Eight of the best spy novels

“KIM”, PUBLISHED in 1901, may be the first spy novel. Rudyard Kipling recounts the adventures of an orphan who becomes a player in the Great Game, Britain’s competition with Russia in the 19th century for influence in Central Asia. MI5 and MI6, Britain’s domestic and overseas intelligence services, appreciating the value of imagination to intelligence work, recruited novelists. On leaving those agencies they incorporated their knowledge of tradecraft into their fiction. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s cold-war spymaster, majored in English at Yale. He advised trainee agents to read William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity”, believing Empson’s literary criticism to be analogous to intelligence work. It was Angleton who famously called spying “a wilderness of mirrors”, a phrase he lifted from the poet T.S. Eliot. English-speakers are especially apt to travel between the seemingly distant realms of spying and novelising, which is why most of the books on our list were written in that language. We have ignored some very good books that emphasise politics at the expense of snooping, which are often, though not always, written in languages other than English. One example is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Sympathiser”, published in 2015, set in the aftermath of the Vietnam war. This much garlanded novel, written in English, is more social commentary than espionage. The eight books we recommend here are guiltier pleasures.