Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence

Wesley K. Wark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135186975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book won the Canadian Crime Writers' Arthur Ellis Award for the Best Genre Criticism/Reference book of 1991. This collection of essays is an attempt to explore the history of spy fiction and spy films and investigate the significance of the ideas they contain. The volume offers new insights into the development and symbolism of British spy fiction.

Decoding German Spies: British Spy Fiction 1908–18

Nicholas Hiley

Between 1908 and 1918 Britain was invaded by an army of fictional spies. They landed in their thousands on bookstalls and in bookshops. They used the short story to establish themselves in hundreds of newspapers and magazines, successfully infiltrated dozens of popular stage plays, and were even spotted in cinemas and on the pages of children’s comics.

Yet no one seemed to know where they came from. The spy, explained a writer in The Graphic in 1914, ‘is always conceived of as a tremendously romantic type of villain by the unromantic average person who has never set eyes on him’:

To make up for this he has read all about him, and has seen him repeatedly on the stage, only, as it happens, neither the playwright nor the novelist is any better informed than the rest, which accounts for the extraordinary likeness between all the spies of the literary imagination. They are all faithful replicas of each other, all copies of the same type, originated by goodness knows whom, goodness knows when.¹

But where did they come from, these dark villains ‘with shifty eyes and an unpardonably bad pronunciation of English’, and their female counterparts, whose seductive costumes were ‘always a tremendous asset’?² What was the origin of the stock fictional foreigner, living quietly somewhere in eastern England, who, on one inevitable and preordained morning, ‘boldly throws off the mask and appears before his fiancée in the hated garb of our Teutonic invaders’.³

The most popular explanation is that these fictional characters were rooted in international politics, and took their nourishment from national decline. Spy and invasion stories, I.F. Clarke observed, belong to the literature of patriotism, for their subject ‘is not the behaviour of recognisable individuals, as it is in the novel; it is the nation, the enemies of the nation, the new instruments of war, and the future greatness of the fatherland’.⁴ Spy fiction, adds David Stafford, is a literature of ‘national passions and phobias’, for its genesis was ‘inextricably linked with the crisis of confidence in British power and security that obsessed the Edwardian age’. Early British spy fiction formed ‘propaganda for a conservative cause … designed not only to thrill and entertain but also to instruct and educate, delivering messages alerting their audience to dangers threatening the nation’.⁵ The spy novel, Christopher Andrew explains, was born in Edwardian Britain from ‘a new sense of imperial frailty’.⁶

The spy story indeed had a mythical quality. I.F. Clarke observed how early tales of spies and imaginary wars describe ‘a myth-world created out of animosities and anxieties’, and formed ‘popular epics for a period of universal literacy’.⁷ A number of writers have noted this parallel between folk myths and spy novels, but, despite their epic quality, spy stories are not in fact myths but urban legends, a recognized form of modern folk-narrative.⁸ Urban legends borrow elements from myth and from fairy-tale, but unlike those forms they tell of recent events and the actions of normal people. Spy stories indeed obey Jan Brunvand’s criteria for urban legends, for they are always related as true, ‘there is usually no geographical or generational gap between teller and event’, and in almost all cases they ‘gain credibility from specific details of time and place or from references to source authorities’. Again, whether or not we believe their details, both spy stories and urban legends serve an underlying need ‘to know about and to try to understand bizarre, frightening, and potentially dangerous or embarrassing events that may have happened’.⁹

Spies were employed in many fictional contexts. They were grafted on to Edwardian science fiction, as in L.J. Beeston’s story A Star Fell, and on to detective fiction – E.S Turner noting how often in the Union Jack Sexton Blake defeated enemy spies, or uncovered plans for the invasion of Britain.¹⁰ Dashing heroes such as Lieutenant Daring of the Royal Navy –strangely reminiscent of Commander Bond of the Royal Navy – could really show their mettle when pitted against enemy agents. In October 1912 the British and Colonial Film Company previewed its forthcoming film Lieut. Daring and the Plans of the ‘Mine Fields’, and got an excellent write-up in the trade magazine The Bioscope:

In this, the latest ‘Daring’ film, the Lieutenant has to deal with a brace of crafty foreign spies. He first meets them on Mr. and Mrs. Chas. Austin’s houseboat on the Thames, where they are posing as an artist and his model. Later, in his own home, they bind and gag him, after the plans of the Mine Fields have been copied on to the shoulders of the female spy. Daring is freed by his wonderful dog ‘Nero’, and then begins a thrilling chase across country … At Brooklands, Daring appeals to … Lieut. E.H. Hotchkiss for the loan of the latter’s monoplane … At Folkestone the young officer hires a motor-boat, and catches up and boards the Channel steamer in mid-ocean. Locating his quarry, he keeps them in sight until France is reached … ending with the arrest of the miscreants in the streets of Boulogne.¹¹

Yet alongside this analysis of the spy story as heroic myth there has recently developed a new critique, based on the influence of actual intelligence operations over the genre. Donald McCormick has commented on the ‘astonishingly long list of authors who have actually been involved at some time or other in intelligence work’.¹² David Stafford has confirmed that many famous spy writers ‘have been professional or amateur players in “the silent game” of intelligence’, and noted how ‘the lines between fact and fiction have often been blurred’.¹³ The idea is attractive, and the 1920s and 1930s may indeed have seen the increasing contribution of fact to fiction, but in these early years the flow was entirely the other way, for most British intelligence officers took the greater part of their ideas of secret service directly from fictional sources.

In April 1907, for instance, Major Ernest Swinton published the short story ‘An Eddy of War’, describing an imagined German invasion of Britain. As one character explains, it almost succeeded, for the Germans resident in Britain formed part of a worldwide conspiracy:

It’s all run by the Hunnish General Staff under the title of ‘Die Götterdämmerung Gesellschaft,’ or the Company of the Twilight of the Gods. In London the Gesellschaft has sub-branches in the ‘Allgemeine Panhunsche Kellnerverein’ – that’s the Universal Pan-Hunnish Waiters’ League – and the ‘Blutwurst Bund’, consisting of clerks chiefly.

These clerks and waiters were trained in sabotage, and assisted the invaders by cutting telegraph and telephone lines, and blowing up bridges and gasometers.¹⁴

Swinton’s paranoid fantasy was utter nonsense, but it nevertheless fired the imaginations of keen military officers. In May 1907 a Lieutenant in the Volunteer Artillery wrote to the press confirming that these dangers were real, for ‘I know at this moment the house in which is the headquarters of the organising staff of the German army, resident in a suburb of London’.¹⁵ In 1908 Lieutenant-Colonel James Edmonds, the newly-appointed head of M05, the War Office ‘Special Section’, confidently included organized sabotage in his secret analysis of the German danger. An invading army, he declared, would undoubtedly get help from resident German aliens:

They have made arrangements for cutting the submarine cables in case of war, and know where to effect all the railway demolitions they deem necessary to impede our mobilization and concentration, and they know all about our difficulties in case of mobilization … They have a German officers’ club in London with German servants, where military matters concerning England can be discussed with perfect security, and German hospitals where even in delirium no secrets could be revealed to British subjects.¹⁶

London’s German clubs were more likely full of lonely young men seeking comradeship, cheap food, and possible employment,¹⁷ but Edmonds always liked his fact well spiced with fiction. By the time he compiled this assessment he was already logging reports of suspicious foreigners and peculiar occurrences, and in 1909 obtained a crop of new sightings from the popular novelist William Le Queux. Le Queux’s postbag was bursting with letters following the publication of his latest novel Spies of the Kaiser, but Edmonds gaily disregarded their doubtful value as evidence. However, many of these stories had reached Le Queux through the Weekly News, which owned the serial rights to Spies of the Kaiser and was running it alongside a prize competition for readers’ letters describing how they had met a spy. As the specially appointed ‘Spy Editor’ explained helpfully, ‘readers may have discovered some of these spies at work, and may have had adventures with them, may have seen the photographs, charts, and plans they are preparing’. Le Queux forwarded the resulting fantasies to Edmonds, and he swallowed them whole.¹⁸

Edmonds was not the only military officer seduced by fiction, for Captain Vernon Kell, appointed as the first head of MI5 in 1909 on Edmonds’ recommendation, shared his mentor’s slippery grasp of reality. In Spies of the Kaiser Le Queux’s hero Ray Raymond had uncovered German plans for landing at Weybourne in north Norfolk, and on visiting the area had found German agents already at work. In 1914, determined not to be outdone and convinced that war was imminent, Captain Kell took his summer holiday on precisely this section of coast, in order to see ‘if there were any German activities going on’.¹⁹ Even during the war his attitude to secret service owed much to fiction. John Dancy, posted to the London headquarters of MI5 late in 1915, discovered that ‘Kell’s Boys’ were recruited from many different backgrounds:

But among them I could sense, if not the influence of counterespionage serials in the Boy’s Own Paper, at least the gay abandon of Dornford Yates and John Buchan. They hankered after disguises, after suspense and after danger. They had that urge to be placed on test and show their worth.²⁰

Kell was indeed addicted to romance and mystification. As his wife later admitted, he might list his hobbies in Who’s Who as ‘fishing and croquet’ but this was just a part of the great deception, for ‘croquet was a harmless bluff: he couldn’t play it at all’.²¹

The saga of Erskine Childers’ novel The Riddle of the Sands shows well the close relationship between fact and fiction. Childers’ thrilling tale of two British gentlemen who uncover a planned German invasion appeared in May 1903, and immediately fascinated both military and naval officers. The Director of Military Operations dispatched ‘a couple of experts’ to Germany to se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Fictions of History
• Secret Negotiations: The Spy Figure in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Fiction
• The Politics of Adventure in the Early British Spy Novel
• Decoding German Spies: British Spy Fiction, 1908–18
• English Spy Thrillers in the Age of Appeasement
• Ireland in Spy Fiction
• Our Man in Havana, Their Man in Madrid: Literary Invention in Espionage Fact and Fiction
• The Development of the Espionage Film
• Ethics and Spy Fiction
• Spy Fiction and Terrorism
• Why I Write Spy Fiction
• Critical Afterthoughts and Alternative Historico-Literary Theories