What are the origins of the spy novel

A. One of the most popular forms of fiction over the last century, the spy novel emerged during the international tensions - in particular the arms race between Britain and Germany - during the years leading up to the First World War. The 20th century's unprecedented tally of war, revolution, subversion and genocide - and especially the threat of nuclear war between 1945 and 1990 - sustained the appeal.

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Q. And the first ones
A. Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903), a suspenseful tale of two amateur British agents foiling a German invasion plot, is often described as the first spy novel, and it has become a classic. But the first spy writer to achieve fame was William Tufnell Le Queux, whose highly successful invasion novel The Great War in England in 1897 (1893) featured an enemy spy. Spies of the Kaiser (1909), Le Queux's lurid portrait of an army of German spies in Britain, also did much to create the mood of spy fever that prompted the creation in that year of the Secret Service Bureau, later to become MI5 and MI6.

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Then there was The Secret Agent (1907), Joseph Conrad's classic tale of an Anarchist bomber. While not strictly a spy story, it has many of the elements that are the hallmarks of the genre: subterfuge, assassinations and dark lives lived by shadowy people with Middle-European accents.

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From this early period the writer who has best endured is John Buchan, whose secret agent hero Richard Hannay first appeared in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), and has made a number of appearances on film. Spy novels have often been successfully adapted for film and TV, something that has helped to sustain the genre's popularity.

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Q. Weren't some of the early novelists actually spies themselves
A. The First World War, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the rise of Fascism created a sombre inter-war climate that saw the emergence of a new generation of spy writer who broke sharply with the patriotic orthodoxies of their predecessors. Some, such as Compton Mackenzie and W. Somerset Maugham, had indeed worked for British intelligence during the war, and they painted a far less glamorous and more realistic picture of the secret agent's life. Maugham's Ashenden (1928), a collection of short stories based closely on his personal experiences, is one such.

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Q. And where does Mr Bond fit in
A. The dominating figure of the post-war period was Ian Fleming, whose Casino Royale (1953) introduced the figure of James Bond. Bond is undoubtedly the most famous fictional secret agent of all time, and he has spawned a legion of imitations.

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Q. And the influence of the Cold War
A. The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 brought a serious chill to the Cold War climate and, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), John Le Carr� marked out the territory that was to dominate spy fiction until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Making an explicit and conscious break with Bond, he created the anti-heroic figure of George Smiley, the protagonist of several of his novels that culminated in Smiley's People (1980).

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Q. What has happened to our spies in this post-Cold War era
A. The successors to the heyday of spy fiction are the suspense thrillers of writers such as Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum. Forsyth�was writing even as Le Carr� and others explored the moral ambiguities of Cold War espionage, and paved the way for the seemingly limitless numbers of thrill-packed blockbusters of varying degrees of merit that dominate the male-targeted fiction market today. Some, such as Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal (1971), are intelligent and suspenseful, while others are little more than action comics for big boys, in which tough male heroes save the world from all manner of disasters.

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By Simon Smith