Margaret Tait Flaws, Spy Fever: The Post Office Affair, Shetland Times Ltd (14 Mar. 2009) At the beginning of the First World War, stories of spies abounded throughout the British Isles. It was in this atmosphere that the entire staff of the Lerwick Post Office was marched off to prison and incarcerated for almost a […]
Wesley K. Wark (1991) Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence This book won the Canadian Crime Writers’ Arthur Ellis Award for the Best Genre Criticism/Reference book of 1991. This collection of essays is an attempt to explore the history of spy fiction and spy films and investigate the significance of the ideas they contain. […]
Stephen Wade (2009) Victoria’s Spymasters – Empire and Espionage, Stroud, The History Press Covering the lives and achievements of five English intelligence officers involved in wars at home and abroad between 1870 and 1918, this exceptionally researched book offers an insight into spying in the age of Victoria. Including material from little-known sources such as memoirs, […]
Stafford, D. (2013) The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies, Thistle Publishing The Silent Game traces the history of spy writers and their fiction from creator William Le Queux, of the Edwardian age, to John le Carré, of the Cold War era. David Stafford reveals the connections between fact and fiction as seen […]
LeRoy L. Panek (1981) Special Branch : the British Spy Novel, 1890-1980 The author has chosen seventeen of the most important or representative British spy novelists to write about. He presents some basic literary analysis and criticism, trying both to place them in historical perspective and to describe and analyze the content and form of […]
James Morton (2010) Spies of the First World War – Under Cover for King and Kaiser, Kew, The National Archives When Colonel James Edmonds argued for a British secret service in 1907, officials mocked that he had ̀espionage on the brain’. But fracturing European relations and the resulting explosion in spy activity were to prove […]
Michael Denning (1987) Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul It is a habit in all of us to make our cover stories, our assumed personae, at least parallel with the reality .. , We should take the opposition’s cover stories more seriously The more identities a […]
John Atkins (1984) The British Spy Novel, London, John Calder Fiction about spies and spying – a genre of which British writers have generally been the most successful exponents – is a phenomenon which truly began in the twentieth century. Although Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities could qualify as spy fiction, it is really […]
Woods B. F. (2007) Neutral Ground: A Political History Of Espionage Fiction, Algora Publishing Espionage fiction is one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the literate world and, since its widespread acceptance in the early twentieth century, it has sought to pursue the secret politics of Western social order. Drawn from reality, exposing what […]
Christopher Andrew, (2009) The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. Allen Lane Contains an extensive background to the founding of MI5 / SIS and the role of spy and invasion literature. To mark the centenary of its foundation, the British Security Service, MI5, has opened its archives to an independent historian. The Defence […]