The British Spy Novel: Styles in Treachery

by John Alfred Atkins

Fiction about spies and spying is a fairly recent phenomenon at which British writers have so far been the most successful exponents. Although Dickens's 'A Tale of Two Cities' could qualify as spy fiction, it is really with 'The Riddle of the Sands', published by Erskine Childers (later to be shot by the British during the 1916 rising in Dublin), that the genre really begins. Since then it has been dominated by writers of varying quality such as John Buchan, Ian Fleming and, more recently, John Le Carre and Len Deighton. Others like E. Phillips Oppenheim and William le Queux were more concerned with the glamour of high life in such places as the Monte Carlo casinos and the femmes fatales who inhabited them, but wrote within the definitions of the genre.
John Atkins, author of many literary biographies and the multi volume 'Sex in Literature' series, examines the subject matter of spy fiction and the authors who write it, many of whom have worked directly for the British Secret Service. Often life turns out to be more incredible than fiction and this is especially true of a form of literature which must be authentic to life and credible to the reader. This book should remain a standard guide to one of the most fascinating and popular categories of modern writing for many years.

287 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

John Alfred Atkins was a prolific British writer, playwright, poet and novelist.

Atkins graduated from the Bristol University in 1938. Subsequently he worked for Mass Observation and later as Assistant and Literary Editor of the left-wing newspaper Tribune, before his call up for war service arrived in 1943. At Tribune his place was taken by George Orwell.

After the war, he worked as a critic specialising in analysing the work of 20th century writers. He taught in different parts of the world, including Sudan and Poland, and his erudition and breadth of knowledge was immense. He wrote several books for Calder Publishing and other publishers and for the last thirty years of his life was spent quietly in East Anglia.

He was the author of many literary bibliographies (including J. B. Priestley, Graham Greene, Arthur Koestler and Ernest Hemingway), an analysis of The British Spy Novel and the multi-volume Sex in Literature series.

Reviews

[severyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

'It is often said, with God knows what authority, that Buchan had an attractive literary style. He hadn't. It was entirely commonplace and unadventurous...' he says of John Buchan's writing.
'This kind of carelessness indicates the contempt which Sapper felt at bottom for his reader,' he says of Sapper's plotting in a Standish story. 'One feels that those who read him from choice deserved contempt.'
Elsewhere Ronald Seth's 'Encyclopaedia of Espionage' is described offhandedly as 'unsatisfactory', P.D. James' commentary on the future of the spy thriller as 'inept', and poor old Buchan again as 'bosh'.

Good fun, even if thirty years old.