What is Spy Adjacent? (& why it bothers me)

Let’s get straight down to it. What’s a spy story?

And then what’s ‘spy adjacent’?
 
The latter is a term I’ve encountered in the always thought-provoking Spybrary facebook group, most recently in a debate about whether The Third Man is a spy story or not.
 
As I said, thought-provoking.
 
Let’s start another way...
 
What is a spy?
 
When I was a kid playing my Waddingtons board game Spy Ring, I thought it was obvious. A spy was someone in a hat and trench coat, collar turned up, lurking around near embassies (whatever they were) who felt a bit like the cartoon detective in The Pink Panther (some confusion creeping in there)…
 
…and what he wasn’t was a secret agent, who was someone who wore slick suits, used gadgets and drove cars that you could get Corgi models of – not only Bond’s DB5 but even The Man From Uncle’s ‘THRUSH-BUSTER’!! (Google it. Carefully.)
 
At which stage, if you’re like me, a couple of things probably happen next.
 
Maybe you’re caught spying on your sister or a neighbour sunbathing. Now you know what spying means – and the importance of avoiding counter-espionage measures.
 
Or, some smart-arse mocks you for getting MI5 and MI6 mixed up and you vow never to make the same mistake again, even if virtually everyone else does… I mean seriously, it’s like apostrophes!
 
Eventually, of course, you read le Carré and the like and you come to accept that an agent or a spy isn’t what you thought; that’s an agent runner or a case officer. Or maybe they’re assets handled by intelligence officers. And along the way you learn the difference between legals and illegals, espionage and counter espionage, and counter intelligence and… well, maybe that’s still a little confusing. Especially when you read Spycatcher and realise how much spying goes into countering it. Or anything about all the WWII agents being turned and run back as doubles.
 
The big takeaway, of course, as childhood absolutes start acquiring shades of grey, is that a spy is probably not a highly-trained, bikini-babe-bestrewn action hero and more likely someone who’s been manipulated into betraying secrets by an equally morally compromised handler. At least, that’s what the prevailing wind in fiction has been telling us ever since le Carré and Len Deighton punctured Fleming fever and reminded us about Graham Greene.
 
Which brings me back to The Third Man, for which Greene wrote the screenplay, and to that cursed term ‘spy adjacent’.
 
What does it mean?
 
On the face of it, it appears to signify a story which, whilst brushing past the world of spies and spying, is really focused on something else. Black Ops maybe. Or a love story. Or, as with The Third Man, crime.
 
But, I think, that word ‘Crime’ exemplifies the problem, especially with a capital letter. This isn’t really about understanding and redefining works of fiction for the purposes of literary or media studies. It’s about shoving them into genres for the sake of convenience. If it’s structured like a detective story, with a murder, an investigation, a revelation, a capture – and/or if it's rooted in the world of organised crime (both of which are true here) – it’s a crime story.  And if it’s on film, especially shadowy black & white with lots of hats and Dutch angles, it’s Noir.
 
So even if it feels like a spy story, sorry, it can’t be. It can only be ‘spy adjacent’.
 
Which in this particular case is fine, I guess. I mean, I might argue that a story set in the Inter-Allied Zone in post-war Vienna, in a milieu that’s so stuffed with spies and secrets that the policing has to be done by MPs who seem a lot more like military intelligence or counterintelligence officers... a story which features an antagonist who’s doing unspecified favours for the Soviets in return for safe haven in their zone and has a Russian ‘liaison officer’ plotting to forcibly repatriate a Czech émigré and presumably falsely accuse her of espionage… still feels kinda spy-ish. Not least because what it’s really about is betrayal, and that’s as spy-central as it gets. But OK, the main thrust of the story is about racketeering not politics and the main character does more investigating than actual infiltrating. It’s spy adjacent. Got it.
 
So what about The Odessa File and The Day of the Jackal? They’re political, and they feature operations to counter underground groups – the kind of thing MI5 and its pretty-spy-ish operatives would be getting involved in if they were set in Britain instead of France and Germany. Plus, with all their assumed identities, they feel like espionage thrillers, and one of them gave us a piece of tradecraft that is still shamelessly imitated to this day. Are they only spy adjacent too?
 
Seemingly so.
 
And seemingly, I would argue, because it’s an easy catch-all basket for anything which isn’t quite what you expect a spy story to be.
 
But hang on a moment. Not every spy story has to feature spies acquiring state secrets or spy-catchers catching moles or Jackson Lamb letting out another fart, does it? And I’m not talking arty-farty genre-crossing either. I mean… Thunderball! By which I mean many other Bond stories too, of course, and much besides. SPECTRE doesn’t really seem to do much Counter-intelligence, Terrorism or Revenge when it comes down to it. It’s all about the Extortion. It’s a racket, like Harry Lime’s black market penicillin. So does that make it spy adjacent?
 
Or take another example. The much-adored spy thriller The Night Manager. The antagonist is an arms dealer, a racketeer. And the protagonist, although recruited and prepped by the spooks in classic le Carré style, is a civilian who has blundered into this world and is motivated by personal feelings, just like The Third Man’s Holly Martins. So is this to be rebranded ‘spy adjacent’? OK, it has some Bond-esque ‘undercover’ behaviour and some Bond-esque locations to make it feel less like a crime or revenge thriller – but then, in the TV version, it also presents us with a glimpsed shopping list of the latest British weapons that puts it firmly in the realm of outright comedy (Vulcan bombers and Trident submarines for crowd control, I seem to recall…) 
 
The fact of the matter, surely, is that much of what we call spy stuff is more like the above. As the Cold War developed (or didn’t) and then ended (or didn’t), we tired of faceless KGB apparatchiks (erm, yeah...) and demanded a more varied cast of baddies, which of necessity brought in colourful criminals of all kinds – often linked to espionage, sometimes not, but rarely perceived as just being (ho-hum) adjacent.

And I’m thinking, too, (because I usually do) of Modesty Blaise. She was frequently touted as ‘the female James Bond’ and referred to as a glamorous spy or secret agent, presumably because she was recruited by British Intelligence. But look at those jobs she was recruited for, or accidentally fell into in later stories. Almost invariably they involved drawing on her criminal background to take on some of that colourful cast of criminal baddies, and often by confronting rather than spying on them. Doesn’t that make her at best spy adjacent?
 
Because I’m coming to the point at last. Modesty was a large part of the inspiration behind my ‘Chasing Mercury’ series, even though they’re set more in The Third Man’s milieu.
 
I confidently decided that the first book, The Borodino Sacrifice, was a historical spy/action thriller. It features a rogue wartime secret agent and an ex-soldier recruited by British Intelligence to track her down in the ruins of post-war Europe, as the Iron Curtain descends with all the political intrigues that entails. The antagonists are renegade Nazis and several competing Soviet intelligence and counter-espionage agencies, including SMERSh. So spy, yes, not adjacent?
 
Then the sequel, The Herrenhaus Forfeit, which launches at the end of August. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a continuation of the first book, as well as a standalone adventure in its own right. But for this novel I’ve changed things up. This time the main antagonists are either British gangsters who’ve infiltrated the occupation forces in Germany (there’s a big heist at the centre of the narrative) or nefarious shadow-state organisations smuggling weapons and refugees. So can I carry on calling it spy, or is it – despite the continued reliance on subterfuge, infiltration and cover stories – shuffling towards spy adjacency?
 
See my point?
 
And what’s really silly (and has prompted this outburst) is that while plotting the third book, The Safehaven Complex, I’m currently losing sleep about whether or not to nudge it back closer to pure-blood spy – at least partly in deference to the non-existent sanctity of non-existent divisional boundaries in a non-binding genre we all know is largely fictional anyway!
 
Right. Better get on with it…


THE BORODINO SACRIFICE is available on Amazon. I am seeking ARC readers for THE HERRENHAUS FORFEIT, so if you'd like a free copy (no obligation to review) get in touch.
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