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The Book of Spies The Book of Spies: An Anthology of Literary Espionage Edited by Alan Furst Modern Library, 2003 400 pp., $14.95, paper The Great Game The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage Fiction by Frederick Hitz Knopf, 2004 224 pp., $22

The Report of the 9/11 Commission has put the CIA and related services in an unflattering spotlight and provoked an unprecedented debate over the structure of the U.S. intelligence program. But for every American who reads the report, a hundred will head to the local multiplex to see The Bourne Supremacy or The Manchurian Candidate. At home, they may have a copy of Absolute Friends, the latest novel by John le Carré, or Dark Voyage, the new book from Alan Furst, who has supplanted le Carré as the reigning master of espionage fiction. It is from such stories, in print or onscreen—from John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps and the exploits of James Bond in all his guises; from Eric Ambler and William F. Buckley, Jr.; from Len Deighton and Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry and all the rest—that most of us, however sophisticated we imagine ourselves to be, have formed our notions about the shadowland of "intelligence." Even spies, after all, read spy fiction.

But how much—or how little—do these notions correspond to reality? Two recent books shed light on this question. In The Book of Spies, Alan Furst has compiled a lively anthology of literary espionage. And in The Great Game, Frederick Hitz—formerly inspector general at the CIA—attempts to sort out the hard reality of espionage fiction from the confabulations of myth. Both books belong on the shelf right next to the 9/11 report.

In his introduction to what he calls "the literature of clandestine political conflict," Furst includes a fine description of the evolution of the modern spy novel. While from the time of Moses there have been spies, and then literature about spies, modern spy fiction began with Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905 (though Furst does not include an excerpt from The Scarlet Pimpernel in his collection). Others at about the same time, notably Rudyard Kipling in Kim, were also pioneers of the genre. Kipling's phrase, the "Great Game," not only set the tone for much of the last century's intelligence literature but also now provides a title for Frederick Hitz's analysis of spy fiction. Both Furst and Hitz treat the notion of a Great Game as foundational to how governments actually conduct intelligence, yet Furst in particular wisely notes that espionage fiction evolved its characteristic forms in synchronization with the century's great international dramas, the two world wars (1918-1945) and then especially the Cold War (1945-1989), which lasted considerably longer than the period enclosing the century's two most catastrophic shooting wars.

Furst chooses his eleven authors with two criteria in mind: good writing and authenticity. By "authenticity," he means that the author had firsthand knowledge of intelligence work as an active member of a service or as someone deeply involved in politics. Furst, of course, is not the first to edit an anthology of spy literature. Probably his most notable predecessor was Allen Dulles, active intelligence operative in World War II and then, in the 1950s, head of the CIA. 1 Dulles introduced his collection of 32 tales by opining that spy fiction is the best medium to portray the fundamental conflicts between good and evil that are involved in tensions between modern nations.

While Furst does an admirable job of giving good examples of the literature from different periods, he does not offer what Hitz provides: introductions and annotations with bits of information from real espionage cases. The pages of The Great Game arise out of a freshman seminar that Hitz has been teaching at Princeton since leaving his position at the CIA. Rather than a straightforward anthology, Hitz gives us something like a series of lectures, with selections from the best espionage literature interwoven with explanations of the spy business along with illustrations from real espionage cases. Along the way, he tries to show how some of the figures from real spy work provided the raw material for characters developed by Ambler, le Carré, and other masters of the genre.

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