British Spy Fiction: Genre, History and Popular Culture

The British have made a profound contribution to espionage fiction, the popular genre proving a convenient vehicle for presenting narratives of adventure and models of national heroism, as well as commentaries on class, corruption, betrayal, and decline. Authors such as Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré have found large international audiences for their espionage stories, and it has been commonly believed that the thriller more generally claims the largest share of the popular readership. Similarly, the secret agent on screen has been a vital genre, especially since the phenomenal success of James Bond in the cinema beginning in the 1960s. The research project will particularly address the underrepresented areas of recent British spy literature and of the `spyscreen`, the re-visioning of spy narratives in film and television. It will seek to assess new writing since the time of Glasnost and the end of the Cold War, and its realignment to new security conditions and threats. A particular emphasis of the research will be on the treatment of espionage and the figure of the secret agent on screen, especially in the important period since 1960, which saw the translation of such leading novelists as Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and John Le Carré to both cinema and television. The research will therefore conform and contribute to the established interest in genre in cinema and television which has informed British screen studies in recent times, and extend critical work on literary spy fiction in Britain last seriously attempted in the 1980s. The study will necessitate archival work in the United Kingdom, principally at the British Film Institute London and the Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, to assess primary literature in the form of film and television reviews and criticism, cinema trade periodicals, newspapers and magazines, and to view film and television dramas. The methodology to be used in the research project is one widely adopted in the scholarly treatment of British film and television, an empirically-grounded research project informed by the three broad characteristics as identified in the New Film History (Chapman, Harper and Glancy, 2007): a methodological sophistication which is sensitive to the production and reception contexts of cinema and television as well as the representational potential of the screen; an acknowledgement of the central importance of primary sources, both filmic and non-filmic; and the appreciation of film and television dramas as cultural artefacts with their own specific signifying practices. The approach will allow for the historical reconstruction of contexts of production and reception as well as close interpretative analysis of spy films and dramas in British cinema and television. The research project on British Spy Fiction will be conducted within, and supported by, the established infrastructure of academic research into British culture studies at the Institute for English and American Studies, Universitaet Klagenfurt.

While the British contribution to the cultural representation of espionage is widely recognized, and James Bond has attracted substantial popular and critical attention and continues to fascinate a world audience, there has been a neglect of the significant re-visioning of other spy stories on British screens. Similarly, recent trends in espionage literature, which have adapted to new conditions following the end of the Cold War and the emergence of new threats often grouped in the form of global terror, have received limited scholarly interest, especially as such stories have been articulated on screen.The project addresses such omissions through offering a more complete and thoroughgoing engagement with British espionage, history, literature and culture. The first phase of the research compiled a detailed survey of British Spy Fiction addressing the period from the birth of the modern spy story in the late Victorian era through to the pressing issues of national security and terror in the twenty-first century. This detailed work has been presented in the Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction, Winner, RUSA Outstanding References Award (2017). The Dictionary is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of the important popular genre of the spy story, to address British espionage fiction across its literary, cinematic and televisual forms, and to consider the stories, films and television dramas in their historical contexts.The second phase of the research undertook a close historical and critical examination of the spy genre on British screens since 1960, a key period in the development of the modern espionage story which was transforming under the influence of the popular screen exploits of James Bond and the new serious writing of John le Carré and Len Deighton. The project examined in turn: the development of the screen spy thriller under the influence of James Bond in the period; the screen adaptations of the new-style stories of le Carré, Deighton and their imitators; nostalgic forms of screen adaptations of classic writers such as Erskine Childers, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, John Buchan and Geoffrey Household; screen treatments of actual espionage cases and scandals, especially the dramatizations of the controversial traitors the Cambridge Spies, Guy Burgess Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby and Donald Maclean; the cycle of Secret State thrillers in the 1980s which criticized excessive government secrecy and the close links between the Security Service and reactionary right-wing groups; and finally new fictions of espionage which followed the drastic changes brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the emergence of global terror as the main national security concern.The project has brought new attention to espionage on screen in Britain. It has introduced fresh consideration of the influence of James Bond on the wider spy story, provided a more comprehensive historical and contextual framework for understanding the spy drama in Britain, and, in many examples, unearthed previously ignored films and television dramas. This has resulted in a more inclusive and far-reaching reflection on the British experience of espionage and its cultural representations. All future examinations of British spy fiction will have to take account of the present work, its findings and its assessments.