In The Service Of Empire: Imperialism And The British Spy Thriller 1901-1914

Of Novels, Intelligence and Policymaking
In the Service of Empire: Imperialism and the
British Spy Thriller 1901–1914
Dr. Christopher R. Moran and Dr. Robert Johnson
“ In the decade before the
First World War, the
British spy thriller was a cultural phenomenon drawing large and expectant readerships
”
across all classes.
In the decade before the First
World War, the British spy thriller was a cultural phenomenon drawing large and expectant readerships across all classes and catapulting its authors to prominence as spokesmen for then widely prevalent concerns about imperial strength, national power, and foreign espionage. Three hundred is a conservative estimate of the number of spy novels that went into print between
1901 and 1914. This article
reflects

Admittedly, this is not entirely new ground. In their larger histories of the British intelligence community, Christopher
Andrew and Bernard Porter have both shown convincingly how popular authors from the period were implicated in the business of “scare-mongering,” giving voice to a range of public anxieties, from the vulnerability of Britain’s defensive preparations to the specter of foreign espionage.6 David French,
David Trotter, and Nicholas
Hiley have also provided important contributions on the role of spy fiction in stirring up a hornet’s nest of tension before the
First World War.7
We nevertheless feel that there are two avenues that
Unashamedly patriotic, their political sensibilities “finely tuned to the cadences of imperial decline,” authors wanted to see more being done by the authorities.
British Spy Thrillers
Studies in Intelligence Vol. 54, No. 2 (June 2010) 3 require further analysis. First, there is a tendency in the existing literature to suggest that the threats discussed in spy fiction had little or no grounding in reality. Authors, it is often said, were spinning mysteries out of airy nothings, so motivated were they by commercial gains. Yet such a