Reading Espionage Fiction

Reading Espionage Fiction explores the ways in which the struggles and loyalties of political modernity have been portrayed in the espionage story over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reading works by authors such as Somerset Maugham, Helen MacInnes, John le Carré, Sam E. Greenlee, and Gerald Seymour as popular literature deserving of sustained attention, this study shows how these narratives have both created a modern genre and, at the same time, sought an escape from its limitations. The book takes up the importance of plot and character and argues that, in this branch of fiction, the personal has always and ever been political.