One of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite writers, John Buchan, was the author of some 30 novels and seven collections of short stories, and was probably the most popular spy novelist during the period of World War I. Among the best known of his works are the novels about spy-catcher Richard Hannay, as featured in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916):
When he wasn't busy writing spy novels, Buchan also served a brief stint as Great Britain's Director of Intelligence, as a director of the news agency Reuters, and--after moving to Canada (where he was created the first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield)--as Canada's 15th Governor General (1935-1940). Buchan himself is the subject of a number of reminiscences and biographies:
At about the same time that Buchan was producing his first Hannay novels, author Gaston Leroux was publishing Rouletabille chez Krupp (1917), one of the earliest French spy novels, which featured his now famous character Joseph Rouletabille. This dashing young journalist with a bullet-shaped head (hence his name) becomes a French secret agent who infiltrates the Krupp armament factories and saves Paris from being destroyed by a German missile. The character was featured in a number of Leroux's novels, and has appeared in several films, TV series and comic books:
Leroux was not a one-character author. He is equally well-known for his other major series character, Cheri-Bibi, and is perhaps best known outside Europe for his immortal tale of unrequited love, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera, 1910). (Could there be a new direction in book collecting here...novels about spies who love operas...?)
The interwar period (1918-1939) saw a number of spy novels penned by retired intelligence officers. Among the more notable of these authors were W. Somerset Maugham and Eric Ambler:
Though Maugham would arguably have the greater impact on literature in general (by virtue of works like Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and Rain), Ambler would have far greater impact on spy fiction as a genre. As Thomas Jones observes in a recent article,
[w]ith the six novels he wrote in the years leading up to the second world war - five of which have just been reissued by Penguin Modern Classics - Eric Ambler revitalised the British thriller, rescuing the genre from the jingoistic clutches of third-rate imitators of John Buchan, and recasting it in a more realist, nuanced and leftishly intelligent - not to mention exciting - mould.
Among other twists on the traditional spy story, Ambler depicted enemy agents as positive and heroic:
While the eve of yet another global conflagration would see the debut of two of spy fiction's most successful authors, it was the "war" after the war that would give rise to the golden age of spy fiction....
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