by economic means. Left-wing writers were removed from the shelves (Howard Fast, Dalton Trumbo and even Frank Baum, author of “The Wizard of Oz”) though never actually censored. They were not in demand because of media propaganda, so what was in demand was the thrillers and spy fiction. Interestingly, apart from Richard Condon’s “The Manchurian Candidate” (1953), which was American, the novels were mostly British. There was Ian Fleming’s Bond, of course, and then, later, John Le Carré, a more literary writer than Fleming. [Le Carré's character George] Smiley is human where Bond is not. “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1963) was a huge success because Kim Philby defected in 1963, and 1961 had seen the Maclean and Burgess defections, so Le Carré was on the wave of these huge political incidents. Then there was “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1974), and “Smiley’s People” (1979) when the Anthony Blunt affair was in the headlines.