[N]ational panic makes bad policy and false prisoners.
For over a decade (1894-1906) towards the close of the 19th century, newspaper readers around the world were treated to lurid tales of real-life espionage gone seriously awry...L'affaire Dreyfus:
When a French Army officer was charged with treason in 1894, based on evidence which eventually was revealed to have been manufactured, his resulting false imprisonment and eventual exoneration created a public appetite for tales of espionage that probably has not been surpassed since.
Even before this shameful episode had completely played itself out on the world stage, three classic novels of espionage had been penned: Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), Erskine Childers' Riddle of the Sands (1903) and Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905):
First published serially in McClure's Magazine from December 1900-October 1901, Kim's focus was The Great Game, the political jostling over Central Asia that so consumed Great Britain and Russia in the 19th century:
Although considered by many critics to be the Nobel Laureate's finest work, Kim leaves many modern audiences less than enthused, the many spies in this tale (Colonel Creighton, Lurgan Sahib, Hurree Chunder Mookherjee) notwithstanding. Kipling's obvious relish for British imperialism leaves many modern readers questioning just how game-like this jostling must have appeared to the many tens of thousands who lost their homes, their fortunes and/or their lives to such geopolitical wrangling. (Kim nonetheless has exerted considerable influence on the development of certain genres, most notably science fiction, where conflicts between civilizations often are a major thematic element.)
A tale of two young men accidentally stumbling upon a German plan to invade Great Britain by sea, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service actually had the salutary effect of causing the British Admiralty to re-assess Great Britain's vulnerability to sea-based invasion (eventually leading the Admiralty to establish additional naval bases along Great Britain's northern coast). In one of those ironies so beloved by historians, Childers later became an ardent Irish nationalist and was executed by authorities of the Irish Free State during the Irish Civil War.
Baroness Orczy (Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála "Emmuska" Orczy de Orczi) launched, with her novel about an English aristocrat (Sir Percy Blakeney) who rescues French aristocrats from the French Revolution, a publishing sensation that eventually encompassed over a dozen sequels (she published the last sequel only seven years before her death in 1947):
We seek him here, we seek him there,Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven? - Is he in hell? That damned, elusive Pimpernel?
But the game was afoot elsewhere as well....
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