When we think of espionage adventures, it’s easy to imagine world-consuming conspiracies, a ticking clock, and a general sense of globe-trotting. But, even James Bond spends the eternity of the novel The Spy Who Loved Me in a small motel in the Adirondack Mountains. The point?
Not all spy missions have to take place in multiple locations or involve people with full passports, forged or otherwise.
In fact, some of the best spy books have a lot in common with the best detective novels; a small-town setting that inherently makes the action and intrigue more human. For fans of mysteries and thrillers, the small-town murder mystery is older than perhaps the genre of murder mysteries themselves. But what happens when you have a small town with spies? These five novels prove that the genre of espionage thrillers can feel big when it gets small.
Who Could That Be at This Hour? (2012) by Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket
While the machinations of the Baudelaire orphans are the more famous young-reader-oriented books from Daniel Handler, the Lemony Snicket series called All the Wrong Questions remains slightly underrated within his larger metafictional oeuvre. Written from the point-of-view of Lemony Snicket as a young man, the entire thrust of Who Could That Be at This Hour is that of an espionage story in a strange little town called Stain’d-by-the-Sea.
In this book, Lemony Snicket’s organization is so secret that it cannot even be named. Hilariously, he’s a spy in training, nobody calls him or his mentor a spy, and he doesn’t even know his mentor’s full name, S. Theodora Markson. The primary mission in this book, and its three sequels, revolves around finding a codenamed villain named Hangfire and retrieving a mysterious statue called the Bombinating Beast. Although technically a YA-ish book series, Handler’s prose is steeped in espionage stories and motifs. Nearly everyone Lemony Snicket meets could be a double agent, including the beguiling Ellington Feint, surely, the spy who Snicket loves. But the setting here is utterly fascinating; Stain’d-by-the-Sea used to be a town closer to the ocean, in which octopi produced copious amounts of ink. But now, the water has dried up and the ink trade isn’t what it used to be. And, it’s the haunting quality of this town that makes Snicket’s spy story sing.
End Game (2017) by David Baldacci
Set in Grand, Colorado, End Game, is one of several books in David Baldacci’s compelling Will Robie series. In this page-turner, Robie and Jessica Reel are sent to track down…their boss. Like that disembodied voice on the tape in Mission: Impossible, Robie and Reel had always worked with a handler named “Blue Man,” who, in this book, goes missing in the town of Grand. In a way, End Game is the perfect example of a modern thriller that values spy tactics as much as fishing trips.
The Human Factor (1978) by Graham Greene
One of the masters of various types of novels, Greene’s The Human Factor, focuses on a former MI6 spymaster named Maurice Castle. This book is primarily grounded in a suburban town in South Africa, where he is trying to retire. Like many books focused on aging spies, much of what is happening here is connected to what has occurred before the story; the motivations that led Castle to this point.
While we learn about Castle’s past, and whether or not an intelligence leak is coming from him or the people he knows, the novel becomes about the nature of loyalty and whether or not Castle truly thinks his former MI6 colleagues are doing the right thing, in the past, or in the present.
Silverview (2021) by John le Carré
Published posthumously after le Carré’s passing in 2020, Silverview is, in many ways, a microcosm of what great John le Carré spy novels are like: From The Spy Who Came in From the Cold to this book, one of le Carré’s best tricks is to make characters seem either bored or utterly nuts when really, those types of characters are the most powerful people. The title of this novel refers to a specific area, “Silverview,” which, as le Carré tells us in Chapter 2, “a small seaside town on the outer shores of East Anglia.”
While the novel has different points-of-view characters, including the on-the-move spymaster “Proctor,” the actual spy story is centered on the seaside town. When a man named Julian tries to open up a bookshop and leave his life in the city behind, a strange, older man named Edward Avon starts asking bizarre questions. Like many of le Carré’s best, what makes Silverview such a great read is the fact that the reader knows that some of the spies have all the puzzle pieces, even if we don’t.
The Spy Coast (2023) by Tess Gerritsen
The most recent smash-hit small-town spy book is perhaps the best so far in this quiet subgenre. Retired spy “Maggie Bird,” is living a fairly secluded life in a snowy town in Purity, Maine, until an operative tries to pull her back into the game after sixteen years. Soon, we learn that Maggie isn’t the only retired spy in this town, she regularly hangs out with others who have forged a new life for themselves, and are known as “the Martini Club.”
Purity, Maine might not be a real small town in the Pine Tree State, but Gerritsen makes it feel as real, if not more real, than many of Stephen King’s faux-Maine locations like Castle Rock or Salem’s Lot. From the way the population sees itself, to local police chief, Jo Thibodeau, trying to deal with meddling spies in her town, all the elements of The Spy Coast mix together into a riveting cocktail. But, what makes this book so grounded, is that within that cocktail, Gerritsen is always reminding us of what kind of booze the local bars and stores have, and exactly how much it costs. The life of a spy is sometimes thought of as glamorous, but The Spy Coast makes it seem not only real but affordable, too.
