Spy Realist Turn

myth:spy_realist_turn

Then the genre grew up. Maugham's Ashenden, drawn from his own war-work, showed the spy's trade as it was — tedious, bureaucratic, and morally soiled — and Eric Ambler made the hero an ordinary man caught in a web he barely understands. Realism came to the spy story, as the hardboiled brought it to the detective. — genre history