You don't need more than a visit to a bookstore to realize that the spy novel is back. "It has never really gone away, but it is clear that it has resurfaced with force", says Míriam Vall, publisher of John le Carré and Agatha Christie, who associates this with the fact that the genre has always been linked to the current political, national and international, and now it is very busy. Putin gives a lot of play to invent many geopolitical plots". The audiovisual "is also a clear influence for the literature that arrives, and the reason that there are more and more series and films with espionage plots is surely the same". The latest, Argylle, hit the big screen on Friday and stars a spy novel author.
But have the new stories coming in changed anything from the ones that brought the genre into vogue during the Cold War period? In general terms, both the publishing world and the authors think so, including the British Charles Cumming, who emphasizes that “in the old days, the antagonists used to be KGB officers. Russians still have a role to play in contemporary fiction, but more nationalities have been added to them. The most important change has been the threat from Islamist groups such as Al-Qaida, Hamas and ISIS. September 11 changed espionage and therefore spy fiction.”
Another aspect to consider is that "women gain prominence. They are no longer a simple companion of the spy. Many times they are themselves and, in the event that this is not the case, they have a decisive role", reflects the writer María Dueñas (Puertollano, 1964), who in 2009 revolutionized the Spanish literary scene with El temps entre costures, with Sira as the protagonist, a dressmaker who, "due to the time she lived in", ends up collaborating with the secret services with clandestine messages to her bosses. "At that time, at least in Spain, a character involved in something like that was not common. Now that is changing. He was always a cold, unempathetic man, who could throw himself off any building without getting scratched, who had no family and who didn't eat either, and the latter was what worried me the most."
The heirs of Ian Fleming are no strangers to the new times and, in part for this reason, they gave the go-ahead for, for the first time, a woman, Kim Sherwood, to write a new trilogy about James Bond, with Doble or nada (Roca Editorial ) as the first volume. "I didn't just want to create powerful female characters, but heroines with whom the readers can see themselves reflected - the author admits -. With this I don't want to belittle the 'Bond girls', but most of us prefer to rescue than to be rescued". Regarding agent 007, he recognizes that "he is an icon, but he is much more interesting as a human being".
Technology is another of the pillars that support today's spy novels. "Today surveillance can be done in a very different way with satellite and listening systems, through mobile phones, credit cards, and even someone can spy remotely from the armchair his house Our image of Smiley, the great manipulator of informants and agents, as well as classic black-and-white spy films, have little to do with today's drones and cyber-espionage," says Salamandra editor, Anik Lapointe, who gives as an example the novel Una noche muy larga, by Dov Alfon, which "stages a confrontation between the Chinese mafia and the Israeli intelligence services in Paris, although, in reality , the fight takes place thousands of miles away, in far-flung offices, which begin illegal eavesdropping, use new technologies such as spyware and satellite tracking to locate, intimidate and defeat the enemy.”
Carlos Zanón, writer and director of the BCNegra festival, which starts tomorrow and will run until February 11, expands views and remembers that new technologies allow not only the agent to spy, but also to spy on the neighbor or any ordinary person. "Every day we give information about ourselves and for free on social networks, and it's easy for that to turn against us."
This is what GPS is talking about, the new novel by Lucie Rico (Perpignan, 1988), which, although it is not a spy novel in use, the protagonist becomes something similar after the disappearance of her best friend, because she will try to track her down thanks to the locations that someone unknown sends to her phone. "There is a clear connection with espionage in a broad sense. It talks about the relationship between technology and everyday life in which we spy on each other", says the director of the label,
The humor has also increased in the new narratives. Eduardo Mendoza (Barcelona, 1943), for example, shows off his crazy wit in Tres enigmas para la Organización (Seix Barral), in which the agents must solve a murder in a hotel on La Rambla.
Another author who uses humor is Mick Herron (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1963). “I'm not too concerned that the most devoted readers of the genre will be puzzled because I have never been conscious of adhering to or departing from the conventions it establishes. I only write about the characters that interest me", the author of Caballos lentos admits to this newspaper.
The ex-intelligence agent and now also writer Fernando San Agustín sees with good eyes that the stories are adapted to 2024 although, "for it to be completely believable, the cardboard should not be seen. And the glamour, although it has been lowered, is not so much. Agents are just another official." But in books the imagination is allowed to fly to unsuspected places.
