This book aims to examine a relatively new form of literature: the British spy novel, which began to appear towards the end of the nineteenth century and during the Edwardian period. This form of literature belonged to the thriller genre, a description given to stories that focused on thrilling the reader and which were often cheaply produced in paperback with a target audience, although not exclusively, a male readership. These became known as ‘shilling shockers’ or in America as dime novels, due to their price. The Edwardian period came after the Victorian development of fiction to cater for a new mass market of readers. An example of this fiction was the Sherlock Holmes stories, followed by a range of other fictional detectives including Sexton Blake. Out of these detective stories came spy thrillers that had at their core simple stories about well-defined good and evil characters. In Britain, these stories took shape as a cultural response to events and movements outside and within Britain, particularly challenges from Irish nationalism, the Boer War (1899–1902), the creation of the German Empire (1871), rival powers’ naval expansion, and the French ending of the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty in 1892 that had kept low tariffs between Britain and France. This was at a time of Britain’s relative economic decline when share of the world trade in manufacturing fell from 35.8 per cent in 1883 to 28.4 per cent by 1900 in the face of the protected industrialisation elsewhere.1 Some of the political responses were the creations of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB ) at Scotland Yard,2 the secret service that developed into the Secret Service Bureau known as MI5 (responsible for internal security and counterintelligence within the United Kingdom and the Empire) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS ) known as MI6 (responsible for intelligence gathering overseas), and the passing of the Official Secret Services Acts of 1889 and 1911. As Priya Satia has pointed out in her study of British spies in Arabia and the cultural responses:
The turn of the century also signalled a new era for Britons at home. The end of the South African War [the Boer War] and of Victoria’s reign heralded a new epoch. The incipient rise of the new security state was formalised with the 1909 foundation of the secret service and the 1911 Official Secret Services Act. Mirroring the new appreciation for the need to develop [a] British intelligence system, the spy emerged for the first time as a hero in novels like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), entwining his cultural and institutional careers from the outset. These developments were part of a new cultural fascination with investigation, also manifest in journalism, social investigation, and police work.3
This book aims to further the understanding of the politics behind the creation of British invasion/spy literature4 and, to a degree, contemporary attitudes towards class, race, empire, the concept of the gentleman, women in relation to war work and sexual relations, as part of the social, cultural, and political responses before and during World War I.5 This range of issues is found within the text of the novels, which in itself tells much of the ideology of the time. Sharon Ouditt has argued the case in relation to her studies of female writers during World War I:
It would be all too easy to dismiss Berta Ruck and Brenda Girvin as simply “no good”. Analysis of their writings in terms of the ideologies encoded within a popular literary form … [and a] range of discourses or subject positions, provide various lines of enquiry that might contribute to a broad analysis of the representation and self-representation of women in this period.6
Ouditt’s remarks are appropriate when discussing writers of spy novels and stories. Overall these novelists belonged to popular and middlebrow writing. Their focus was on entertainment with the use of repetition, spelling out a story without necessarily allowing readers to interpret the text for themselves. In doing so the novelist was reinforcing prejudices or opinions already held within British society at their time of publication rather than any deep analysis of characters and circumstances. However, there are some that did allow for different interpretation such as the Hannay novels by John Buchan. On the surface, they can be labelled merely as entertaining literature with simple characters and plots but unlike in other works, readers can have different interpretations on events and some characters. An example is The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). In this story, Scudder, the American spy, tells Hannay that Jews are ruling the world through the Germans:
The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und Zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog. He is the German business man [sic] that gives your English papers the shakes. But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, Sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now.7
Yet, later in the novel after Hannay has escaped from a group of German conspirators, the character of Sir Walter Bullivant (the head of the British secret service) warns Hannay that this viewpoint is not necessarily correct, saying that ‘He [Scudder] was half crank, half genius, but he was wholly honest.’8 In varying degrees the reader can read spy novels in more ways than one. One approach is to interpret the use of spies by novelists such as Buchan as an indication of contemporary concerns about foreigners, especially Jews, believed to have infiltrated British society for their own undesirable purposes. Claud Cockburn saw this as part of a fictional world constructed by authors who had ‘peopled it with figures of their own devising. The way they ensure or demand that these puppets should behave is inevitably an indication of their attitudes to human behaviour in the “private sector” in their own day.’9 Cockburn’s remarks were on bestsellers that had been, for the most part, forgotten decades after their initial success. Buchan is still remembered after his initial success due to the popularity of The Thirty-Nine Steps and the subsequent 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film based loosely on the novella and it has been referred to in popular culture in many John le Carré novels, movies such as RED, television series such as The Saint and Special Branch, and even used as a bingo call.10 Others, such as William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim, both of whom wrote in the spy genre, have largely disappeared from the public consciousness.11 Yet, during their lives they were very much part of British popular culture. The novelist Arnold Bennett, once a magazine editor, noted Le Queux’s stories were bought for serialisation ‘all year round’.12 In 1898, Bennett was informed by Lever Tillotson, a representative of the Bolton literary syndicate, that Le Queux earned as much money as H. G. Wells and Thomas Hardy, at the top rate of 12 guineas13 per thousand words.14 He continued for a time after his death to belong to popular British culture, being referred to by Graham Greene in his Ministry of Fear (1943), where the main character Rowe cries out in a nightmare that ‘The World had been remade by William Le Queux.’15 Peter Cheyney’s Dark Duet (1942) had a lead character comment: ‘This [Hotel Estrada] is the best hotel in Lisbon. It has everything. It has fat blonde German spies all dressed in black velvet gowns hiding behind the palms in the lounges. It only needs William Le Queux here to write a book about it. It’s a scream, n’est-ce pas?’16 Clearly, during World War II the name of Le Queux was still associated with the world of international intrigue. Today, once-popular writers like Le Queux are seldom read, even though his and others’ creations were earlier prototypes for later spy heroes like James Bond. He is now generally only of interest to academics and connoisseurs of old spy and detective novels.
A common theme in many spy novels before and during World War I was the integrity of the British Empire being threatened by the jealousies of other nations. The hero was always on the side of good, inevitably on the British side, and the ...