Spies turned novelists
- John Fullerton
- 3 days ago
- 11 min read
I’m not sure this was such a good idea after all!
I’d no notion that there were so many people in the intelligence trade who took up writing novels until I started to look. My list, which is long, is by no means comprehensive. It concentrates on the British and the Americans, with only a couple of spies-turned-authors from other cultures whose books have been translated into English.
What of the Spanish, the Japanese, Chinese, French, the Germans?
I’ll try to find out at some point.
In the meantime, I should explain I’ve put an asterix next to the names of the authors whose work I especially admire. Maybe I’m wrong, but I divide spy thrillers into two classes. The first are those that have had a lasting impact. Even if I don’t happen to remember the details, I remember the atmosphere, the tone, the sense of threat and excitement, the characters. The second consists of those whose books I forget almost as soon as I reach the last page. Yes, they were fun, entertaining, but I’ve forgotten them within hours, certainly days. They’re not keepers.
Do let me have your comments, though. I’d seriously like to know what you think.
Here’s my list:
Ted Allbeury
A Special Operations Executive officer in World War Two, he rose to the rank of colonel. He’s believed to be the only SOE operative to have parachuted into Nazi Germany during WW2. Allbeury published his first novel, A Choice of Enemies, at the age of fifty-six (there’s hope for us all!). His books explore the complexities of war and human nature on both sides.
Jack Beaumont*
One of my favourite spy novelists. Beaumont is a pseudonym for a former French Air Force fighter pilot, special forces flyer, and finally a DGSE intelligence officer who used fake identities on his foreign missions. His two books have a distinct toughness and authenticity about them, without the posturing of some very English, very middle class and verbose spy novelists.
Gavin Black
Pseudonym of Scottish author Oswald Wynd, best known for The Ginger Tree, adapted for a BBC series. He wrote a couple of dozen books, with around half that number being thrillers under the name of Gavin Black. Wynd was captured and imprisoned by the Japanese during World War Two but survived to return home to Scotland.
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir
A Scottish novelist, historian, British Army officer, a Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, as well as the author of spy thrillers. Buchan’s most famous espionage caper is The Thirty-Nine Steps, a classic featuring the character Richard Hannay.
Erskine Childers
Best known for his classic spy thriller Riddle of the Sands. Initially an ardent supporter of Empire, he volunteered to fight with the British during the Boer War. He held the rank of major in military intelligence during World War One, running spies along the Turkish coast (he was a keen sailor, too), but became disenchanted with imperialism and took up the revolutionary cause of Irish independence. He was executed by firing squad in 1922, ostensibly for possession of a small-calibre pistol.
Matthew Dunn
A British spy novelist and former Secret Intelligence Service officer, he holds a Phd in international relations. His spy career is said to have included spells with the Special Air Service Regiment, the SIS special operations ‘Increment’ unit as well as the Special Boat Service. He has written 14 novels, the first of which was Spycatcher.
Ian Fleming
Author of the famous, outstandingly successful James Bond novels, Fleming worked for Britain's Naval Intelligence during WW2. He was involved in planning and supervising two intelligence units, 30 Assault Unit and T-Force, though it seems he himself was not involved in operations and did not experience combat, a perceived lack that may have driven much of his spy fiction. Some might say he was a glorified Whitehall messenger, a socialite with a wealthy family background along with a taste for womanising and dry martinis. Others might think it unkind, for he came up with several creative ideas for special operations. He worked for Reuters before the war, thanks to his mother’s lobbying.
Link: https://ianfleming.com/
Frederick Forsyth
One of Britain’s most successful spy thriller writers. He told the Crime Writers Association in an interview: ‘Before my breakthrough novel, Day of the Jackal, written in 1970, I was variously a pilot in the RAF, a journalist in the UK and a foreign correspondent for Reuter, BBC and freelance. I believe I have visited some 70 countries but am now quite content to be an old codger outside Beaconsfield.’ His work frequently appeared on best-sellers lists, and more than a dozen titles were adapted to film. By 2006, he had sold more than 70 million books in more than 30 languages. He subsequently revealed that he’d worked for The Secret Intelligence Service as an unpaid agent for some 20 years. Like Buchan, he was conservative in his political views.
John Fullerton
A newspaperman and Reuters journalist, Fullerton worked as a ‘contract labourer’ for SIS during the Cold War in the form of a head agent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, following the Soviet Union’s invasion of the latter. His first novel, The Monkey House, set in the Bosnian war, was well received in Europe, though it failed to sell in the United States, possibly because potential readers there couldn’t find Sarajevo on the map. All told, he’s so far written 14 books, lived or worked in 40 countries and covered a dozen wars. His spy novels, based on war zones he’s known, can be found below.
Link: johnfullerton.org
Alan Judd
A pseudonym used by Alan Petty, a former soldier, diplomat, and writer. Several of his 17 novels draw on his military background, and they include several spy thrillers. He’s often described simply as a diplomat, but my feeling there’s more to this author, which is why he’s here. My favourite was his first, Breed of Heroes, about a young army officer on his first tour of duty in Northern Ireland.
Alma Katsu*
An ex-CIA analyst, Katsu is in my opinion one of the very best of the spies-turned novelists with her Red Widow and Red London. A skilful writer, her plots are satisfyingly unexpected, and her characters don’t seem to need guns, knives or bombs to provide intense tension, excitement and high stakes. She calls this ‘the logical marriage of her love of storytelling with her 30+ year career in intelligence.’ She’s up there among the greats with Len Deighton and Eric Ambler in my view.
Graham Greene*
A leading literary figure in 20th century Britain, Greene used his spy novels to probe the moral and intellectual ambiguities of his time, wrestling with his Roman Catholic faith and questioning conventional views of what patriotism means. Nothing was taken for granted, politically or in the personal lives of his characters. His novel The Quiet American was a masterpiece in predicting the nature of American intervention in Vietnam, the collapse of French colonial rule and the attraction of Communist resistance. However, he saw his espionage novels as mere ‘entertainments’. False modesty, perhaps?
In 1941, he was recruited into SIS by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the Service. He was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War. The Soviet spy Kim Philby was his boss and his friend. He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize several times. In 67 years of writing, he produced plays, short stories and more than 25 novels. The Power and the Glory won the Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize. Several of his books have been filmed.
William Haggard
Haggard was the pseudonym of Richard Clayton, a onetime military intelligence officer with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He produced 33 novels, 25 of which featured Colonel Charles Russell of the (fictional) British Security Executive. Haggard emerged during the 1960s in the shadow cast by Ian Fleming, but was he was arguably a better writer without the mysogeny, snobbery and sensationalism of the Bond novels.
Haggard was middle-aged when he started producing novels, and this gave him a mature voice, with strongly held opinions about the British authorities. As an article in the Independent newspaper put it, he was drawn to characters who spent their lives manoeuvring around the corridors of power, while readers preferred Bond in a casino with a Martini and a Walther PPK.
Geoffrey Household*
A spy novelist I've admired since my school days. His most famous book, Rogue Male, was first published in 1939. It’s still in print.
During WW2 the pipe-smoking and cat-loving Household worked in Field Security in Persia, at the British Military Mission in Bucharest and Security Intelligence in the Middle East. After the War he became a full-time author, producing 37 novels and numerous books of short stories as well as children's books. His last novel, Face to the Sun, was published in 1988, the year of his death.
John le Carre*
Pseudonym for the outstandingly successful spy novelist David Cornwell, who had the rare distinction of working for Britain’s Intelligence Corps, the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service in succession. At university he was a snitch; he informed on fellow students — left-wingers, in particular — for the Security Service. He rightly made his name with his third novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which exhibited all the brutality of betrayal and duplicity of Cold War espionage. It was written with a hard, chilly bluntness which I don’t think he ever surpassed in his many later spy novels, although its successor, the almost forgotten The Looking Glass War, came close. Among England’s chattering classes, and with the help of his publishers, film producers and huge sales worldwide, he’s achieved a kind of literary sainthood post mortem.
Helen Macinnes*
Born in 1907 in Glasgow, Macinnes wrote 21 espionage thrillers, four of which were adapted as films. Her early books were set during the Second World War. She was married to an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service, and while I have no evidence she herself was a spy, they worked closely together and travelled extensively in Germany before the outbreak of war, which must have helped her at the very least to acquire both ideas and background. In her later books, MacInnes shifted to the Cold War. The Venetian Affair, for example, published in 1963 and set in Paris and Venice, involves Soviet agents and sleeper cells, alludes to events unfolding in Algeria and Vietnam, and contains a conspiracy to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. She continued to produce about one book every two years until her final novel, Ride a Pale Horse (1984).
Compton Mackenzie*
Born in England, Sir Edward Compton Mackenzie was nevertheless a Scot (he didn’t sound like one, apparently) who co-founded the Scottish National Party and was a lifelong supporter of Scottish independence. He published nearly 100 books of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir. Best known for Whisky Galore and Monarch of the Glen, he wrote three spy novels, Extremes Meet, The Three Encounters and the satirical Water on the Brain. During World War One he established counter-intelligence networks in Athens, apparently with the rank of captain in the Royal Marines. He was subsequently prosecuted and fined for violating the Official Secrets Act after allegedly quoting from secret documents in his memoir Greek Memories.
Jason Matthews*
Prior to becoming a novelist, Matthews spent 33 years working for the CIA in Europe, Asia and Caribbean as a case officer, recruiting and running foreign agents in ‘denied area’ operations ie. in locations under heavy surveillance. Unusually, his wife worked in the field with him as a team. In 2014, his first novel, Red Sparrow, won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American author. Writer and critic Art Taylor wrote in the Washington Post that ‘isn't just a fast-paced thriller—it's a first-rate novel, as noteworthy for its superior style as for its gripping depiction of a secretive world.’
William Somerset Maugham*
Born at the British Embassy in Paris and orphaned at the age of ten, Somerset Maugham faced considerable difficulties as a child, and these formed the basis of his masterpiece, Of Human Bondage (1915). Too old to fight in WW1, he volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver, but it was through his wife Syrie Wellcome that he was offered a job in Geneva with the Secret Service Bureau, now known as the Secret Intelligence Service, coordinating British agents in Germany. His experiences as a spy were reflected in his Ashenden stories. In all, he wrote 32 plays, 20 novels and 21 collections of short stories and was one of the commercially most successful and prolific British writers of the 20th century.
Charles McCarry
An American novelist of spy fiction, McCarry started his writing career in the US Army for Stars and Stripes with the rank of sergeant. He joined the CIA in 1958, and worked undercover around the world over nine years. He wrote 11 novels in the Paul Christopher series, Christopher being a clandestine operative for ‘the Outfit’, a fictional version of the CIA. McCarry was described as "the dean of American spy writers” by the Wall Street Journal and the "poet laureate of the CIA" by The New Republic magazine. He produced four non-Christopher novels and nine works of non-fiction as well as short stories.
David McCloskey
This former CIA staffer’s website has this to say: ‘David McCloskey is the Sunday Times-bestselling author of The Seventh Floor, Moscow X, and Damascus Station. He is co-host of the podcast “The Rest is Classified.”
‘…While at the CIA, he wrote regularly for the President’s Daily Brief, delivered classified testimony to Congressional oversight committees, and briefed senior White House officials, Ambassadors, military officials, and Arab royalty. He worked in CIA field stations across the Middle East throughout the Arab Spring and conducted a rotation in the Counterterrorism Center focused on the jihad in Syria and Iraq…
Stella Rimington
Dame Stella Rimington was Director General of the Security Service, popularly known as MI5, a position she held from 1992 to 1996. She was the first female DG of the Service, and the first DG whose name was publicised on appointment. In 1993, Rimington became the first DG to pose openly for cameras at the launch of a brochure outlining the organisation's activities. Following her retirement, she was critical of what she believed was the government’s over-reaction to the 9/11 attacks, pointing out that an authoritarian crackdown on civil right was what the terrorists would have wanted. She launched a second career as a writer, producing 12 spy novels with the help of author Luke Jennings.
Dennis Wheatley
Wheatley was an English writer whose prolific output of thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world's best-selling authors from the 1930s through to the 1960s. At one stage he was selling a million copies a year. He served as a 2nd lieutenant of artillery in WW1, but was invalided out after being gassed in a chlorine attack. During WW2 he was a member of the London Controlling Station, involved in planning secret strategic deception.
He wrote mainly adventure and espionage novels, including the Julian Day spy series, producing 75 novels all told as well as short stories.
Joseph Weisberg
A CIA officer for three years, Weisberg is a both novelist and screenwriter. His series The Americans, co-written with Joel Fields, is an extraordinary take on KGB illegals buried deep in American society, so deep the viewer asks who the enemy really is after all. It’s all about conflict, internal and external, along with a daily crisis of identity. I couldn’t get enough of it, even after five series. He wrote two novels, 10th Grade and An Ordinary Spy, as well as the non-fiction Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War.
In a controversial step, he and Fields signed a letter along with a thousand Jewish creatives denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech for The Zone of Interest at the 96th Academy Awards in which Glazer had criticised Israel’s Gaza genocide and its ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank.
I hope this is of some interest.
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