Sheer Coincidence?
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It may have to do with the zodiac, the way the planets align, or whose moon is in which house, but there does seem to be a huge conspiracy (this one not yet identified by Hillary Clinton) that has resulted in October being the birth month of an inordinate number of espionage writers.
Or it might be a coincidence.
Sure, sure, call it coincidence, but with the CIA, MI5, and all those agencies of a similar ilk involved, you just never know. How can any reasonable person ascribe to pure chance the fact that Graham Greene, John le Carre, Helen MacInnes, and so many other thriller writers were born in a single month? I mean the odds are 12-to-1 against, right?
Greene, born October 2, 1904, not only was a spy writer, but went that extra step and was a spy as well: His life was inextricably bound with that of Kim Philby, the notorious British traitor who eventually defected to the Soviet Union.
Although Greene liked to divide his prose fiction into two camps, his “serious” novels and those he dismissed as mere “entertainments,” there is little to distinguish the two.
Virtually all of his fiction features action, pursuit, suspense, and a powerful moral drama, ignited by religion and his faith in the Catholic Church.
Arthur Conan Doyle believed his Sherlock Holmes stories to be inferior to his other work, especially his historical novels, and he was confident that those works, now largely forgotten and unread, would stand the test of time, while the Holmes stories were nothing more than literature-lite.
Greene is a major novelist of the 20th century, but the books that readers are mainly interested in today are not “The Man Within,” “The Name of Action,” “Rumor at Nightfall,” or “It’s a Battlefield,” but such thrillers as “The Confidential Agent, “This Gun for Hire,” “The Ministry of Fear,” “The Third Man,” and “Our Man in Havana.” It is no coincidence that all were made into successful films.
Also in the first rank of 20th-century authors is John le Carre (real name David John Moore Cornwell, born October 19, 1931) who, like Greene, was a spy in his early years. Although his work has enough moral relativism to suggest that the sins of the British Secret Service and its sister organization in the Soviet Union are equally despicable, his desk job with the Foreign Service does not appear to have given aid in any way to his country’s enemy.
After the publication of the towering achievement that was “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” Mr. le Carre could have retired with the assurance that he would forever be regarded as one of the giants of the espionage genre. In fact, he exceeded even that masterpiece with what has become known as the Karla trilogy: “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” “The Honorable Schoolboy,” and “Smiley’s People.”
George Smiley, the hero of his first two books (“Call for the Dead” and “A Murder of Quality”) as well as the Karla trilogy, was so perfectly played in television series by Alec Guinness that Mr. le Carre could no longer write books about him. He felt that the gentle, dogged, industrious, and resolute character was no longer his, but the actor’s.
Admirers of Mr. le Carre, and there are legions (as I was until his strident anti-American voice became too much to bear) agree that of the authors whose major works were based on the battle between the democratic West and the totalitarian Soviet bloc, he is the only one to flourish after the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
E. Howard Hunt (born October 9, 1918) went a step further than Greene or Mr. le Carre by having as his primary career one with the CIA, and his espionage fiction no more than a sideline. He created a CIA agent, Peter Ward, under the pseudonym David St. John (the names of his sons), and, using the Robert Dietrich pseudonym, a Washington, D.C., accountant named Steve Bentley who functions precisely the way a secret agent would.
Despite having more than 50 novels to his credit, many set in countries to which he had been assigned in his own career, Mr. Hunt will be most remembered for his role in the Watergate break-in.
The most successful female thriller writer of all time was Helen MacInnes, the Scottish-born American who was born on October 7, 1907. One after the other, her books nestled onto best-seller lists, became main selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club and were made into movies (“Above Suspicion” and “Assignment in Brittany”).
While she would never be accused of being an important or original prose stylist, she gave a kind of comfort to readers who enjoyed the meticulous evocations of faraway places, liked the fact that the good guys were very good and always triumphed over the evildoers, and that romantic interludes had happy consequences.
Other notable espionage writers born in the cooling month of October are Philip McCutchan (10/13/1920); Desmond Bagley (10/29/1923); Derek Lambert (10/10/1929); Valentine Williams (10/20/1883), who created the wonderful “Clubfoot”; the sadly underrated Ted Allbeury (10/24/1917); and E. Phillips Oppenheim (10/22/1866), author of more than 100 books between 1887 and 1943. Before W. Somerset Maugham brought some reality to the spy story with “Ashenden” in 1928, Oppenheim wrote exciting romances in which spies always wore dinner jackets, the women were always young and beautiful, gentlemen didn’t read other gentlemen’s mail, and much of the action took place on yachts, in gambling casinos, and the swankiest men’s clubs.
In spite of the aristocratic tone of the players in the Oppenheim potboilers, they were little different from the seedy characters in more modern spy fiction. Always, there was betrayal, torture, and death.
How fitting it is that October is the month of Dia de los Muertes.
Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.