At one point during his brief and inglorious military career, the 1940s’ literary man Julian Maclaren-Ross found himself in conversation with his commanding officer. Bringing up the rackety existence he pursued in Civvy Street, Maclaren-Ross admitted to having met the spy novelist E. Phillips Oppenheim when staying in the South of France. ‘What did he talk about?’, the CO, a fan of espionage novels, wanted to know. ‘Well, sir’, Maclaren-Ross volunteered, ‘mostly he talked about agents.’ ‘Of course he would’, the CO assured him. ‘Bound to, a man like that.’ On the instant, Maclaren-Ross realised that he had been misunderstood, that the officer was presuming an expertise that Phillips Oppenheim did not in fact possess. ‘No sir, he talked about literary agents.’

In the claustrophobic yet star-spangled world of the spy novelist, these confusions are more or less endemic. The fact that Somerset Maugham had worked in Intelligence during the Great War led many of the readers of his ‘Ashenden’ stories and a large number of his friends to assume that the narrative voice was a projection of Maugham himself. There were good reasons for this. The ‘I’ of the stories is sardonic, aloof, detached, given to expostulations of the ‘You’ve shot the wrong man, you fool’ kind. There is a moment in a story called ‘The Pool’ when a less than well-educated character remarks that a poem by Francis Thompson is ‘a bit of all right’. ‘It’s generally thought so,’ the narrator shoots back in tones of freezing hauteur that were Maugham’s to the life.

As these anecdotes, with their assumptions of books quarried from the coalface of personal experience, serve to demonstrate, a spy in an espionage novel is never simply a spy. He – and it is usually a he – may be a projection of the author himself. He may, on the other hand, be a figurative creation, at large in the political landscapes of the Cold War and bent on bringing home metaphorical truths about them. He may, in very rare cases, be the absolute antithesis of these types – single-minded, incurious and wrapped up in doing his job – and yet somehow confirming their existence by virtue of his detachment from the world they inhabit. But at nearly all times he may be taken as representing something, whether that something is a worldview, a mindset or simply a way of behaving. Simon Raven, for example, once wrote a novel of continental derring-do entitled Brother Cain  (1959). If not one of his greatest performances, it is still – what with its undercover networking and its hints of corruption in high places – a fascinating insight into how a clever, conservatively-minded young man thought the world worked in the era of Macmillan and Khruschev.

Clearly, the lens through which Raven examined the landscapes of 1950s espionage had been borrowed from Ian Fleming. After all, Fleming’s James Bond is thoroughly representative of all kinds of things – not least a set of attitudes, both personal and political, that were still going strong in the immediately postwar era. Bond can tell you a great deal about Macmillan-era Britain and not only in the realm of international power-politics: among other things, he is an infallible guide to the wish-fulfilment that tended to colour male attitudes to women. At the same time, Bond has a permanency. His adventures keep on coming. His opponents may change; their wiles may grow steadily more sophisticated and place ever more insistent demands on his resourcefulness, but still, gamely and indefatigably, he manages to shape up. All this makes him a victim – or depending on your point of view – a beneficiary of something to which no sequence of spy novels has ever been immune. This is stylisation.

Just as we remember Sherlock Holmes for his seven per-cent solution and his deerstalker hat, so we remember 007 for all the things that are pretty much incidental to his profession: his champagne, sausage and scrambled egg breakfasts, the ‘slow’ 20 press-up exercise regimes, the 70-a-day cigarette habit and the subscription to Country Life. The tendency endures: anyone asked to write down what they remembered of Jackson Lamb in the Mick Herron novels would doubtless come up with his disdain of the Slough House telephone – why pick up the receiver when a thump on the floor does just as well? – his continual farting and a predisposition to fall asleep at his desk. It would be wrong to complain that this constant harping on peripherals turns character into caricature, for many a literary classic works in exactly this way. Dickens’ novels, for example, are awash in signature remarks and personality-defining paraphernalia – everything from Mrs Gamp’s umbrella to Mr Carker’s teeth. Rather, it turns them into creatures of myth.

But what sort of myth? And bringing off what kind of effects? And making what kind of assumptions about the world they describe? One of the fascinations of the spy novel of the past 70 years – from Fleming’s first Bond adventure Casino Royale (1953) to the latest Herron, say – is the impression it conveys of a longstanding continuity. Given the range of cross-referencing, to which both reviewers and writers enthusiastically subscribe, the post-1945 fictional espionage world can sometimes look like a giant palimpsest, to which each newcomer adds one or two flourishes without changing the original design. Thus, the paperback jacket of Herron’s Slow Horses (2010) harbours a quote from the Scottish crime writer Val McDermid hailing the author as ‘The John le Carré of our generation.’ Inside the cover, Herron is busy filing his own allusions to the tradition of which he has become a part. And so, Catherine Standish reflects on her relationship with her boss Charles Partner: ‘Sometimes he’d called her Moneypenny, but that was it. And even afterwards they were hardly friends, though it did not escape her that he never called her Moneypenny again.’

All this might suggest that Fleming, le Carré and Herron are essentially writing about the same thing, albeit from a slightly – in some cases radically – different historical vantage point. But this, too, would be a mistake. It is not just that the villains have changed, with Russian double agents giving way to Islamist bomb-carriers, but that the perspective and the operational practices have gone with them. Bond’s world, for example, though thoroughly up-to-date in its gadgetry, is in other ways sepia-tinted, what with the references to an Aston Martin bought ‘before the war’ and the occasional glances back to M’s Edwardian boyhood. And Bond, although he has sidekicks to assist him and apparatchiks waiting back in London to guide his hand, is essentially a lone wolf, a privileged being whose exceptionalism keeps him going and excuses his occasional lapses (see the beginning of You Only Live Twice, where he almost gets sacked), with whom most of his service colleagues know better than to interfere.

Move forward to le Carré and the exceptionalism has mostly gone. Certainly, there are sharp operators cunningly and sometimes belligerently at large on the streets of Mitteleuropa, but a bureaucratic blanket has descended on their heads, whose chief effect is to leave them at the mercy of protocol. Le Carré, as Adam Sisman’s painstaking 2015 biography (and its codicil, The Secret Life of John le Carré, 2023) shows in some detail, took himself very seriously as a writer, but one of his main achievements in the Smiley novels was to demonstrate that espionage, however high the stakes and terrifying the dangers, was, at bottom, a job like any other, weighed down by routine, boredom, petty irritations and the need to establish a modus operandi with people whom you may actively detest. There are times when Smiley’s ‘Circus’ of agents bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to the Civil Service. Hasten on another three decades to Slough House, and the modus operandi scarcely exists. Several of Lamb’s juniors dislike their jobs. They know they are there are on sufferance, or, like permanent fall-guy River Cartwright, sustained by family connections, drifting away on a slack tide, far away from respect and preferment. Worse, they dislike most of the colleagues with whom they have to spend their working days.

And then there is the question of their adversaries. There are morally ambiguous characters in the Bond world, but the oppositions are mostly clear-cut: even the reviewers of the early 1960s were complaining about what Kingsley Amis (a fan and later a Bond-imitator) called his ‘naively patriotic and anti-Soviet attitudes’. With le Carré, on the other hand, moral ambiguity is everywhere; flaws are what make people interesting and one of the chief pleasures of his books is trying to determine where everyone stands. Back in Slough House, although there are international terrorists trying to hold the world to ransom and ancient Cold War scores still waiting to be settled, the real enemy sometimes seems to be the Regent’s Park elite as represented by Diana Taverner’s ‘Dogs’. As for the world beyond the cracked panes of Lamb’s office, Standish is not the only character to conclude that in Charles Partner’s day, ‘the Cold War had been simpler. Back then it had been easier to pretend it was a matter of us and them’.

Unsurprisingly, the procedural device that steers most of the action home to port, or, to mix the metaphor, the glue which binds the novels together, is very often irony; the irony of situation (as in the predicaments brought into focus by the characters that other characters imagined they could trust) and the irony of speech. Bond is certainly an ironist, a past-master of terse repartee, a slapper-down of feminine caprice, always reflecting on fate, chance and happenstance. Here in the 21st century, Herron’s lowlifes tend to converse in a kind of endless, sub-satirical banter that reflects their curious end-of-tether quality. It is hard to imagine the Lamb who sprawls exhaustedly across his desk ‘getting work done, hard to imagine him standing up even, or opening a window’. Tête-à-tête with Cartwright, he resembles nothing so much as a cross-talk comedian, jockeying for precedence with a straight man who is clearly not up to his fighting weight (‘Found anything interesting?’ ‘Define interesting.’ ‘Let’s pretend for the moment that I’m your boss’, etc.)

Myth, of course, is only as good as the readers who perpetuate it. The emblematic qualities of secret agents grow all the more seductive when set against the unpromising political backdrops from which they emerge. To many of his original fans, Bond’s allure lay in its deviation from statist postwar norms. He was not a projection of ‘wicked and snobbish fantasies’, Simon Raven once declared, but a version ‘of what every spirited and normal man would like to be, particularly in a world which grows drabber and more circumscribed every day… He is the embodiment, not of fantasy, but of sanity; he is mens sana in corpore sano’, an antidote to ‘ugly surroundings’ and ‘smug and flabby politicians’ (Spectator, 28.10.1966.) But, as even Raven might have conceded, longevity, stylisation and the puppeteering to which even the greatest novel sequences occasionally descend, can sometimes have a wearing effect.

One very obvious characteristic of spy fiction, for example, is the readiness with which it lays itself open to parody. Fleming was taken off as early as 1963, with the appearance of Cyril Connolly’s ‘Bond Strikes Camp’, in which our hero is ordered to get himself up in drag to effect a particular mission and importuned by a similarly cross-dressing M. Critics of le Carré’s later novels noted the jokes about ‘tedious detail’ and the odd sensation of an author almost consciously sending up some of his own material. Interestingly, Karla’s Choice (2024), Nick Harkaway’s re-animation of his father’s world, offered several late-period le Carré tics: excess dialogue; briefings that go on too long; lavish resumes of East European history. Like an ageing rock band, determined not to forsake the pleasure of treading the boards deep into their eighties, the espionage novelist seems destined – or perhaps a better word would be fated – to turn into his own tribute act.