more for a foreign ministry or a war office, so you knew the pages were spiked with disguised secrets.
By now you may have concluded it was mostly a Cold War library. While that aptly describes the ones I read as a teen, his holdings were far broader and deeper. More than a quarter of his first editions were published before 1950, and even The Riddle of the Sands, from 1903, wasn’t nearly the oldest.
There was Rudyard Kipling’s Kim from 1901, with its Great Game intrigues of British India, and William Le Queux’s Strange Tales of a Nihilist from 1892. The oldest was James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy from 1821, a tale of a double agent for George Washington. Dad’s two-volume copy was so fragile that he’d placed it off-limits, which made me curious enough at the age of fifteen to track down a reprint in an embassy library. I realized by the second sentence, which ran to a breathtaking eighty-five words, that I’d never finish. Yet it was Cooper’s first bestseller, and he showed surprising prescience about the future of spying by having Washington tell the hero, “You must descend into the grave with the reputation of a foe to your native land. Remember that the veil which conceals your true character cannot be raised in years—perhaps never.”
You’ve probably never heard of most of the earliest authors, but some were hugely popular. Le Queux, for one, although to me he was a hack. Manning Coles, of the Tommy Hambledon books, took the quality up a notch, as did John Buchan, and then Ambler. And of course there was Joseph Conrad, who not only produced The Secret Agent in 1907, but a 1911 sequel, Under Western Eyes.
It was only in the mid-fifties that Cold War tales came into vogue, and even those were dominated for years by a pair of rakish Brits—Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora. Fedora is largely forgotten now, but he was in print two years before Bond. JFK made all the difference for Fleming when the dashing young president revealed he was a Bond fan. Sales took off, and Hollywood took notice. Fleming also had the better pedigree, having worked in British intelligence with everyone from Kim Philby to Graham Greene.
Dad harrumphed that Fedora and Bond were “cartoons for the drunk and oversexed,” yet he collected all sixteen Fedoras, and all fourteen Bonds with their beautiful jacket illustrations by Richard Chopping. He also grabbed up the first five books in Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm series—another man of action, and far worthier than the spoofy film portrayal by Dean Martin—and all four books in Adam Diment’s series featuring Philip McAlpine, a groovy Austin Powers prototype.
The more cerebral spies whom we now think of as the genre’s exemplars didn’t start showing up until ‘61, with Le Carré’s Smiley, and at first even he was more concerned with solving murders than digging out moles. Then, in ‘62, Len Deighton gave us something darker and more genuine to chew on with The Ipcress File, with its anonymous hero (a spy who didn’t acquire the Harry Palmer name until the books went to Hollywood). The following year Le Carré published The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which made even Graham Greene gush, and afterward things were never the same.
Lemaster’s arrival at the end of the sixties led an American charge joined by Charles McCarry, Robert Littell, and even the political pundit William F. Buckley Jr. (I refused to read his Blackford Oakes spy novels after coming across two pedantic groaners in the first three paragraphs: “Johnny got orotund when he was tight” and “At Yale, mere registrars don’t summon students thus peremptorily.”)
The early seventies ushered in a golden age of Lemaster and Le Carré, plus Deighton and Adam Hall with his knotty string of Quiller novels. By the eighties, even some of the genre’s older hands were returning—Graham Greene, Ted Allbeury, Helen MacInnes, and E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA man notorious for
By now you may have concluded it was mostly a Cold War library. While that aptly describes the ones I read as a teen, his holdings were far broader and deeper. More than a quarter of his first editions were published before 1950, and even The Riddle of the Sands, from 1903, wasn’t nearly the oldest.
There was Rudyard Kipling’s Kim from 1901, with its Great Game intrigues of British India, and William Le Queux’s Strange Tales of a Nihilist from 1892. The oldest was James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy from 1821, a tale of a double agent for George Washington. Dad’s two-volume copy was so fragile that he’d placed it off-limits, which made me curious enough at the age of fifteen to track down a reprint in an embassy library. I realized by the second sentence, which ran to a breathtaking eighty-five words, that I’d never finish. Yet it was Cooper’s first bestseller, and he showed surprising prescience about the future of spying by having Washington tell the hero, “You must descend into the grave with the reputation of a foe to your native land. Remember that the veil which conceals your true character cannot be raised in years—perhaps never.”
You’ve probably never heard of most of the earliest authors, but some were hugely popular. Le Queux, for one, although to me he was a hack. Manning Coles, of the Tommy Hambledon books, took the quality up a notch, as did John Buchan, and then Ambler. And of course there was Joseph Conrad, who not only produced The Secret Agent in 1907, but a 1911 sequel, Under Western Eyes.
It was only in the mid-fifties that Cold War tales came into vogue, and even those were dominated for years by a pair of rakish Brits—Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora. Fedora is largely forgotten now, but he was in print two years before Bond. JFK made all the difference for Fleming when the dashing young president revealed he was a Bond fan. Sales took off, and Hollywood took notice. Fleming also had the better pedigree, having worked in British intelligence with everyone from Kim Philby to Graham Greene.
Dad harrumphed that Fedora and Bond were “cartoons for the drunk and oversexed,” yet he collected all sixteen Fedoras, and all fourteen Bonds with their beautiful jacket illustrations by Richard Chopping. He also grabbed up the first five books in Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm series—another man of action, and far worthier than the spoofy film portrayal by Dean Martin—and all four books in Adam Diment’s series featuring Philip McAlpine, a groovy Austin Powers prototype.
The more cerebral spies whom we now think of as the genre’s exemplars didn’t start showing up until ‘61, with Le Carré’s Smiley, and at first even he was more concerned with solving murders than digging out moles. Then, in ‘62, Len Deighton gave us something darker and more genuine to chew on with The Ipcress File, with its anonymous hero (a spy who didn’t acquire the Harry Palmer name until the books went to Hollywood). The following year Le Carré published The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which made even Graham Greene gush, and afterward things were never the same.
Lemaster’s arrival at the end of the sixties led an American charge joined by Charles McCarry, Robert Littell, and even the political pundit William F. Buckley Jr. (I refused to read his Blackford Oakes spy novels after coming across two pedantic groaners in the first three paragraphs: “Johnny got orotund when he was tight” and “At Yale, mere registrars don’t summon students thus peremptorily.”)
The early seventies ushered in a golden age of Lemaster and Le Carré, plus Deighton and Adam Hall with his knotty string of Quiller novels. By the eighties, even some of the genre’s older hands were returning—Graham Greene, Ted Allbeury, Helen MacInnes, and E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA man notorious for
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