The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed at the time to presage the death of spy fiction as a genre. The U.S. Congress toyed with the idea of disbanding the CIA and (even worse to some observers) the New York Times abandoned its long-running column that reviewed spy fiction.
While spy novelists who had established audiences before the Soviet collapse continued to be published, it became much more difficult for budding purveyors of spy fiction to break into their ranks. Among the handful who did manage the feat were American novelists Gayle Lynds and Daniel Silva, and British novelists Charles Cumming and Henry Porter:
(Folks who collect bibliomysteries [see our posts of 27-28 September 2009] might want to make an exception for Lynds' latest spy novel, Book of Spies, to be published at the end of March 2010. In addition to introducing a new spy character, the book (the first in a series) also will introduce a character who is a rare books curator, both of them seeking Ivan the Terrible's "lost" Library of Gold.)
Spy fiction has always required an enemy, preferably one with a global reach, and the nastier that enemy the better. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, nasty enemies with a global reach were harder to come by...until 11 September 2001.
The events of that terrible day quickly aroused a complacent public into a new appreciation of just how interconnected everyone's lives had become, and a new appreciation also for the role of accurate intelligence about matters which concern us.
Thus it is that editors once again are seeking out authors proficient in matters of espionage.
And authors are responding. Because many of these authors are themselves former intelligence operatives, their books often are short on glam and glitz, focused instead on tradecraft realistically depicted. Among the more notable such authors are Dame Stella Rimington, former Director General of MI5 (British internal security) and former British cryptographer Alan Stripp:
One suspects that spies will be needed yet a while longer....
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