Like cashiered spies groping for a mission, veteran literary spy masters are coming out of the Cold War into a new world order that is hard on current sales and indifferent to their old-fashioned trench-coat espionage fiction.
Some well-known authors have recently parted with their publishing houses in search of a fresh approach to increase sales, a strategy as elusive as KGB moles.Others, like John le Carre, have found intrigue in new settings. In March, his new book, which promises the thrills of a spy novel in a sinister world of international finance, will be published. The book begins, of course, with the execution of a lawyer in horn-rimmed glasses.
Most dramatic, perhaps, is the literary turn taken by Frederick Forsyth, the author of "The Day of the Jackal" and "The Odessa File," who has changed publishing houses as his sales have declined, acquired a new literary agent and publicly renounced the thriller genre to "try my hand at something else."
Something else is a slim volume, a sequel to Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel, "The Phantom of the Opera," that grew out of discussions with the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who may stage it as a musical. Forsyth's publisher of more than 25 years, Bantam, chose not to buy the manuscript, "The Phantom of Manhattan," which places the disfigured character in a Coney Island factory cleaning fish. But the author found another taker.
The market is colder than a Siberian winter for espionage tales, many publishing executives and agents say, blaming the end of the Cold War and shifts in readers' tastes. Today they prefer the Tom Clancy style of technological thrillers featuring exotic military weapons and an executive-style CIA hero to the lonely agent who survives deception, betrayals and multiplying body counts in the twilight world of espionage.
"When someone like Freddie doesn't want to write them anymore, then there must be something going on in the world that makes it difficult for a master," said Forsyth's new agent, Ed Victor, who added that the authors' moves probably reflect "that spy fiction has peaked, and people usually look for people to blame, which means you can fire your publisher, fire your agent."
Since the Berlin wall crumbled in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, writers who established themselves by exploring the duplicitous world of spycraft have had much more difficulty climbing the heights of the New York Times best-seller list, occupying those rarefied levels for fewer weeks, if at all.
For example, Len Deighton followed the life of Bernard Samson, a star-crossed British agent, in three trilogies, two of which were best sellers in the 1980s and 1990. But the last set, published through
1996, failed to make the ranks.
Forsyth achieved enduring success with "The Day of the Jackal" and "The Odessa File," which lingered on the list for 48 weeks. But his last best seller, "Icon," a postcommunist thriller set in a disintegrating Russia, slipped off the list after two weeks.
For his sequel to "The Phantom of the Opera," Forsyth has signed with an untraditional publisher, Michael Viner, the president of New Millennium Entertainment in Beverly Hills, Calif. Viner is better known for publishing tell-all nonfiction like Faye Resnick's book about Nicole Brown Simpson.
In the last two months, writers like Robert Ludlum and Ken Follett have left their publishing houses for new ones, moves that often reflect polite differences about advances or sales expectations that publishers do not consider promising enough to justify generous contracts.
But the public explanation from Ludlum, Follett and le Carre is a desire for fresh approaches, a yearning that has seized some well-known writers like an old-fashioned global conspiracy.
Ludlum, who achieved his biggest successes in the 1970s with tales of complex global plots, left his publisher of more than two decades, Bantam, for St. Martin's Press, which offered him an eight-figure contract and a new strategy.
His sales at Bantam had settled to a plateau of about 450,000 copies for recent titles like "The Matarese Countdown," whose plot revolved around a CIA rookie battling a planet-threatening dynasty of killers.
"It's certainly harder to get an audience hot about the Cold War, because it's just not there anymore," said Jack Romanos, the president of Simon & Schuster, which is publishing le Carre's new book through its Scribner imprint.
"It's been difficult to take it to a different area. People have tried to make it work in South America, the Middle East and China, but it never had the same cachet as when it was the good old Americans against the communists."
Historically, spy fiction has flourished and waned with the inspiration of war or its threat. The first spy novel in Western literature is credited to James Fenimore Cooper, who in 1821 wrote "The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground," a novel based on a Revolutionary war spy, said Thomas B. Allen, co-author of a reference guide, "Spy Book."
There was a dry spell until the American Civil War inspired a spate of exaggerated memoirs by spies on both sides.
"I think we're in a valley," Allen said of the present cycle, noting that some authors are floundering as they search for new themes.
Most affected by the cooler market are the second-tier authors who were writing in the genre, said Romanos of Simon & Schuster. The well-known authors, he said, had a tougher time keeping their audience, while "the next level, the up-and-coming spy fiction, began to shrink dramatically, so there's hardly any more of it."
Younger thriller writers like Daniel Silva, 37, author of "The Unlikely Spy" and "The Mark of the Assassin," draw inspiration from World War II, but "going back to the Cold War would be a little strange," he said. "Instinctively it doesn't feel right. There's not enough distance and drama."
Le Carre, a former British intelligence officer whose real name is David Cornwell, can be viewed as a case study of shifting to new themes while tinkering with publishing relationships.
The author left his publisher of 20 years, Alfred A. Knopf, changed literary agents and is poised to publish a new book, "Single & Single," that continues his movement away from espionage themes and the prosaic world of his weary and brooding spy, George Smiley.
His last book, "The Tailor of Panama," involved an elaborate plot to void the Panama Canal Treaties. His base of readers has eroded and his past sales figured into his last advance from Simon & Schuster, which dropped to $2.5 million.
At Scribner, where marketing executives have a one-word view of Cold War spy fiction ("Done") the publishers are positioning le Carre to reach a new generation of readers. Scribner is planning to print 300,000 copies of the novel.
Wesley Wark, a University of Toronto history professor who specializes in the study of intelligence services and spy fiction, said the espionage genre still had life but was "going through a difficult period when clearly new settings or scenes are required."
-- IN SEARCH OF A NEW LODE: Instead of new spy settings, though, writers are switching to new genres with the intrigue of politics or police work.
"You have to wait for the Cold War to be quaint as a little Napoleonic war," said Charles McCarry, a former CIA intelligence officer who has moved from novels about spies to books about political intrigue like his best-selling "Lucky Bastard." "After doing this for almost 30 years," McCarry said, "what happens is that you live your experience and eventually it runs out. So you find another vein."
A contrarian view of the Cold War comes from Follett, who with his departure this month from Crown for Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Putnam, intends to write a historical novel based on a failed launching of an American satellite amid Cold War tensions in 1958. He is careful, however, to correct any typecasting of the book as a Cold War novel.
"If you say it's a Cold War story," Follett said, "people will think it has a character like Smiley and involves a KGB person and an FBI agent who are at loggerheads. And it isn't like that at all. None of the principal characters are Russian."
Follett noted that he had avoided the spy genre in his last two novels, the latter a contemporary thriller called "The Hammer of Eden," which centers on aging hippie eco-terrorists.
"Certainly, the golden age of the spy story is definitely over," Follett said.