The spooks homed in on the officers in the past few weeks after working with anti-terror police to uncover "sleeper" agents in London's Met. -- News of the World
When I was kid, nothing could separate me from spy stories. I devoured them at a rapid pace, and always came back wanting more. There was something about the world of cloak and dagger that fascinated me.
Quiller was my favorite spy. Written by Adam Hall, the Quiller books were fast and lean. Violent. Fun. Quiller was always getting up to no good behind the Berlin Wall, and Hall managed to paint Quiller into extremely tight corners from which no one could escape. Except, of course, Quiller.
The Quiller Memorandum put Hall on the map, and Hollywood turned the book into a pretty good flick starring George Segal (and Alec Guinness, in a bit-part). As the years went on, Hall (a pen name for Elleston Trevor) churned out more novels, but Hollywood never picked them up. This was understandable. If you've read the Quiller series, then you know that it was written in the first person. First person stories rarely translate well to the big screen because so much of the story is about the character's own thoughts and emotions. It takes a very good script, and a very good director, to show these thoughts to the audience without telling them.
le Carre
It wasn't until I grew older that I could read John le Carre's stuff. Le Carre went in for the hum-drum spy, the quiet machinations of the dark world. As a kid, I couldn't get into it because it bored me, and when I was older I made the big mistake of reading le Carre's post-Soviet Union material.Like most spy writers, the crashing of the Berlin Wall destroyed le Carre's career. You may argue that many of his post-Wall books have made the bestseller list, but I think that was more on reputation than on quality of writing. As a friend of Stephen King's once told him, "You could write something on toilet paper now and people would still buy it."
One day I was in the book store and I spotted The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. I hemmed and hawed and finally bought it. And I loved it. I was in my twenties and I was finally old enough to let Carre take me through 65 pages of nothing before getting to the point. Until I realized that the 65 pages were the point, and that he had fooled me. Leamas still worked for Smiley, and he was going East.
I read the Smiley books shortly thereafter, and I loved them, too. Le Carre's post-Wall politics as an anti-American panty waist have clouded the fact that he was a very good spy writer. Today, the Left regard him as good people, while the Right figure he sold out (I don't think they truly trusted him to begin with). Me, I just think he's some guy that wrote a few good spy stories.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was probably my favorite, and Smiley's People comes after that. Nobody, and I mean nobody, could write more boring material and make it more interesting. Whole chapters of Smiley reading musty old documents, or talking to alcoholic widows, or wandering around a murky dockyard under overcast skies.
Depressing stuff, and maybe that's why the Right don't remember him too fondly. His spy world was not one of gunshots and victory. Smiley was not the typical spy hero. He was fat, old, washed up. His wife had cheated on him with his best friend, and his best friend turned out to be a double agent. He wasn't James Bond.
I never liked Bond. On my scale of spies, I'd put Quiller first, Smiley second, and anybody from Frederick Forsyth third (Forsyth almost doesn't count, because many of his book weren't "spy stories," in the true Berlin Wall sense).
The tension of the Cold War spy books came from one place: over there. The Wall represented a physical reality for a philosophical nightmare: beyond the barbed wire was a land where free throught was outlawed, and free thinkers were jailed and starved. Over there was a place where you could die for writing a poem, and over there was a place you could never leave. If you were born over there, nobody in the West would ever know you existed unless you were a politician or a figure skater.
Then the Wall came down, and the spy writers went with it. No more dragons to slay, no over there to go to.
Fast forward almost twenty years, and the spy racket is in total disrepair. The Bourne movies are about a character that is being hounded by his own people, three times over. Any story involving today's great enemy, Islamic fascism, is run through the political litmus test before it reaches the shelf. If the story is a film, then the litmus test becomes an acid test, as the story is warped into some strange tale about equality between the good guys and the bad guys.
Kim Philby
There are no more real spy stories. They're gone. The Kim Philby disaster that rocked British Intelligence (and gave birth to Smiley) is ancient history. Today, 4 members of the London MET are outed as agents spying for fanatical terrorists, and everybody yawns. In the old days, a spy outed in the newspapers would be crapping his pants and heading for the train station, one step ahead of the noose. Today, the word "treason" in never mentioned and the spy wonders if his lawyer will get him off. And nobody cares. Why?Because the enemy is already over here, walking amongst us, part of the political theater. Indeed, over there is over here, and vice versa. Treasonous acts are no longer treasonous, they're simply a nuisance. Spies are not spies, they're just people with a different set of beliefs. When a spy is eating dinner at the next table, how dangerous can he be?
I guess we'll have to wait and find out.
Photos: Lenin Imports & Wikipedia
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