ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at periods of LeRoy Panek, who has written, 'the golden age of the spy novel began in the early 1960s, and it has lasted for twenty years. During this period the spy novel separated itself decisively from the thriller'. The shift that began this golden age of the spy novel was marked by the publication in 1962 of Len Deighton's The Ipcress File and in 1963 of John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. And the new 'cynical' spy novels were not only symptoms of this crisis of confidence but accounts of its origins; this is particularly true of the novels that meditate on the figure of Kim Philby. In looking at these novels the chapter begins with their historical inaccuracies, displacements, and rewritings, not in order to judge the novels by their fidelity to the documented facts, but to see those differences as loci of meaning.