Graham Greene

The trade of a spy is a very fine one, when the spy is working on his own account. Is it not in fact enjoying the excitements of a thief, while still retaining the character of an honest citizen? But a man who undertakes this trade must make up his mind to simmer with wrath, to fret with impatience, to stand about in the mud with his feet freezing, to be chilled or to be scorched, and to be deceived by false hopes. He must be ready, on the faith of a mere indication, to work up to an unknown goal; he must bear the disappointment of failing in his aim; he must be prepared to run, to be motionless, to remain for hours watching a window; to invent a thousand theories of action … The only excitement which can compare with it is that of the life of a gambler.

Hanaré de Balzac

D
escartes once wrote, ‘Nothing so strange and so little credible can be imagined but that some philosopher has asserted it.' And so it is with spy writers and spy stories. They rank, with ghost stories and fishing and golfing tales, in a special class of literature in which the real and the imaginary can be mixed in any proportion, so long as both are present. The strangest spy yarn may be to some extent true—Graham Greene's wholly disingenuous introduction to this anthology says as much: ‘Does Cicero's visit to the German Embassy in Ankara seem more or less fictional than Hannay's to the headquarters of the British Secret Service?' After all, the espionage world has attracted some of the oddest characters who ever got involved in serious matters. Take Captain Cumming, the first head of MI6. He wore a gold-rimmed monocle, wrote only in green ink, and it is said, possibly apocryphally, that after he lost a leg in an accident he used to get round the corridors by putting his wooden one on a child's scooter and propelling himself along with the other. Visitors to MI6 are reported to have been intimidated by his habit of stabbing his wooden leg with his paper-knife in order to drive home the point of an argument. With such nonfictional material at hand, one may question the need for invention.