Spy thrillers are everywhere — why are they so popular?

Spies have infiltrated our television and movie screens.

Fictional tales of espionage date back centuries but our fascination with intelligence agencies and the people who work for them has seemingly reached new heights in the streaming era.

Black Bag is the latest instalment of the spy genre. The Steven Soderbergh film is a glamorous thriller about married spies who live and work together at the Secret Intelligence Service in London.

In the film, George (Michael Fassbender) is tasked with identifying a mole inside the agency.

It’s a high-stakes mission made infinitely more complicated by one of the names on his list of suspects: his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett).

This isn’t the first movie to pit husband and wife spies against each other or to explore the complicated relationship dynamics of professional killers, whose livelihoods depend on their ability to lie and deceive.

In the 2005 film Mr and Mrs Smith, starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the married assassins are secretly assigned to kill one another.

A television remake of the same name was released on Amazon Prime in January 2024, joining a slate of spy dramas to grace our screens in the last 12 months — including Netflix’s Black Doves, The Night Agent, Apple TV’s Slow Horses (now in its fourth season), and Paramount’s The Agency.

“People have always been interested and intrigued by spying,” Chris Costa, a former intelligence officer and national security adviser to President Donald Trump in his first term, tells ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra.

And experts believe this obsession with sinister plots could be a reflection of the times.

A short history of spy fiction

Spy fiction first surfaced in the 19th century, popularised by the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, who drew inspiration from the American War of Independence for his elaborate tales of espionage.

A century later, the prolific writer William Le Queux took the genre to new heights when he began publishing a series of widely read spy novels centred around German spies operating in Europe in the years leading up to World War I.

“Such was the level of fuel that he created that the British government of the time actually created the forerunner of MI5 and MI6,” said David Rymer, an author who is researching Australian espionage fiction for a PHD at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

“It’s possibly the only genre … that has actually created an entire government department that has been replicated around the world.”

Spy fiction evolved after World War II in tandem with the formation of the world’s biggest spying agencies, giving rise to Ian Fleming’s James Bond as the archetype of a secret service agent.

In the 1960s, John Le Carre and Len Deighton entered the frame, introducing “cerebral spying” as a game of intellectual chess and reinventing the spy persona from a smooth-talking member of the elite to a cockney everyman, according to Rymer.

Two decades later, author Tom Clancy’s character Jack Ryan introduced a new wave of American espionage fiction.

Many spy writers were former intelligence, their fictionalised accounts inspired by — but by no means reflective of — their own work in the trade.

“A great deal of life in an intelligence agency is as humdrum as in any other organisation,” former intelligence officer John Horton once reflected in the Washington Post.

“Rather than leaping from the dark bridge of a ship to the deck of the Soviet vessel with the hostages aboard, he is more likely to be sitting tired-eyed at his desk that night, proofreading an intelligence report.”

But paperwork and office politics didn’t sell books or TV shows, so the heroic spy often met their match in dastardly villains that were Nazis or Russians — until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Just after the end of the Cold War, espionage writers wrung their hands and went, ‘Okay, we don’t have an opposition. How do we write?” Mr Rymer says.

A new era of spy fiction post 9/11

This question loomed over the genre for almost a decade before the September 11 terrorist attacks and consequent war on terror.

Intelligence agencies were in the midst of downsizing and restructuring at the end of the Cold War and reassessing their purpose, says Dr Melanie Brand, a lecturer in intelligence studies at Macquarie University.

“After 9/11, all of that changed, and there was a huge amount of recruitment and massive budget increases and that’s had a profound change,” she says.

The evolving intelligence landscape was a source of inspiration for spy thriller writers, who have in turn shaped the public’s view of the industry.

Dr Brand believes a lot of our knowledge of intelligence agencies still stems from popular culture to this day.

“I think we all know that James Bond isn’t real but, without any other sort of alternative explanations, we are subconsciously influenced by those kinds of ideas [in film and television],” she says.

“I think that’s especially the case in Australia, because there isn’t much popular culture that deals with Asia … and so our understanding of Australian intelligence is really marked by what we see of UK and US intelligence in popular culture especially.”

It’s a different experience for former intelligence officers watching these programs.

“My family could tell you that I struggle to watch some of the spy dramas on TV and even documentaries, because I’m really looking for realism,” says Mr Costa, who is now the executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington DC.

“But also I would point out that fiction provides, and I’ve learned this the last seven years working at the Spy Museum, fiction is a good departure point to say, ‘hey, that’s real, and that would never happen’. So it is a good starting point.”

Espionage fiction has a lot of cross over with other popular genres, Mr Rymer says, such as crime fiction, action-adventure thrillers, historical fiction and military fiction.

On the small screen, Dr Brand says the academic consensus is that a lot of spy dramas stem from police procedural shows, and serve similar purposes.

“It allows the audience to explore threats to security and their safety, but in a safe way, and they’re normally resolved at the end of the story” she says.

Dr Brand says this is especially useful right now, “[since] there’s a lot of anxiety, changing geopolitical tensions [and] shifts in power relationships across the globe”.

“I think that has a huge influence on why spy thrillers are so popular at the moment.”

Understanding our obsession with espionage

That assessment has been echoed by the creators of recent spy shows that appeal to our strong desire to resolve ambiguity.

“The world feels very uncertain to a lot of people right now, and if there’s one thing human beings really can’t stand, it’s uncertainty,” Joe Barton, the writer and creator of Black Doves, told The Guardian.

“What these shows do is let us in on secrets and peek behind the curtain.”

Espionage fiction has always drawn on timeless themes of the human experience, such as internal conflict and the search for home, according to Dr Brand.

She points to Black Doves as one example, with the character of Sam Young (Ben Whishaw), a skilled assassin and friend of Helen Webb (Keira Knightley), struggling to reconcile his job with his conscience and yearning for a normal life.

“Home is both what the hero is trying to save and the place that he can’t really return to because he’s working in that ethically grey area of intelligence, and he has to move out of intelligence work before he can move back to home,” she says.

“But this is part of the moral code that the heroes and the anti-heroes are always working to preserve, their sense of home and their sense of the domestic.

“Obviously, with the new spy fiction a lot of the new stuff is more ethically and morally murky, and these messages aren’t as clear, but if you start to look for them, you can see that that’s typically a pattern that you find in most of them.”

Dr Brand says the recent interest in espionage dramas reflects the times we live in, with audiences increasingly pessimistic about the future and less trusting of government and institutions.

“We can perhaps think of that as people exploring sort of changing power structures within nation states and even within democracies.

“And [these shows] allow us to explore that.”