There can be few genres that have reinvented themselves quite as successfully as the spy thriller. From shadowy figures in silent cinema and Hitchcock’s innocent men on the run to James Bond, George Smiley and the decidedly less glamorous inhabitants of Slow Horses, spies have remained a remarkably persistent presence on our screens.
In Spies on Screen, Paul Burke takes on the considerable task of charting that history across more than a century. Beginning with cinema’s earliest attempts at espionage, he works chronologically through two world wars, the Cold War, the uncertain years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the age of terrorism and finally into today’s world of streaming and renewed international tension.
What makes the book particularly readable is that Burke is clearly a fan rather than someone approaching the subject solely from an academic viewpoint. He knows his films and television, and there is an infectious enthusiasm in moving from Hitchcock and Bond to le Carré, Bourne, Mission: Impossible, Killing Eve and Slow Horses. Yet this is more than a catalogue of favourite screen spies. Burke is interested in why these stories appear when they do and what they tell us about the societies that produced them.
Bond inevitably looms large. Burke makes a persuasive case for 007 having changed the screen spy forever, while also acknowledging that Bond's success helped create an appetite for the more realistic espionage fiction that followed.
Elsewhere, there is welcome attention given to international productions, with the arrival of streaming allowing series such as France’s Le Bureau and Israel’s Fauda to reach audiences far beyond their home countries.
Burke’s central argument is convincing: spy films flourish when audiences feel uncertain about the world. Today, with cyber warfare, terrorism, surveillance, AI and renewed East-West tensions, the genre is once again thriving. But did it ever go away?
Comprehensive without becoming dry, Spies on Screen works equally well as a history, a reference book and something to dip into simply to remind yourself of films and television series worth watching again. There is a rather excellent foreword by Vaseem Khan. For anyone with even a passing enthusiasm for screen espionage, there is an enormous amount here to enjoy.
