Gissings, Ivy Compton-Burnetts or Angela Carters. A genre has rules and recipes, or
at least expectations. Just as Shakespeare’s comedies end in marriage, his tragedies in
death, so readers know that a detective story will have a crime, normally solved by a
detective, at the end; that the chief actors in a children’s book will be children, and
that something magical or at least nice will happen to them in the end. Likewise, a
spy novel will have bluff and double bluff. It is generally the case that authors who
write autobiographies should reveal that they were miserable at school.Detective fiction
Given these rules, recipes, conventions, expectations, the author of detective fiction
can place the story in Venice, Copenhagen or Botswana rather than in a country
house or in London; or make the detective a woman; or blunder upon the truth after
many mistakes; but not leave the case unsolved. Likewise, children’s books do not
end with children being murdered. Genre has norms and variations, and the varia-
tions confirm the norms: there is a satisfaction in seeing rules observed, or varied
with the right kind of ingenuity. There are also sophistications of these genres which
query the conventions and leave conclusions in doubt, although, as with psycholog-
ical Westerns, these are often less satisfying. An advantage of genre fiction from the
professional writer’s point of view is that it sometimes makes money. It is easier to
sell standardized products: Agatha Christie used every few months to deliver to her
publishers, William Collins and Sons, a manuscript which never needed any editing.
The print run was large, and at editorial meetings there was always a welcome for the
news that ‘the new Agatha Christie’ had arrived. Many a novelist, academic and poet,
ashamed of going down-market, has published genre fiction under a pseudonymSpy fiction
John Le Carré
A reminder that genre fiction can reach beyond the topical and the cult market to
reach the lower slopes of literature came in the spy novels which John Cornwall
(John le Carré) has bee n writing for fifty years, the best of which were early:The Spy
Who Came in from the Cold(1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy(1968).The subject
is not new: the Iliad shows Odysseus spying, and the fall of Troy in the Aeneidis engi-
neered by a double agent. Those who query the claim to literary quality should read
the first chapter ofTinker, Tailor.Le Carré follows the examples of such popular
novels as Rudyard Kipling’s exceptional Kim and the spy fiction of Erskine Childers
and John Buchan. He brings to the genre a sardonic scepticism, and a minimal hope
fo r the possibility of honourable conduct; the same pessimism is found earlier, in
Joseph Conrad’s novels of political terrorism (see p. 231), and in the ‘intelligence’
fiction of Graham Greene. Conrad was anti-Russian, Greene anti-American, as is Le
Carré. He has none of the metaphysical interest of his superiors, but is technically
highly professional, and a deadly social observer. Cornwell’s father was a criminal
confidence trickster. The son carries double bluff to new lengths, but keeps to the
rules: the primacy of plot over characters; gentlemen and players; and honour or
dishonour in the treatment of the vulnerable, especially of women. The rest is tech-
nique and ‘tradecraft’. Le Carré defended the spymaster ‘Kim’ Philby when Philby was
exposed as having betrayed British agents to the USSR. Finding capitalist democracy430 15 · CONTEMPORARIES