Bond and Smiley should be retired: it's time for working-class spy fiction

Since the genre’s inception, its heroes have usually been privileged types. Less well-connected heroes would make better novels and wouldn’t go amiss in real life

From the moment Erskine Childers created the British spy novel, in 1903’s The Riddle of the Sands, spying in fiction has been almost the sole preserve of the upper and middle classes. That novel’s hero, Carruthers, is a Foreign Office man who goes off to investigate German naval operations, in his spare time, for a bit of a jolly. And the pattern continues.

Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s 1915 The Thirty-Nine Steps is sitting on a comfy mining fortune before getting caught up in the dastardly plans of the Germans. Eric Ambler’s protagonist in 1939’s The Mask of Dimitrios, Charles Latimer, is a novelist – hardly working-class hero material. W Somerset Maugham’s suave Ashenden (1928) is a playwright who swans about hotels in Switzerland, picking up gossip while millions die on the western front. None of these gentleman heroes needed to be spies.