The Politics of the Thriller: On Munich and Moral Ambiguity

Standard thrillers, the action kind that Hollywood still churns out, care little for credibility: the genre formula demands simple villains but deviously complex conspiracies. Writers like John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, le Carré, and, most recently, Alan Furst, had something different in mind. They made spy stories a medium for serious themes. Their agents were burnt-out cases who had lost their ideals or decent men abused or cut loose by their callow or corrupt superiors. They could be covert operatives, posing as diplomats or businessmen, or entrepreneurs of intelligence working in a demimonde of double agents and Mata Haris. In this shady territory, political loyalty, vital information, and even human life itself were always up for sale. These serious thrillers still belonged to a bipolar world; Soviet agents replaced ruthless Nazis as the ultimate enemy, but the good guys and bad guys were not always easy to tell apart. They could be secret sharers, brothers under the skin. The protagonists, weighed down by past experiences, moral scruples, and the distractions of their own messy lives, operated within a gray zone of moral ambiguity. At the same time, the colorful villains took on confusing traits of humanity, including their own family lives and some remnants of idealistic beliefs, however tarnished.