Spy Novels Need to Come in From the Cold War
Not since the Cold War has there been so much real-life international villainy begging for the Le Carre treatment.
A genre out in the cold.
Photographer: Clive Limpkin/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
The golden age of the spy thriller ended with the Cold War. But of late, news reports have provided enough material for a silver age to start — if authors take heed.
The last time a spy thriller topped the list of a year’s bestselling novels in the U.S., compiled by Publisher’s Weekly, was in 1988 or 1989 — depending on whether one counts the latter year’s “Clear and Present Danger” by Tom Clancy as an espionage novel or a political one. (In 1988, another Clancy book, “The Cardinal of the Kremlin,” unmistakably a spy novel, was number one.) John Le Carre, who had his first book on top of the list in 1964 (“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”) and was in the Top 10 a total of nine times, had his last big hit in 1989, too, with “The Russia House,” although he has continued to publish regularly.