Kidnap Fiction Stories

Ways With Words: The truth about spies

British Intelligence was for too long a male preserve and British spies in literature were invariably male. But round about the Eighties, the glass ceiling of the intelligence world began to shatter, careers opened up for women and they turned out to be very good at the job. So now it’s time for women to break through in literature. Let’s hear more of the female intelligence officer.

What a strange bunch those early fictional spies seem now. One might expect that spy stories would feed on reality, but surely no reality can ever have touched Duckworth Drew of the Secret Service, the 1903 creation of William Le Queux. This was a man “upon whom rested the onerous and most perilous task of obtaining the well-guarded secrets of other nations and combating the machinations of England’s enemies”.

Ridiculous though they now seem, Le Queux’s novels were successful in their purpose – to alert a sleeping nation to the threat from Germany before the First World War. The same threat inspired Erskine Childers to write The Riddle of the Sands in 1903, in which Carruthers of the FO, more of a counter spy, sailed to the German Frisian Islands and discovered that the great British nightmare was true; the Germans were secretly preparing an invasion.

There was indeed a German espionage network operating in Britain before the First World War, but the lives of the men appointed to combat it were far less exciting than the readers of the books would have imagined; in the early days they seem to have spent most of their time in interdepartmental wrangling or trying to work out what they were supposed to do. Cumming writes laconically in his diary: “Been here five weeks and not yet signed my name.”

Secrecy was taken seriously in those early days, so the spy-story writers of the First World War and the interwar years had it easy. Very little information leaked out about the activities of the real intelligence services, so readers were quite prepared to believe that poisoned pins, exploding cigars and a German spy who hooded his eyes like a hawk were all the daily bread of the average British intelligence officer.

It was enough for readers that British counter spies, such as John Buchan’s Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot, should be patriotic, morally upright and male and that baddies should be German – or at least foreign – and sometimes women. According to The 39 Steps, spies were simple people: “No,” said the Frenchman. '“You do not understand the habits of the spy. He receives personally his reward, and he delivers personally his intelligence. We in France know something of the breed.

Western Fiction Review: Cotton's War

Cotton’s War is billed as the first in a new series (the second book, Cotton’s Law, is due out in January 2012) so it seems as if Sheriff Cotton Burke is the main hero of the books, but in this one he plays more of a secondary role, being used to set events in motion and as a link between various characters. The lead is taken by Jack Stump, and he makes for a very memorable reluctant hero, one I hope will return in further books.

Choices, a core collection for young reluctant readers

Science-fiction, the Gernsback years : a complete coverage of the genre magazines ... from 1926 through 1936

Science-fiction, the early years, a full description of more than 3,000 science-fiction stories from earliest times to the appearance of the genre magazines in 1930 : with author, title, and motif indexes

Choices

Encyclopedia of science fiction