Leslie Howard: Propaganda Artist

This chapter is devoted to the wartime radio broadcasts and films of Leslie Howard, which include Pimpernel Smith (1940) and 49th Parallel (1941). Howard worked with the Ministry of Information and independently for two political purposes: to help build British popular support for the war and to encourage Americans to join Britain in defeating Nazi conquest and persecution. He became both a critical and popular voice advocating for Britain, its people and Hitler's targeted victims, rebutting negative connotations of propaganda. His personal voice and anecdotes on radio, combinations of satire, thriller and romance in Pimpernel Smith, and epic thriller in 49th Parallel were designed to forge a mutually sympathetic transatlantic community emanating from his very successful years in America as a Hollywood star.

Conclusion

This conclusion focuses on the theme of suspicion as the narrative and heuristic bridge connecting espionage fiction and exile. Suspicion drives characters and plots and serves as an over-determined metaphor, designating nations, organisations, ideologies and individuals as agents as well as objects of distrust. The chapter argues that the British fictions studied in this book express the urge to provide counter-narratives to the casual prejudices, wilful ignorance and silences that constituted official and general responses to political and racialized victims of exile in their times and that reverberate today.

John Le Carré’s Never-ending War of Exile

This chapter shows how World War II is a central thematic and political presence in le Carré’s novels. Detailed studies of the expressionist techniques in Call for the Dead (1961) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) show how Cold War intrigue is intertwined with unvanquished elements of Fascism that reappear in Britain as double agents now working for East Germany. Villainy and victimhood are also enmeshed as Holocaust survivors betrayed by western indifference turn to Communism, creating the tragic overtones of these political spy thrillers.

Exile – The Heart of the Secret World

The introduction situates the book in its different frames of reference, and historical and theoretical contexts to show how exile is a persistent political and narrative concern in spy fiction and extends to other current interest in citizenship and belonging. This includes experiential and philosophical definitions of exile and their relation to the genre of spy thriller, twentieth century political crises, and propaganda in relation to political art. It reviews various scholarly studies of spy fiction to show how fictional representations of espionage as tied to states of exile demonstrates historical, narrative, and analytical complexity. The introduction then outlines each of the following chapters and how they relate thematically to each other.

Double Agency: Women Writers of Espionage Fiction

This chapter examines the fiction of Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, With different narrative techniques, each of them dramatise ethical and political concerns about the viability of a second world war. They also reshape the genre of spy fiction by creating women protagonists who represent keen insights into narrative and political relationships, particularly deracination, exile, and antisemitism. Their novels respond critically to the way conventional spy thrillers draw heroes and villains as caricatures of good and evil and women as disposable attractions. Each writer engages gender analysis as a significant part of international politics and the genre of spy fiction.

Eric Ambler: Espionage Chronicler of the 1930s

This chapter examines Eric Ambler's novels of the 1930s, including The Dark Frontier (1936), Background to Danger (1937), Epitaph for a Spy (1938), Cause for Alarm (1938), The Mask of Dimitrios (Also titled A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939). Detailing Ambler's use of a gothic expressionist style, the chapter shows how his anti-fascist stance led to narrative experiments combining popular genre conventions with polemical fiction to critique the more egregious stereotypes spy fiction had previously deployed and to create sympathy on behalf of Hitler’s targeted victims.