Recently revising the essay collection
A Century of Spy Fiction (the second edition of that book is now out) I had occasion to think specifically about the way the histories of the genre tend to be British-centered--so much so that it is common for those writing that history to pretty much dismiss any American spy fiction produced before the 1970s. Of course, the more time I have spent actually looking at the relevant works the more I am struck not just by how much American spy fiction there actually was, but how many works within it deserve better than the dismissal. (Does it not seem worth noting that, in addition to such relatively well-known works as Richard Condon's
The Machurian Candidate, Upton Sinclair, author of classics like
The Jungle, produced a noteworthy early spy series in his Lanny Budd novels? Or that Kurt Vonnegut produced
Mother Night? How about works like Jack London's
The Assassination Bureau?)
Still, it seems to me fair to say that while Americans were writing spy
fiction, the British had created a
genre of spy fiction. There was a tradition and a counter-tradition here, with its founders and its orthodoxy and its subversives, its formulas and its fandom and its lore. Thus did William Le Queux and Edward Phillips Oppenheim establish the spy story as we know it with works like
Secrets of the Foreign Office and
A Maker of History, giving us the kind of characters, the kind of situations, that the genre has tended to deal in ever after. Le Queux's Duckworth Drew is the prototype of every "international man of mystery" since, while in
A Maker of History we have the starting point for those tales where some innocent but hapless individual finds himself caught up in an international conspiracy--and all this was carried forward by writers like John Buchan (a great admirer of Oppenheim) in his Richard Hannay novels. Not long after others responding to such images of the fictional spy offered their own, very different, tales, W. Somerset Maugham quite conscious of what he was doing when he subverted it with
Ashenden, and the same going for the parodic and satirical works of Eric Ambler (who was aghast to have ignorant critics mistake his mockery of Oppenheim's "bad prose" as his own "bad prose"). And so it went from there, with Ian Fleming in his James Bond stories giving the Duckworth Drew type an update, all as he made overt allusion to Oppenheim, to Bulldog Drummond, to Ambler.* (Indeed, in a reminder of how much the books were parody to begin with, Bond read Ambler's
The Mask of Dimitrios on his flight to Istanbul right before, in significant ways, recapitulating the foolish adventure of that book's protagonist in many ways.) At the same time the James Bond image played its part in John le Carré's
conception of the extreme opposite character in a secret agent who was a short, fat, bespectacled and much-cuckolded philologist. And so on and so forth, down to the present, with Roman Pearce telling us in
Furious 6 that this "007-type s--t . . . is not what we do!" (though of course it was exactly what they did from here on out).
By contrast, there is far less evidence of the authors of the American works I have mentioned being part of a self-aware collectivity --of, for example, Vonnegut's
Mother Night being significantly allusive toward or even inspired by other spy novels, American or otherwise. (Rather, as the title suggests, it is Goethe's
Faust that Vonnegut seems to have most in mind.) Indeed, historians of the spy story seem to think of those later American spy novelists of the '70s and after have come to be thought of as latecomers to an old British tradition--which fact has in itself left critics less aware of older American spy fiction, with the pattern of neglect self-reinforcing.
Of course, none of that diminishes what authors like London or Vonnegut accomplished, but it does suggest there being
less accomplishment than might otherwise have been the case. That the writing did not produce a genre can seem to indicate that it did not make the impact it might have--while it may be that the existence of a genre furnishes writers with possibilities and inspirations whose benefit they would otherwise lack. Simply put, the fact of writers picking up what others did and reacting to it, extending it, turning it around, if most obviously encouraging activities like parody more broadly encouraged them in taking up "different ways of seeing"--what Ambler gave us, which included parody but was certainly not
just parody, is partly a matter of his following after writers like Oppenheim. What le Carré gave us likewise seems to have been a matter of his coming after people like Fleming. And so on. Considered in those turns it would seem that, far from genre being a bad thing, it at least has the potential to be a very good thing, so that rather than the existence of genre work being a problem the problem would seem to be that these days the genres we have are fairly stale, that new genres do not seem to be emerging the way one might hope--and that the creatively stultifying demands of the crass and vulgarian marketing departments contribute to the problem by demanding writers bash their square pegs until they fit into the round holes the
Dauriats of publishing-land are prepared to afford them.
* Thus does Gala Brand of Special Branch in
Moonraker dismiss spies like James Bond as "people that Phillips Oppenheim had dreamed up with fast cars and special cigarettes with gold bands on them and shoulder-holsters," while in their confrontation aboard the Orient Express in
From Russia, with Love, Red Grant warns Bond that "Bulldog Drummond stuff" will not get him out of the corner he is in.
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