Literary covers: secret writing in Anglo-American spy fiction and film

Secret writing – perceived both as the writing of secrets (act) and as the instrument of subterfuge (object) – lies at the heart of espionage operations both in fact and in fiction. Intelligence reports, secret dossiers, coded documents and dead-letter-drops are all familiar motifs in spy narratives, highlighting the significance of the written word as a vehicle of truth, deception, propaganda and misinformation.

My project explores systems of written communication in Anglo-American spy fiction and film. Sought as objects of desire, written texts raise ongoing questions about authorial identity and provenance, material authenticity, and political value. I investigate how textual and literary forms, materials, and spaces are used as a means of fashioning, concealing, conveying, and exposing secrets. Relatedly, I explore how these cultural expressions influence how the realities of the covert state – by nature unacknowledged and undocumented – are deciphered and understood.

In this project, I show how textual miscellany, systems of bureaucracy, and the conflict of authorship shape issues of class and gender in The Third Man (1949); how letter-writing and disrupted communication engender disembodiment and desire in Smiley’s People (1979 and 1983), and how the spy memoir (promoting the open secret) precipitates the commoditisation and degrading of data value in Hopscotch (1980) and Burn After Reading (2008). In doing so, I examine writing objects such as the pen, typewriter, and computer as tools of control, confession, and commercialisation.