Interested in espionage fiction, but don’t know where to start? Let our expert guide you.
The fictional exploits of spies, intelligence officers and their hangers-on certainly predate the Second World War. The modern genre was born in the 1930s, when what had been a largely jingoistic enterprise — strewed with absurdly macho good guys and flimsy writing — turned into a richer conversation about the human spirit and the shadow lands of our world. Since then, spy fiction has gone global, shining a light on the dark underbelly of everything from the Cold War to the War on Drugs, the Vietnam War to the War on Terror. It’s also a genre moving at different speeds, from classic slow-burn — the English end of the spectrum — to more pyrotechnic stories on the American side.
Surprisingly, for such a suspicious, betrayal-obsessed lot, the genre is also a cheerfully wide-open tent. Because, really, what makes a spy novel? It’s simple: a story involving spying. And those doing the spying might not be intelligence officers working for the C.I.A. or the K.G.B. They might be ordinary people just like you and me.
I want to start at the beginning
A Coffin for Dimitrios
by Eric Ambler (1939)
On glorious display in “A Coffin for Dimitrios” is what would become one of the great tropes of the genre: the amateur thrust into spy games well above his or her pay grade. Here the mystery writer Charles Latimer, aided by a policeman, descends into the murderous Turkish underworld to investigate the death of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a notorious criminal. A mystery lies at the heart of the story, but Makropoulos’s rap sheet and the novel’s globe-trotting intrigue qualify it as one of the first modern entries in the genre. And although it was published in 1939, “Dimitrios” is indeed thoroughly modern; its milieu is one of spooks dealing with moral ambiguity.
Give me the O.G.
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
by John le Carré (1963)
Le Carré — a former officer of MI5 and MI6 — is the undisputed king of the modern spy novel. Here he brilliantly explores themes of loyalty and betrayal when his protagonist, Alec Leamas, is dispatched by British intelligence to dangle himself as a faux defector in front of the East Germans. The book is soaked in the moral grayness of the Cold War — the West plays the same dirty games as the Communists — and at its heart is an intelligence officer who’s spent his entire life lying to those he loves most.
I’d like a beautifully written conspiracy thriller
The Tears of Autumn
by Charles McCarry (1974)
McCarry is the American answer to le Carré — a former C.I.A. officer who writes stories of literary and emotional consequence that just happen to feature spies. “The Tears of Autumn” explores this compelling proposition: What if the Kennedy assassination was a hit by the South Vietnamese — with some Cubans and Mafiosi smattered about — conducted as vengeance for Washington’s role in a coup that brought down President Ngo Dinh Diem? McCarry’s intrepid agent Paul Christopher tries to sort it all out.
I want it shaken, not stirred
Casino Royale
by Ian Fleming (1953)
This is the first outing for the dashing, tuxedo-clad, martini-swilling spy James Bond, who’s out to bankrupt Le Chiffre, a French trade unionist and member of Soviet intelligence. Fleming writes with equal panache about spies, food and drink, and his novels, including this one, are far more nuanced than their film versions. “Casino Royale” is good espionage fun. It’s also a welcome excuse to pour a martini.
Give me Cold War intrigue with a stylish baddie
The Stone Roses
by Sarah Gainham (1959)
After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, a British journalist is sent to Prague to exfiltrate a missing agent. Gainham — the pen name of Rachel Stainer, who was a foreign correspondent for The Spectator magazine — may be better known for her crime novels, but her spy fiction is also first cabin material even if most of the books are out of print and can be challenging to find. “The Stone Roses” is both a pacey midcentury spy thriller and the inspiration for a namesake 1980s English rock band. Oh yes, and that terrifying baddie: She loves her leather.
I’d like a novel that gets the spy details exactly right
Red Sparrow
by Jason Matthews (2013)
Spy novels don’t need to get the tradecraft and the lingo right to be worthwhile, but it sure is sweet when they do. Matthews, a 33-year veteran of the C.I.A., absolutely nails the depiction of how spy agencies carry out intelligence operations right under the nose of a hostile service. He centers this first novel of a trilogy on the dance between the case officer Nate Nash and his Russian asset, Dominika Egorova. Readers will get the skinny on topics as varied and esoteric as surveillance detection routes, short-range agent communications systems and night action cables. Oh, and the sex is wild (and, fair warning, sometimes disturbing). Buckle up.
How about some misfit spies?
Slow Horses
by Mick Herron (2010)
Not all spies wear tuxes and drink martinis. In Herron’s ensemble series the stench of grease, flatulence and failure hang over a crew of MI5 rejects, the Slow Horses. They work out of Slough House (get it?), whiling away their time as the service waits them out. In the meantime they get pulled into some stone-cold serious business. Herron’s genius is to show the office politics of espionage in all its grimy glory.
I want a twisty psychological drama set in the Middle East
The Peacock and the Sparrow
by I.S. Berry (2023)
Berry spins a propulsive tale set during the Arab Spring in Bahrain, where Shane Collins, a cynical case officer, is on his last tour. Saddled with heaps of emotional baggage and a penchant for booze, he soon finds himself in a whirlwind romance with a local artist, Almaisa, who is anything but what she seems. The writing is smooth and the setting is perfectly drawn — you can practically feel the Gulf humidity emanating from the pages.
Got anything that isn’t British or American?
The Sympathizer
by Viet Than Nguyen (2015)
For good or for ill the genre, birthed in Britain, leans Anglo in both geographic focus and authorship. “The Sympathizer,” a serious spy novel told through the eyes of the Vietnamese, shatters the mold on both counts. It’s a tragicomedy about an unnamed captain, a Communist double agent working for the South Vietnamese Special Branch, first in Saigon and then as a refugee in California. One memorable sequence shows the captain’s advisory work on a film (a barely disguised “Apocalypse Now”) that, for my money, is the funniest scene to grace the pages of an espionage novel.
Hey, isn’t China kind of a big deal?
Night Heron
by Adam Brookes (2014)
During the Cold War, most spy novels focused on the global contest for influence between Washington and Moscow. And yet today, with a similar struggle brewing between China and the United States, comparatively few espionage authors have taken the same tack. Brookes masterfully weaves together the geopolitics of this new era with the nuts and bolts of tradecraft on the streets of Beijing. He also imbues his Chinese protagonist (a man called Peanut) with depth and verve, and deftly piles onto the glorious trope of the amateur spy in Philip Mangan, a journalist who finds himself in way too deep.
I want a superhero spy
The Gray Man
by Mark Greaney (2009)
Greaney’s operative Court Gentry, the “Gray Man,” is a C.I.A. assassin and sometimes freelance killer at the heart of this delightfully action-packed spy novel. In this series kickoff, a host of shadowy forces and former friends dispatch their own assassins to put Gentry in the ground, with stupendously rough results. The frenetic plot is supported by fanatical attention to the details of weaponry and close-combat tactics. This is an excellent introduction to the more kinetic (and American) end of the spy novel spectrum.
Give me a real-life spy story masquerading as fiction
Agents of Innocence
by David Ignatius (1987)
Rumor has it that Ignatius, a longtime Washington Post journalist, got the bones of this jaw-dropping novel — about the recruitment of a spy deep inside the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organization — from the actual C.I.A. officers involved in a similar operation in Lebanon in the 1980s. Small wonder that Ignatius’ subsequent novels, including his latest about the fight for dominance in space, all say something true about the spy business.
How about that Jack Ryan guy?
The Hunt for Red October
by Tom Clancy (1984)
Clancy didn’t invent the spy-driven techno-thriller, but he did mainstream it. A Soviet submarine captain appears intent on defecting to the West along with his submarine, which contains a cutting-edge “caterpillar drive” rendering it invisible to sonar. Jack Ryan, a C.I.A. analyst, is convinced that the captain is the real deal. And though Clancy takes some liberties in depicting the work of the eggheads at Langley, he is astute at capturing both the geopolitics of the Cold War and the technical details of submarines and weapons systems.
Give me a novel at the corner of Spies and Literary Fiction
The Quiet American
by Graham Greene (1955)
Greene was a masterly novelist and prose stylist who sometimes happened to write about spies — perhaps because he had been one himself, working for Britain’s MI6 during World War II. “The Quiet American” explores the beginnings of the French collapse in Vietnam and, quite spookily, predicts that a greater dose of American intervention will not go so well. The C.I.A. man here, Alden Pyle, is a whip-smart Harvard grad who’s got big plans to help the Vietnamese. Problem is, he doesn’t know squat about Vietnam.
If you’ve read it and loved it, try … “Shanghai,” by Joseph Kanon; “The Coldest Warrior,” by Paul Vidich; “The Helsinki Affair,” by Anna Pitoniak.
How about a spy novel with a wild ending?
Berlin Game
by Len Deighton (1983)
Bernard Samson is asked to plan the exfiltration of an MI6 agent from East Germany. Sound simple? Not quite. One of Deighton’s master strokes was to center his spy stories not on action heroes or upper-crust Oxbridge gentleman spies, but on working-class antiheroes who fight their battles in the back offices of the espionage business. And the ending is shocking.
