BIBLIOGRAPHY• 609withThe Fourth Seal; William Gibson inWild Career; andStrange In-
telligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Serviceby Hector Bywater. Sir
Paul Dukes, the author ofRed Dusk and the Morrow: Adventures and
Investigations in Soviet Russia, returned to his theme of his own
involvement in espionage in 1938 withThe Story of ST-25. Similarly,
George Hill, who was also operating in Russia during and after the Bol-
shevik Revolution, wroteGo Spy the Landin 1932 and tapped the same
vein in 1936 withDreaded Hour. Whereas Hill wrote about his own
assignment, Henry Landau set a precedent in 1934 by making more
general revelations withAll’s Fair, which he followed soon afterward
with three other titles, all describing his wartime activities for the Secret
Intelligence Service (SIS) on the continent, and all published from the
safety of the United States where he could not be threatened with prose-
cution under the Official Secrets Act.
That the authorities took the confidentiality that was supposed to sur-
round SIS seriously had been demonstrated in 1932 when Compton
Mackenzie was convicted and fined at the Old Bailey for indiscretions
contained in his memoirs,Greek Memories, in which the author re-
called his participation in SIS’s wartime operations in the Eastern Med-
iterranean. Others in not dissimilar positions published memoirs
apparently without incurring the wrath of Whitehall. For example,
Edwin Woodhall, one of a handful of Metropolitan Police Special
Branch officers seconded to France on counterintelligence duties in
1914, wroteDetective and Secret Service Daysin 1932, followed soon
afterward bySpies of the Great War.
Within this first category should be included those authors who wrote
what they claimed to be firsthand accounts of their exploits that did not
always bear close scrutiny. The tone was set withMy Secret Service,by
‘‘The Man Who Dined with the Kaiser.’’ This was followed byI Spy!
Sensational Disclosures of a British Secret Service Agentby ‘‘Baroness
Carla Jenssen’’—actually Mrs. Stafford Lewis, famously described by
MI5’s Guy Liddell as ‘‘a bankrupt and an adventuress’’—which is
among the first in the genre that was to become especially prevalent
after World War II. Similarly, Marthe McKenna wrote no less than three
other works of nonfiction about espionage after the success ofI Was a
Spy!, and also produced eight spy novels. The gray area between fact
and fiction, which in later years was to become even more blurred, was
exemplified by Sidney Reilly’s wife Pepita who, eight years after his