From the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, British espionage fiction documents relations between the UK and its European neighbours. In many countries, spying was conducted under the auspices of the Foreign Office, albeit at arm’s length. From the 1920s until 1968, British spies often worked in Passport Control Offices, which were attached to consulates in Europe and around the world. These spies, however, did not hold diplomatic status. In novels such as The Riddle of the Sands (1903), The Secret Agent (1907), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), A Small Town in Germany (1968), and A Perfect Spy (1986), amateur and professional spies take diplomatic cover or work in tandem with government officials. More often than not, early spy fiction presumes that European interests are inimical to British sovereignty and security. In The Riddle of the Sands, Germans plan to invade England. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, continental Europeans foment an assassination plot against the Greek Prime Minister to instigate a war. Although Cold War alignments and membership in the European Union change this dynamic, Britons remain suspicious of European motives. In this regard, British spy fiction asks the same question in different historical contexts: in what ways are Britons European, or not?

Don DeLillo, this chapter argues, has created innovative narratives from the typecast materials of popular genre fiction. It demonstrates that genre novels and films, from spy thrillers and noir to mafia stories and horror, have often served DeLillo as, counterintuitively, a blank canvas – not as a narrowing template or pre-determined plot but as grounds for subversion, especially of the ideologies popular genres tend to encode, including the myths of individual agency with which DeLillo’s characters often strongly (and wrongheadedly) identify. DeLillo has remained interested in responding to generic narratives throughout his nearly fifty-year career because genres’ tired conventions and predictable endings often act as foils to his far more distinctive explorations of violence and death, that real-world ending, particularly in his late-career invocations of horror. The chapter examines primarily examples from Running Dog, Players, Libra, Underworld, The Body Artist, and Point Omega.

The figure of the spy is almost invariably tied to the concept of the nation and of the sovereign state – so much so that, as this chapter suggests, the removal of the state from the spy story would amount to what might be thought of as an ontological reconfiguration of the genre. William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy – Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010) – effects just such a reconfiguration. The chapter traces the ways in which Gibson reimagines the figure of the spy in the age of the global and unearths the implications of this transformation. While the centrality of the nation-state has much to do with the conservativism that typically underpins spy fiction, the absence of the state in the Blue Ant trilogy’s global setting does not serve to transform a fundamentally conservative genre into a progressive one; rather, it points to something that is in fact more regressive: the emergence of a neo-feudal world.

This chapter offers a detailed reading of McEwan’s 2012 novel Sweet Tooth as a highly self-conscious and allusive literary spy thriller of the Cold War era, one which invites a renewed attention to the Cold War themes, ideas and literary strategies which have been important in his work since the late 1970s in which the novel is set. These flourished especially in the two novels written around the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Innocent and Black Dogs which also receive extended treatment here. In McEwan’s reworking of the Cold War spy thriller as postmodern literary fiction we find, it is argued, a recurrent fascination with misunderstandings and readjustments in emotional and political relations between the sexes as an analogy for Cold War politics and vice versa. Added to this McEwan increasingly packs his fictions with informed literary debate that constitute a profound exploration of literary genres and of the complex relationship between author and reader.