Are these other books you’ve picked your five favourite post-Soviet spy novels? The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq also provided huge amounts of material for spy writers, ditto Messrs Assange and Snowden.
You had Putin’s spy cronies poisoning the likes of Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal and, more recently, Alexei Navalny (the theme of Judas 62). Suddenly there was a completely new canvas on which to draw, whether it was Islamist terrorism or Russia as an emerging gangster state. Both were game changers for the intelligence services and therefore for spy novelists. The first was the ascent of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency. So, the 1990s was a dead decade, then suddenly the genre came back to life again?Įxactly. On this side of the Pond, with the exception of le Carré-who published four or five post-Cold War thrillers-there was only Remembrance Day by Henry Porter. So you could say that the 1990s is the decade that the spy novel forgot. This was a crisis in the real-life intelligence services too they didn’t necessarily know what useful purpose they were serving. What else was there to write about? You’d had four or five decades of Len Deighton, John le Carré, Robert Ludlum and many others, mining the seam of the Cold War-East versus West, Smiley versus Karla-all those wonderful novels.
Can you describe what’s been going on?Īs soon as the Berlin Wall came down and Yeltsin stood on his tank, readers and publishers alike felt that the spy novel was effectively over. I suppose, back in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, I might have naively thought that spy novels were going to disappear as a genre. You’ve picked five post-Soviet spy thrillers for us. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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