In 1959, Graham Greene and his brother, the journalist Hugh Greene, published an anthology of spy literature titled The Spy’s Bedside Book, an amalgam of fiction, reporting, and memoir that helped define the genre for decades to come. Aside from being wildly popular with readers and a useful guide to the burgeoning literature of espionage, the book was also believed to be revealing—German authorities reportedly secured 100 copies in order to scour the pages for tradecraft and secrets. The following essay has been commissioned by The Folio Society as the introduction for a new edition of the famous anthology, written by Stella Rimington, the first woman to serve as Director General of the British Security Service.
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Descartes once wrote, “Nothing so strange and so little credible can be imagined but that some philosopher has asserted it.” And so it is with spy writers and spy stories. They rank, with ghost stories and fishing and golfing tales, in a special class of literature in which the real and the imaginary can be mixed in any proportion, so long as both are present. The strangest spy yarn may be to some extent true—Graham Greene’s wholly disingenuous introduction to this anthology says as much: “Does Cicero’s visit to the German Embassy in Ankara seem more or less fictional than Hannay’s to the headquarters of the British Secret Service?” After all, the espionage world has attracted some of the oddest characters who ever got involved in serious matters. Take Captain Cumming, the first head of MI6. He wore a gold-rimmed monocle, wrote only in green ink, and it is said, possibly apocryphally, that after he lost a leg in an accident he used to get round the corridors by putting his wooden one on a child’s scooter and propelling himself along with the other. Visitors to MI6 are reported to have been intimidated by his habit of stabbing his wooden leg with his paper-knife in order to drive home the point of an argument. With such non-fictional material at hand, one may question the need for invention.
As we all know, spies themselves never sleep—MI6’s headquarters is the only public building in London where the union flag flies night and day—so the title of Graham and Hugh Greene’s charming little book should be not The Spy’s Bedside Book but The Bedside Book of Spies. For its intended purpose—to send non-spies to sleep—it is both effective and potentially very useful to spies. To get to sleep, a dose of spy stories is just what is needed, much better than counting sheep, since spies dip into and out of the real world just as you do when dozing off. You will fall asleep with The Spy’s Bedside Book before you can say “Top Secret” or “JIC.” Hopping from one short imaginative excitement to another wears you out, and the book will slip easily through your fingers to be stolen by the spy lurking under the bed. There you are—asleep already!
That is just as well, for the Bedside Book does provoke one question that could keep you awake. What really is a spy story? Is John Buchan’s “Greenmantle,” which supplies the anthology’s first tale, truly a spy story or is it merely a ripping good yarn, a pure adventure story about a gang of Scottish, South African and American swashbucklers who persuade themselves, and us, they are English patriots, prior to sloshing a beastly Prussian called Von Stumm and stealing his motor car? Aren’t the coded messages, the hidden journeys, the secret rendezvous and all the stuff about the jihad and the fire sweeping from the East to combust the dry leaves of European civilisation, merely what spies call “chickenfeed,” information intended to attract and puzzle the recipient? In fact, like Kipling’s Kim before it and so many spy stories after it, it was based in reality and has, as T. E. Lawrence observed, “more than a flavour of truth.” The same cannot be said of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, from which the Greenes include several excerpts. Even conceding that in common parlance the word “spy” includes not only the intelligence gatherer but also the action-oriented secret agent, Bond is no spy, though it is almost a heresy to say so. He is no more than a licensed killer with no mission but to destroy. But even by 1967, when the Bedside Book was first published, he had become so popular that no spy anthology could omit him.
Similarly, when is a spy story not a detective story? The longest piece in the Bedside Book, “The Case of the Dixon Torpedo” by Arthur Morrison, concerns a stolen design for a torpedo. Certainly, there is strategic advantage in keeping ahead of the enemy in weapons development, and a good deal of real Cold War spying was in just that field. But really this story is a variation on the classic detective theme of the “sealed room,” a puzzle where someone or something is in a room, which cannot be penetrated unobserved, and yet they disappear or get themselves killed, provoking observations like that of Sherlock Holmes: “How often, Watson, have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” A detective story classically involves a puzzle, something happens and the contract with the reader specifies that the questions ‘Whodunnit?’ and ‘Howdunnit?’ should be answered. A true spy story is not concerned with such matters. ‘Who’ is often given at the outset; there is not necessarily any puzzle, and if there is, the questions to be answered are more likely to be ‘What?’ and ‘Why?’ In this, a spy story resembles human life, being more concerned with situations and psychology.
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Illustrations by Nick Hardcastle.
The modern spy story originates in the disturbed state of European politics after the 1878 Congress of Berlin and up to the First World War. Spies themselves, of course, can contest the honour of being the world’s oldest profession, and they are certainly the second oldest. But they escaped celebrity status until they were outed by the storytellers. If we exclude the historical novel in the hands of Dumas & Co., nobody spotted their potential as a specialised arm of fiction until about 1900. Nothing, save only the Cold War, ever gave the genre such a boost as did, successively, Russian covetousness for India, and Kaiser William’s designs on England. The two most influential of all spy stories were published at the beginning of the twentieth century, and both were British—Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), and The Riddle of the Sands (1903), Erskine Childers’ story about preparations for a clandestine German invasion across the North Sea. Selling, reportedly, over three million copies, The Riddle of the Sands not only influenced public attitudes but also demonstrated the profitability of the new genre. The only comparable masterpiece of spy fiction before the Cold War and le Carré is Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), inspired by an older world of international conspiracy and terrorism, springing from anarchist and revolutionary movements. If you put together the twentieth-century forces of national rivalry and the nineteenth-century forces of revolutionary conspiracy, you have most of the springs of the “classical” spy story (and arguably of the modern profession of intelligence). From this archetype there emerged two separate traditions of spy story, which could be called the “romantic” and the “realistic.”
The “romantic” is represented here by William Le Queux, a prolific spy writer with eleven entries in the Bedside Book, based on several hundred novels and short stories, which test the furthest limits of credulity, embracing every villainy of which spies are capable and some of which no one could be. Le Queux was one of those not so uncommon people in whom reality and fiction, farce and melodrama, flow in a single stream. He was successively a diplomat, newspaper editor, aviation pioneer, explorer, early radio buff, spy and, in collusion with Field Marshal Lord Roberts, with whom he formed a sort of voluntary Secret Service Dept, defender of the realm.
Given these preoccupations, he could scarcely have avoided stumbling into spy-storytelling. A small selection of his titles, The Czar’s Spy: The Mystery of a Silent Love and The Tickencote Treasure: Being the Story of a Silent Man, a Sealed Script and a Singular Secret, conveys the flavour of his genius. He invented in 1903 the character of Duckworth Drew of the Secret Service, a “man held in fear by the diplomatic circle in Europe . . . upon [whom] rests the . . . most perilous task of obtaining the well guarded secrets of other nations and combating the machinations of England’s enemies.” Drew carried drugged cigars with a view to knocking out enemies of the state for long enough to enable him to read the contents of secret treaties lying on their desks. England’s enemies reciprocated. We read in the Bedside Book of “the renowned spy . . . Otto Krempelstein, Chief of the German Secret Service,” who would pop over the Channel to fox-hunt in the shires. Krempelstein blew up the Czar’s Privy Counsellor with a cigar incorporating an explosive missile, which presumably went up the poor man’s nose. He caused considerable pain to Duckworth Drew by inserting a poisoned pin into his handtowel, later trussing him upside down in a chair and laughing “in a sinister fashion,” while—a ticklish business—placing a powerful explosive in a lighted oil lamp on a nearby table. Fortunately Drew possessed survival powers surpassing those of Dick Barton.
No wonder the Bedside Book is dedicated “to the immortal memory of William Le Queux and John Buchan.” It was these two who put the glamour into the spy trade. It has been suggested that Duckworth Drew was Fleming’s original for James Bond, and thus the “romantic” tradition of the spy story, proceeding by way of swimming pools filled with barracudas and manservants wielding galvanised bowler hats, shed any connection with intelligence gathering and bubbled up into a Hollywood cloud-cuckoo-land. Surprisingly, British action-men with their fabulous motor cars, impeccable suits and devastating way with the ladies still predominate. The “romantic” spy story is a very British marque.
The “realistic” spy-tale tradition is less manifest in the Bedside Book than the “romantic,” possibly because the Greenes’ tongues were so firmly in their cheeks. Four main strands can be detected in the history of “real” spying—the military, the diplomatic, the police and the geopolitical.
Illustrations by Nick Hardcastle.
The military spy, generally attached to armies and spying on the enemy’s military and political arrangements, is personified by Wellington’s spy-master, later himself a field marshal. The tragic tale of Major André, a Swiss who spied for the British during the American War of Independence, and who allowed himself to be hanged rather than betray his contacts, represents this strand in the Bedside Book. On the whole, though, military spies have contributed remarkably little to the history of the spy tale.
The diplomatic or political spy or agent, often French or Austrian in origin, was brought into spy literature by Dumas and Baroness Orczy, among others. The Countess de Winter is one of the first fictional appearances of a female agent:
‘She goes into England,’ said Athos.
‘With what view?’
‘With the view of assassinating or causing to be assassinated the Duke of Buckingham’ . . .
‘And do you have that letter of the Cardinal?’ said d’Artagnan.
‘Here it is,’ said Athos, and he took the invaluable paper from the pocket of his uniform.
D’Artagnan unfolded it with one hand, whose trembling he did not even attempt to conceal, and read:‘It is by my order and for the good of the State that the bearer of this has done what he has done— richelieu.’
The quite unromantic police spy flourished in most European capitals, as no doubt he has in most capitals since the beginning of time. Their modern background was counter-revolutionary politics. They are the dirty-raincoat brigade at best and the Gestapo or the Stasi at worst. Fouché, Napoleon’s Chief of Police, was, if not precisely their prototype, one of their most efficient modern organisers.
Finally, there is the geopolitical spy, nourished on the British side in the struggle to keep the Russians away from the Indian north-west frontier—the world of Kim. This strand in spying, with its long-term strategic focus, its professionalism, its ideological undertones and its large-scale organisation, has gradually, through the Cold War and modern terrorism, absorbed all the others.
Spies and clandestine agents did indeed do some of the things described by Le Queux and Buchan, and their various exploits fed both the “romantic” and the “realistic” tradition of the spy story. German spies really did flit among our forts and naval installations before the First World War, and were the material on which MI5, founded in 1909, cut its teeth. The reminiscences of Steinhauer in The Kaiser’s Master Spy are as unintentionally hilarious as anything written by Le Queux. The quality of his arrangements can be gathered in the following passage:
‘One day while down at Chatham having a look at things in general and, as I imagined, effectively disguised with a false beard, who should I run across but William Le Queux, who had more than a nodding acquaintance with most of the spies in Europe . . .’
For the fusion of fiction and reality, that takes some beating! Richard Hannay’s original, Tiny (later Field Marshal) Ironside, really did drive into German South-West Africa in search of information disguised as a native wagoner. Baden-Powell, revealed in the Bedside Book capering round Balkan forts brandishing a butterfly net, really did organise boy scouts to gather information at Mafeking, and Kim’s mentor, the Colonel, was a real and known personality. Nothing in the Bedside Book is funnier than Compton Mackenzie’s real-life British agent of Greek nationality who shut himself for two days in a lavatory cubicle – and the excuses he made on his emergence for not carrying out his mission. And nothing is more chilling than the ogpu agent Petrov’s account of the assassination of a non-co-operating mandarin in 1935, or L. C. Moyzisch’s description of his interview in 1943 with the valet of the British Ambassador in Ankara:
‘Before I tell you what it is I ask your word that whether you accept it or not you won’t ever mention it to anyone except your chief. Any indiscretion on your part would make your life as worthless as mine . . . You’d like to know who I am? I’m the British Ambassador’s valet.’
Illustrations by Nick Hardcastle.
The “realistic” spy tale takes some of the features of the genuine spy world and exaggerates or exploits them. It portrays a universe in which certain human characteristics like friendliness and companionship are absent and the qualities of loneliness and ambiguity of role and motive are emphasised; a world in which both friend and foe are outsiders, belonging to a professional community with its own conventions. The masters of the “realistic” school—Conrad, Greene and le Carré—are all writers with a much larger range than the spy story, though le Carré has chosen to specialise in the genre. All use the spy story to hold a dark mirror to a wider world, and all of them have a direct experience of it to draw on. Greene’s attitude to the spy world, as amply demonstrated in the Bedside Book is subversive and ironic. He has a strong sense of the absurdity of being two persons, known and unknown. His first go at what, long afterwards, became Our Man in Havana was a film script (never played, but published by Penguin alongside The Tenth Man) in which a British spy who is the Singer sewing-machine representative in a Baltic State deceives his spy-masters by inventing all his reports and claiming expenses for fictitious agents. He is gradually driven to involve in his affairs successively his estranged wife, the local police chief and the German embassy and its attached thugs, while being continually thwarted by a withered spinster who manages his false accounts and supplies his disguises. He is detected and recalled to London, but not before the Germans, attempting to foist false military plans on the British, accidentally hand him the Nazi plan for the invasion of Poland. In London, the official effort to cover up his deceptions causes this, his last and only discovery, to be overlooked. It seems a pity that this wonderfully amoral tale did not see the light of day rather than the funny but untidy little novel with the same title.
Greene the spy writer has his dark and sad moments, revealed in The Third Man and The Human Factor, a tale which compounds treachery and error to conclude with the defection of a double-agent to Moscow – possibly a reference to Philby, Greene’s wartime boss in MI6. But he never reaches to the pessimism and calculated confusion of le Carré, nor to the detached awfulness of Conrad’s Verloc, a paid Russian agent who imperturbably drives his mentally disabled nephew to blow himself up in order to satisfy his diplomatic masters that “an event” has at last taken place. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, also a work of the “realistic” school and based on the author’s own career in espionage, skates through most of the shades and possibilities exploited by the three masters.
Espionage has attracted many authors. An earlier period of shifting loyalties provided us with Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe—both agents; Shakespeare’s father, too, worked for the Elizabethan spy machine, as, it has been suggested (among other things), did Shakespeare himself. As Somerset Maugham says in Ashenden, a writer has passports—a public identity and a reason for being almost anywhere—very useful to a spy. Writing itself involves creating identities: one could regard it as practising a certain kind of deception. The true spy story resembles real life as we all actually know it—a place where it is rarely quite clear what is happening and what one ought to do. The Spy’s Bedside Book is a genial way of reminding us about all that, and I register only one complaint. After everything we have done for spying, there is, apart from the obligatory reference to Mata Hari, hardly anything in this book about women!
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From Stella Rimington’s introduction to The Spy’s Bedside Book (The Folio Society, 2018), edited by Graham and Hugh Greene. Illustrations by Nick Hardcastle.
