In 1939 the Scottish-American author Helen MacInnes launched an extraordinarily successful 45-year career as the Queen of Spy Writers:
Trained as a librarian, and fluent in both French and German, MacInnes attributed the immense popularity of her books to the prodigious research she undertook before writing each one. (So accurate was her third book, Assignment in Brittany [1942], that it was required reading for Allied agents working with the French Resistance. Assignment, incidentally, is one of only four MacInnes novels ever to have been turned into films. This, despite the fact that her 21 novels have been translated into some two dozen languages and have sold well over 25 million copies.)
At about the same time as MacInnes' debut (1940), Manning Coles published the first of the extremely popular Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon novels:
Manning Coles was the pseudonym of two British authors, Adelaide Manning and Cyril Cole. Manning was born with a birth defect that left her with a deformed ankle, rather limiting her opportunities for employment. Coles, eight years Manning's junior and dyslexic as a youngster, had been Great Britain's youngest intelligence officer during World War I. Their collaboration arose from the fortuitous circumstance of Adelaide renting an apartment owned by Cyril's father, from whence Adelaide and Cyril became neighbors and friends.
As Tom & Enid Schantz point out in a recent article, [i]ts realistic portrayal of the real world of espionage is what makes Drink to Yesterday one of the most important books in the development of the spy novel, a fact that was immediately recognized not only by the critics but by the general reading population. Though the duo wrote several similar novels over the course of their almost-two-decades collaboration, many of which enjoyed considerable popularity, their post-World War II books are dismissed by most modern critics as "formulaic."
It was the "war" after World War II, the so-called Cold War, that gave rise to spy fiction's golden age. The era from roughly 1945-1991 saw the rise of a number of authors who devoted their often considerable talents to tales of espionage. Some of the more notable authors publishing in the genre during this period (several of whom continue to publish) were Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy:
Many of these modern-day tales of espionage were a bit cynical as to the benefits of the world's second oldest profession. Nor were all such tales penned only by writers in the West. The Soviet author Julian Semyonov, for example, covered a wide historical swath of Soviet intelligence history in his spy fiction:
Originally an academic with a background in Persian history and politics, Semyonov gave up the cloistered halls of academia to pen a prodigious number of novels and short stories. He is best known for his character Otto von Stirlitz, the code name for Soviet intelligence agent Maksim Isaev. So popular is this character in Soviet literature that Stirlitz jokes constitute a virtual sub-genre of their own. The most popular book in the Stirlitz series, Seventeen Moments of Spring, noticeably depletes Soviet (now Russian) streets whenever a filmed version appears on television (usually on or around Victory Day).
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, much of the raison d'être for modern spy fiction (on both sides of the former Iron Curtain) collapsed with it....
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