Most Famous Spies in Fiction

Next to James Bond, George Smiley is possibly the most famous fictional spy of all time. Smiley, who appeared in nine John Le Carré novels, is the anti-Bond. Smiley was introduced in “A Call for the Dead” as a “breathtakingly ordinary” man with thinning hair and glasses who wears ill-fitting suits and longs for the love of his serially unfaithful wife, Lady Ann. Besides matching wits with communist spies, Smiley also deals with betrayal from within the British secret service ranks. Among those who played him in the movies and television are Alec Guinness, James Mason, and Gary Oldman.

Blackford Oakes is a CIA operative created in 1975 by conservative writer and lecturer William F. Buckley, Jr. The first of Buckley’s 11 Oakes novels was titled “Saving the Queen.” Buckley said he wrote the books as a counterpoint to the prevailing “rogue CIA” stereotype. The novels cover the Cold War timeline from 1952 to 1987, with Oakes confronting historical figures such as revolutionary Che Guevara and British defector Kim Philby.

Ian Fleming, British author, journalist, and former naval intelligence officer, wrote the first of his 12 novels and two short-story collections about James Bond, the British secret service agent with the license to kill, from his home in Jamaica in 1953. The phlegmatic, gadget-brandishing, famously womanizing 007 would become a worldwide phenomenon, spawning 25 full-length films that starred seven different actors. Movie-makers are weighing who the next Bond will be for the 26th James Bond film.

British historian and novelist Len Deighton wrote seven spy novels whose protagonist – unnamed in the books, but dubbed Harry Palmer in a series of films based on them – is a former petty thief who lives in seedy apartments, is constantly falling behind on his utility bills, and doesn’t have meaningful relationships with anyone. Michael Caine played Palmer in a series of films in the 1960s, and the role was taken on by Joe Cole (“Peaky Blinders”) for a mini-series in 2022 .

Rudyard Kipling drew on his personal experiences in India to create the character of Kimball O’Hara – Kim – the orphan son of a British soldier and an opium addict in India. As a boy in the streets of Lahore, he befriends a British secret service agent and is used as a spy to bring messages to a regional British commander.

Mick Herron has written 13 novels and novellas in the so-called Slough House series featuring spy Jackson Lamb, a slovenly, acerbic has-been British spy with a keen intellect and useful connections. Slough House is, in Herron’s fiction, a kind of dead-end limbo for spies who have screwed up but can’t be fired for various reasons. The stories have been adapted for television under the name “Slow Horses,” starring Gary Oldman as Lamb.

From the imagination of Charles McCarry springs the spy Paul Christopher, born in pre-Nazi Germany. Christopher is something of a renaissance man, elegant and fastidious, but wickedly skilled at spycraft. McCarry knows of what he writes. He was a correspondent for the Army newspaper “Stars and Stripes” and later became a speechwriter for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. McCarry joined the CIA in 1958 and traveled the world as a deep-cover operative. He left the agency in 1967 and started writing his Christopher novels – 10 in all.

Alec Leamas is the aging, world-weary spy sent on a final, fateful mission to East Germany during the very tense years of the Cold War in the early John Le Carré masterpiece “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” Richard Burton inhabited the role in the film version, embodying the archetypical burned-out secret agent, reflecting the toll that spycraft takes on an individual.

The prolific Tom Clancy wrote 17 novels featuring Jack Ryan and sold more than 100 million books before his death in 2013, and four different writers have continued to turn out Ryan-centered works since then. The novels typically delve into the technical details and science of the craft as pracrticed by Ryan, a former Marine and onetime stockbroker who joins the CIA as an analyst. Four Clancy books – “The Hunt for Red October,” “Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger,” and “The Sum of All Fears” – have been turned into box-office hits. Ryan has been portrayed by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine on the big screen, and by John Krasinski in a series on Amazon Prime.

Quiller is a British spy created by Adam Hall, one of numerous pseudonyms used by prolific novelist and playwright Elleston Trevor. Quiller appears in 19 books published over a span of 31 years beginning in 1965. After masquerading as a German soldier guarding a concentration camp and freeing enslaved Jews, Quiller is recruited by a shadowy British spy agency called the Bureau. Quiller doesn’t carry a gun, but he’s highly skilled in martial arts and because he can resist torture, doesn’t require a cyanide pill when he goes on assignments. Quiller also appeared in a spy motion picture, “The Quiller Memorandum,” in 1966. In it he investigated a neo-Nazi organization.

Jason Bourne was introduced to the world in a series of three novels by thriller writer Robert Ludlum and has continued his adventures since Ludlum’s death in numerous sequels by Eric Van Lustbader and Brian Freeman (both accomplished spy-story authors in their own right). Bourne is an alias of David Webb, a foreign service officer who specializes in Far Eastern affairs. The novel was first adapted for television in 1980 and later became the basis for a series of films starring Matt Damon (and in one instance, Jeremy Renner).

“Ashenden,” published in 1926, is drawn from Somerset Maugham’s experiences as an MI6 agent during World War I. It is considered one of the first realistic spy novels, capturing the cynical nature of the craft and its impact on people. The novel influenced authors of later spy fiction such as Graham Greene, Len Deighton, and John Le Carré.

Magnus Pym is John Le Carré‘s “perfect spy.” Pym is a high-ranking British intelligence officer in his mid-fifties who disappears after his father’s death. It’s discovered that he’s been a double agent working for Czechoslovakia. The story focuses on Pym’s life and his complicated relationship with his grifter father and his Czech handler, and how the years of espionage have deeply affected his identity and sense of loyalty. The character of Pym’s father is based on Le Carré‘s own father, who was indeed a con man.

Donald Hamilton wrote 27 novels featuring Matt Helm, a highly competent and ruthless assassin, tasked with taking out enemy agents. Helm’s first assignments are during World War II and he continues his activities after the war is over. A noteworthy characteristic of the series is the continuity between novels. In 1965, Columbia Pictures bought the rights to eight of the novels and four of them became movies. Dean Martin starred as Helm, basically playing himself as a fun-loving, easy-going girl-chaser – nothing like the original character in the novels.

Londoner Adolf Verloc, a mustachioed, heavy-set man in his 40s, runs a shop that sells pornography and contraceptives. He’s also a spy for an unnamed foreign embassy and is involved in a revolutionary movement, though he’s not ideological. All this is unknown to his wife, whose mentally challenged brother is recruited by Verloc to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. After the man is killed, Verloc’s enraged wife stabs him to death. Alfred Hitchcock loosely interpreted Conrad’s novel for his 1936 film “Sabotage.”

Vince Flynn wrote 13 books featuring CIA operative Mitch Rapp; since his death, thriller writer Kyle Mills has penned eight more. Rapp joined the CIA after the girl he’s in love with was killed in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. He is now assigned to thwart foreign terrorist attacks, sometimes using methods that push the boundaries of what is usually considered acceptable. “American Assassin,” the 11th Rapp book, was the basis of a 2017 film featuring Dylan O’Brien (“Teen Wolf”).

English novelist and comic-strip writer Peter O’Donnell created Blaise – originally in a comics format – as a formidable female character able to do heroic deeds as well as, or better than, her male counterparts. She and her associate Willie Garvin handle special assignments with sometimes lethal force for British intelligence, but unlike James Bond, to whom she was often compared to, she had a life outside spying. A 1966 movie starring Monica Vitti as the title character was seen as a Bond send-up and failed at the box office. A direct-to-video film called “My Name is Modesty” was released in 2003 with a “Quentin Tarantino Presents…” logo, and the director has sometimes expressed interest in making a Modesty Blaise film of his own, though thus far this hasn’t happened.

Len Deighton authored two sets of trilogies featuring Bernard Samson, the son of a British agent who operated in Germany in World War II and runs Great Britain’s Berlin unit after the war. Bernard grew up in post-war Berlin but is looked askance by both Germans and the British. As a British agent, he’s brave but cynical and highly disrespectful of his superiors. His wife Fiona figures prominently in the novels because she defects to East Germany, leaving her family behind – which may or may not be part of a devious double-cross. Two novels from the trilogy were adapted into a TV series that aired in 1988, featuring Ian Holm as Samson.

Graham Greene, who worked for the British secret service MI6 during World War II, modeled his character James Wormold on a Spanish double agent called “Garbo” who fed German intelligence false information about Allied troop movements and operations. Greene set his book in Cuba during the Cold War, a conflict that he found absurd. The book was made into a movie in 1960 that starred Alec Guinness as Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman who becomes a spy so he can support his free-spending daughter.

Prize-winning Irish author Banville gave the name Victor Maskell to his stand-in for Anthony Blunt – one of the infamous Cambridge graduates who were spies for the Soviet Union. A closeted homosexual who was the knighted curator of the Queen’s pictures, Blunt revealed in 1979 that he had been spying for the Soviet Union for decades. The Maskell character is an art expert himself. He gains access to the royal family when he goes on a secret mission to post-war Germany to procure documents that could be damaging to the royals due to the Duke of Windsor’s dalliances with the Nazis. Maskell becomes keeper of the royal family’s art collection.

Graham Greene’s Alden Pyle in “the quiet American” is an idealistic Harvard graduate and son of a professor who is inspired by his intellectual hero York Harding to help make sweeping change in Vietnam. Pyle joins the American secret service. He is honorable and brave but also believes any action, no matter how questionable, is justifiable in bringing Vietnam to his idealized view of society.

After 33 years as a well-traveled member of the CIA, Jason Matthews created the Red Sparrow trilogy, featuring Russian spy Dominika Egorova and CIA agent Nathaniel Nash. Egorova has aspirations of becoming a ballerina. But Russia had other plans for her and envisions Egorova as a “sparrow” who could use her sexuality to trap would-be targets to work for Russia. Nash is an effective counterintelligence agent who falls in love with Egorova. Jennifer Lawrence starred as Egorova in a 2018 movie based on the original novel in the trilogy, called simply “Red Sparrow.”

Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson drew on his experiences covering Iraq to author 12 novels about spy John Wells. The novels cover Wells’ exploits working undercover for the U.S. and cover a range of America’s 21st-century foreign-policy concerns: Al Qaeda, North Korea, nuclear terrorism, CIA black sites, the war in Afghanistan, ISIS, the U.S. relationship with Israel, and the new Cold War with Russia. The only American agent to successfully infiltrate Al Qaeda, Wells is fluent in Arabic and a practicing Muslim.

Stella Rimington served as director general of Great Britain’s security service, MI5, from 1992 to 1996. After she retired, she wrote her first spy novel, launching the Liz Carlyle series. Carlyle is a smart, ambitious MI5 agent schooled in counter-espionage. With the Cold War over, she’s tasked with thwarting assassination plots in London against Russian expats who’ve run afoul of Vladimir Putin.