16 Best Spy Thrillers, Split Into Desk Books and Chase Books

Alec Leamas has watched his network in East Germany get picked apart, so London brings him home and then sends him out again as bait, playing a drunk washout ready to sell what he knows. The book is barely two hundred pages and it moves like a trap closing. Nothing in it is glamorous. The meetings happen in grocery shops and rented rooms, the lies are administrative, and the cost lands on ordinary people who never signed up for any of it. Two sittings is all it takes, and afterwards every other spy novel you read is arguing with this one.

George Smiley is drifting around London in early retirement when he is handed the worst question in the service: one of the five men who run it is a Soviet mole, and he has to find out which. Almost the whole book is people remembering things in rooms. Interviews, requisitioned files, a safe house, one long night with old paperwork. The tension comes from knowing that any question Smiley asks might reach the mole before the answer reaches him. As a picture of what an intelligence service feels like from inside, including the pettiness and the wrecked marriages, nothing else is close.

You know from the first page that de Gaulle was not assassinated, and Forsyth still makes the thing unbearable. The Jackal builds his identity, his rifle and his route with the calm of a man filling in forms, while Claude Lebel works backwards through hotel registers and passport applications with the same patience. It is procedure against procedure, reported in a flat newsroom voice with almost no interior life allowed. As an engine it is close to perfect, which is why thriller writers still take it apart to see how the parts fit.

Fowler covers the French war in Vietnam, smokes opium in the evenings, and keeps telling himself he is not involved in anything. Then Pyle arrives from Boston with a head full of theory about a third force, and with designs on the woman Fowler wants back. Greene wrote this in the early fifties and it reads now like a memo nobody in Washington opened. The espionage sits in the margins, which is the whole point: the damage is done by a courteous young man who is certain he is helping. The last stretch asks what a bystander is actually answerable for.

Slough House is where MI5 sends its embarrassments so that they will resign: a set of rooms full of people transcribing phone calls under Jackson Lamb, a boss who is disgusting on purpose and cleverer than anyone above him. Then a young man is taken by a group threatening to behead him on camera, and the rejects find themselves inside a live operation that head office would much rather they stayed away from. Herron writes internal politics as a blood sport, and it is very funny right up to the moment somebody dies badly.

Wormold sells vacuum cleaners, cannot afford his teenage daughter's horse, and gets recruited by British intelligence in a bar toilet. Having no secrets to sell, he manufactures them, sketching vacuum parts as blueprints of a mysterious installation in the mountains. London is thrilled. Then his invented agents turn out to match real people with real addresses, and somebody starts killing them. Greene filed this under entertainment and that is what it is, until it stops being one. The joke underneath is that a bureaucracy will always prefer a satisfying report to a true one.

Deighton's narrator is never named, has no visible interest in queen or country, and thinks mostly about his pay grade, his lunch and the feud between his department and the next one. Scientists are disappearing and returning with their minds rearranged. The plot is genuinely hard to follow in the middle, which Deighton did deliberately: you are reading a report by a man who was not briefed properly either. This was the first spy novel to make the work sound like an irritating job, with forms, travel claims and colleagues you would not sit with.

Kimball O'Hara is a white orphan raised in the bazaars, fluent in the languages around him, invisible because nobody looks twice at one more street kid. He attaches himself to a lama on pilgrimage and is pulled at the same time into what the book calls the Great Game, the intelligence contest between Britain and Russia along the northern frontier. Kipling's politics are the empire's politics and they are all over it. The writing about the Grand Trunk Road, the horse traders, the sellers and the dust, is still some of the most alive travel prose in English.

Dominika Egorova is recruited by her uncle in Russian intelligence after an injury ends her dancing, and sent for training that treats sex as an operational tool with a syllabus. Matthews spent decades in the CIA and it shows everywhere except the romance: the surveillance detection runs, the dead drops, the meeting protocols and the paranoid arithmetic of a personal meeting are the real attraction. The book is explicit, and its handling of its heroine's body is uncomfortable in a way that is sometimes the argument and sometimes just the author. Every chapter ends with a recipe, which is a strange thing to be true.

Marie Mitchell is stuck with paperwork at a bureau that will not promote her, and takes a job aimed at Thomas Sankara, the young leader of Burkina Faso. The novel is written as a long letter to her twin sons, so her operational life and her family life arrive in the same breath, and neither gets to be the side plot. Wilkinson cares more about what loyalty costs a woman who has never been treated as fully American than about chases and shootouts. It moves quietly for a long while, and then it hurts.

Hayes wrote screenplays before this and it shows in the best way, because six hundred pages go by like four hundred. There is a murder in a New York hotel room that has been staged using a forensics textbook, a long chase through Turkey, an extended section following the antagonist from a childhood in Saudi Arabia, and a plot that ties all of it together far more neatly than life would. Everyone I know in India who has read it finished it in one weekend, usually while complaining about the coincidences and refusing to put it down.

Maugham really did intelligence work in Switzerland and Russia during the First World War, and he turned it into stories about a man who takes trains, waits in hotels, pays informants, and now and then sends a stranger to their death by writing one careful sentence. There is almost no action anywhere in it. The entire tone of modern spy fiction, the boredom and the shabbiness and the way a decision made at a desk kills somebody a thousand miles away, starts in this book. Read three stories at a time rather than swallowing it whole.

Jonathan Pine works the night shift in a Cairo hotel and then a Swiss one, carrying guilt about a woman who died after handing him a document. British intelligence builds him a criminal past, floats him into the orbit of Richard Roper, and the back half of the book has Pine living inside a lie on a private island among people who would kill him without raising their voices. This is le Carre after the Berlin Wall came down, following money and weapons instead of ideology, and it is by some way his most plot-driven novel.

Deva served in the Indian Army and writes the parts he knows from the inside: the briefings, the unit rivalries, the gap between a plan drawn on a map and the same plan happening in a village at night. The story crosses the border into training camps and comes back through intelligence corridors in Delhi, with a soldier's contempt for politicians never far from the surface. The prose is functional rather than fine and the pace is quick. It treated this material as genre rather than as a lecture, and a series grew out of it.

Sood ran R&AW and writes here about the shape of intelligence work rather than about anecdotes: how raw information becomes an assessment, why services fail in predictable ways, how propaganda and covert action sit beside each other, what the Indian service was built to do and what it was never built to do. Do not come for revelations, because he does not hand them over. Come for the correction, because after a dozen novels you will have absorbed a fictional version of this job, and here is a practitioner quietly marking which parts of the fiction are silly.

The premise is one of the finest in the genre and it carries the first two hundred pages without effort. Then Ludlum keeps going, and the book becomes a long conspiracy involving an assassin called Carlos, a great many capital letters, and characters explaining the plot to one another in rooms. If your Bourne is Matt Damon in a Zurich park, be warned that the film kept the setup and threw away nearly everything else, including the pace and most of the shouting.