Over Christmas, I’ve been looking at the spy novels genre in some detail. I read The Thirty Nine Steps (John Buchan) when I was a schoolboy, and then Riddle of the Sands (Erskine Childers) when in my late twenties.
I think that these two books defined the genre way back at the start of the twentieth century, though there were a couple of other contenders: The Man Who Was Thursday (G. K. Chesterton) and The Secret Agent (Joseph Conrad).
