Literary Agents: The Novelist As Spy

by Anthony Masters

Spy novels have been one of the most successful literary genres of the 20th century. But how many of their authors were spies themselves? In this book, the authors penetrate the shadowy world of British Intelligence in an attempt to uncover some of the less celebrated activities of well-known literary names. From John Buchan during and after World War I and Compton Mackenzie in the tense and suspicious 1930s, the story continues through the World War II exploits of Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge to the post-war era of Ian Fleming and John le Carre. The author explores his subjects' attitudes and responses to their varying experiences and suggests how these experiences were transmuted into fiction - and how the secret services tried to prevent this. The reality of espionage work was not always the thrilling, momentous and intricate world depicted in much modern spy fiction. Often humdrum, and sometimes frightening, frequently absurd and bathetic, the facets of this world are as varied, and as surprising, as the subjects of the book - and their own fictional characters - themselves.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1987

About the author

Anthony Masters was a writer, educator and humanitarian of exceptional gifts and prodigious energy. He was, in the parlance of his spiritual ancestors, the ancient mariners, that rare voyager "as gracious as a trade wind and as dependable as an anchor".

He leaves 11 works of adult fiction – notably, Conquering Heroes (1969), Red Ice (1986, with Nicholas Barker), The Men (1997), The Good and Faithful Servant (1999) and Lifers (2001) – and was in the process of completing another, Dark Bridges, which he thought would be his best. Many of these works carry deep insights into social problems that he gained, over four decades, by helping the socially excluded, be it by running soup kitchens for drug addicts or by campaigning for the civic rights of gypsies and other ethnic minorities.

His non-fiction output was typically eclectic. It ranged from the biographies of such diverse personalities as Hannah Senesh (The Summer that Bled, 1972), Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin: the father of anarchism, 1974), Nancy Astor (Nancy Astor: a life, 1981) and the British secret service chief immortalised by Ian Fleming in his James Bond books (The Man Who Was M: the life of Maxwell Knight, 1984), to a history of the notorious asylum Bedlam (Bedlam, 1977).

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

1980s written book on the actual spy career of various authors. Bought it primarily for the Dennis Wheatley chapter (uninformative if you've read the excellent Baker bio) and also the incredible title which, props. My version also has an excellent cover.

I'm kind of running out of good things to say here because honestly this just reeks of old boys network. The entire British intelligence community was basically jobs for the boys: ridiculous numbers of relations and chums who went to school together, a fact that is made abundantly clear in the book, right up to the chapter on John le Carre who is presented as a vaguely unpatriotic meanie for writing about, er, how the place was run by old school chums. The author is basically revelling in his personal connection to all the authors still alive (wtf was the Len Deighton section except fluffing). It reeks of snobbery and low level homophobia. Bah, basically.

Also, let's be honest, the only author who comes out of this sounding like you'd trust him to run a whelk stall, still less an intelligence department, is John Buchan, a man of actual major talents and moral fibre, who gets sneered at for his 'Boys Own' stories throughout. (I would say the authors featured here couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery but actually it's fairly clear heavy drinking was well within their capability.)