Secret Agents: The Best of Spy Fiction

Secret agents, forged documents, border crossings in the dark—spy novels have turned modern history into a world of codes and double crosses. This course explores some of the best classic spy fiction, from John Buchan’s breakneck chase The Thirty-Nine Steps and Alan Furst’s atmospheric The Spies of Warsaw to John le Carré’s Cold War masterpiece The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We then slip behind the Iron Curtain with Olen Steinhauer’s The Bridge of Sighs and sail back to Edwardian invasion fears in Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. Together, these novels offer a tour of spies and ordinary people caught up in great-power games—and show why espionage stories remain so hard to put down.