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In the decade before the First World War, the British spy thriller was a cultural phenomenon drawing large and expectant readerships across all classes and catapulting its authors to prominence as spokesmen for then widely prevalent concerns about imperial strength, national power, and foreign espionage. Three hundred is a conservative estimate of the number of spy novels that went into print between 1901 and 1914. This article reflects upon some of the seminal publications from the period, including Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), the tale of a streetwise orphan who trains as a spy and becomes embroiled in the intelligence duel on India’s North-West Frontier; Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), the story of two gentleman yachtsmen who, cruising in the North Sea, stumble upon a secret German plot to invade England; and William le Queux’s Spies of the Kaiser (1909), a dire prophecy of German espionage in advance of an invasion.
