Spies don’t fall short

Agents of Treachery: Spy Stories

For decades, and driven largely by Cold War dread, espionage fiction dominated bestseller lists. Writers like John le Carré, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and Len Deighton captivated readers with exposés of life’s fraught underbelly; a tense, deceptive world where good and evil wage perpetual war but where the dividing lines have blurred beyond distinction.

Spying has rarely been explored by the short story, probably because it was considered too restrictive a format for the convoluted double- and triple-cross plot-building that distinguishes the genre. Agents of Treachery goes a considerable step towards dispelling such notions. Proving that, in capable hands, such limitations as brevity can not only be overcome but turned to the writer’s advantage, Otto Penzler has gathered 14 new stories by some of the genre’s top guns, including David Morrell, Joseph Finder and Gayle Lynds.

The collection opens with a bang. Charles McCarry’s ‘How Long Is a Piece of String’ transports us to Africa’s Guinea Coast of the 1950s, where an American operative finds himself caught up in a military coup against the larger-than-life, and occasionally monstrous, mass of contradictions, President Ga. McCarry sets a towering standard here, and the stories that follow do well to keep pace.

A few are worthy of note. Morrell’s ‘The Interrogator’ offers a disturbing glimpse into the processes of torture, mental and physical, committed in the name of good, and the sort of training that enemy forces must undergo to hold fast against such treatment. Torture features heavily, too, in Robert Wilson’s atmospheric and at times heartbreaking story, ‘The Hamburg Redemption’. And in ‘Sleeping With My Assassin’, by Andrew Klavan, a Russian-born sleeper spy, certain that he has been compromised, harbours deep suspicions about the woman who has just entered his life. The only real slip comes from the usually reliable Lee Child. Child, whose thrilling Jack Reacher page-turners have made him the marquee name on show here, contributes probably the book’s weakest offering: a short, well-conceived piece that, too reliant on its twist ending, falters to a conclusion.

Throughout this collection, all the necessary ingredients of great espionage are here in abundance: violence, chaos, paranoia, intrigue, romance and betrayal. Penzler has shown a deft touch in his story selections and arrangement. The result is genuinely impressive, not only the first anthology of previously unpublished spy fiction ever issued, but one that is thematically strong, with carefully constructed plot twists and cogent, fully realised characters. Lovers of the genre will not be disappointed.