The best spy novels from someone who has been addicted to them since childhood

I’ve included this book in the list, although it’s not technically an espionage novel, because it brilliantly crosses so many genres.

The plot is based upon an attempt to assassinate Charles De Gaulle, the President of France. Despite the reader knowing the ending from the outset, it is the defining example of creating suspense in a novel. Forsyth leaves the reader spellbound to the final page. It’s a vivid recreation of time, place and character. After more than half a century, this novel remains pre-eminently the best political action thriller ever written.

This is the classic espionage novel.

It is set in 1950s Germany, grey, squalid, and morally bleak, with cynical characters, treachery, marvelous plot twists, betrayal, and surprise. Le Carré’s Spy Who Came in From The Cold defined the espionage genre. He writes in a spare, simple style devoid of description, creating realistic and sordidly believable characters.

McCarry has never had the wide acclaim that my first two picks have had, and that’s a shame.

The Tears of Autumn is set in late 1963. Kennedy has been assassinated, and Vietnam has come to a fast boil. McCarry’s protagonist, Paul Christopher, an introspective poet and burned-out spy, takes it upon himself to find out the truth behind the rumor that the Vietnamese were behind Kennedy’s killing.

It’s a novel that spans continents and provides professional insight into the motivation and temperament of the spy world. Like Le Carré, McCarry’s style is sparse, lean, and enthralling. In a world beset by conspiracy theories, disinformation, and fake news, The Tears of Autumn is superb.

With so many truly excellent novels to choose from Harris’ An Officer and A Spy makes my list largely because Harris skillfully recreates an historical period and weaves a captivating story by mixing historical fact with a compelling set of interpreted characters. In doing so, using the Dreyfus Affair, he provides us with a disturbing view of a notorious lapse in democratic justice and the moral perils of rushing to judgment.

Harris’ protagonist is Georges Picquart, head of the "Statistical Section" in French military intelligence. For me, Picquart is one of those rare, complex individuals. He is a little stodgy but principled and willing to risk his career and reputation in pursuit of justice.

Taking a leaf from Forsyth, the outcome of An Officer and A Spy is well known, but it’s one of the novel’s numerous strengths as it provides a brilliant depiction of the seamier side of France’s Belle Epoque period.  

The Sympathizer is the story of a Vietnamese-American spy, a man who is never named, born in Vietnam but raised and educated in America, who returns to Vietnam and spies on behalf of the Viet Cong.

It’s a novel bursting with important themes: loyalty, suffering, race and identity, betrayal and confidence, isolation, colonialism, love and friendship, power, and sympathy for one’s enemies. Nguyen’s Asian American point of view and his protagonist’s idiosyncratic outlook are both complex and persuasive. He writes with a deliberately jerky narrative, a sequence of memories that bounce in time and place from Los Angeles to a police general’s office in Saigon on the eve of America’s evacuation, a North Vietnamese Army prison cell, and a movie set in the Philippines.

In the espionage genre, it’s a work very different in form and perspective from the traditional spy story, and in this respect, it’s ground-breaking.