I loved conspiracy theories long before I wrote them. I thought of myself as a connoisseur, chasing a revelatory rush as new possibilities emerged and the world became surprising again. They needed to walk the line between plausibility and astonishment, piling up enough arguments that you found yourself involuntarily steered into the realms of just maybe. But I also loved them in the way I loved big airport thrillers—stories expanding to consume all, interweaving what had been disconnected. Both seemed to be attempts to do justice to the complexity of events, and to expose hidden worlds barely touched by the news.
That was the kind of justification I used. Isn’t it our duty as citizens to question the narratives that underpin power? I didn’t pay too much attention to the name: conspiracy—conspire—literally to breathe together, with its hint of an original fixation on small groups. The first conspiracy novel set in a European present was Friedrich Schiller’s The Ghost Seer (1789), arriving just after the church banned Masonic Lodges, feeding off the curiosity about the organization that this inspired. By the end of the century the German reading public was hooked to the Bundesroman or lodge novel, and writers have been exploiting our interest in secret societies ever since. But a text with a far darker history hangs over the genre, of course. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in Russia in 1903, a forgery which purports to show a Jewish plan for global domination; the template for a thousand subsequent conspiracy theories and still one of the most effective recruiting sergeants for antisemitism.
I never forgot that, but I wasn’t convinced it rendered all conspiracy theories taboo. Some, after all, turned out to be correct. Perhaps there was naivety in my outlook born of growing up in the UK under Thatcher when a lot of the information about a militarily-aggressive establishment only emerged as the result of dogged investigation. I thought of conspiracy theories as left-leaning: it was the left, after all, that seemed most concerned with undemocratic concentrations of power, with probing big money, unpacking foreign policy. But conspiracy has always had a different inflection in the US, where it’s the right that distrusts government most venomously. In his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter was one of the first to tie this ideology to the conspiracy theory itself, tracing “movements of suspicious discontent” throughout American history, all bound by a tendency towards “heated exaggeration” and “conspiratorial fantasy.”
On December 4, 2016, a 28-year-old man arrived at Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington, DC armed with an AR-15-style rifle. He was there to save child sex slaves from a pedophile ring connected to high-ranking Democrats. It was not good times for conspiracy theory. As Jane Coaston notes in her Vox article “Why Conspiracy Theories Matter,” the form seems less entertaining when you have a conspiracy theorist in the White House (birther, anti-vax, climate change denial etc). Conspiracy theories were now seen to degrade politics, muddying true and false, allowing toxic arguments to gain prominence while undermining genuine issues. Most of all, they divide people—you disagreed not just on what was right but what was real. The Red Pill grants you access to a higher truth (Amazon places books about conspiracy in the category of religion and spirituality). Everyone else is dumb or complicit. 9/11 Truthers (a phenomenon that originally seemed, in part, a reaction to the news media’s own over-simplifications) slid into the grotesque spectacle of people claiming high school massacres as false flags. Politics became the assertion of your right to believe whatever you wanted, to stand firm against the oppression of reality. Suddenly a genre that I saw challenging the edifice of establishment power became very clearly a tool for maintaining it.
Where does this leave the conspiracy thriller? Are novels dealing with political conspiracy part of the problem? The question became personal as I carried out research for my first spy novel, A Shadow Intelligence. I’d written detective novels previously, attracted to them as a way of exploring society’s intersecting power games. I wanted to maintain a sense of verisimilitude when it came to spies. One of the paradoxes of genre writing is that it has to perpetually self-correct against a veer towards fantasy, which means finding ways to re-engineer a frisson of realism. I wanted my spy novel to pose difficult questions. I wanted to get close to the truth, without personal affiliation (is it ‘conspiratorial’ to wonder if all the former-spies who contribute to the genre grant us the full access that they claim?). The question was how to do that.
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Researching contemporary espionage is hard. When they say it’s secret, they mean it. The first official history of MI6 was published in 2010, and takes us up to 1949. There’s no sequel in the pipeline. Others tip-toe into the 1990s, a new era of supposed transparency, before devoting a few pages to the “dodgy dossier” that steered Britain into the Iraq war, but the extended timespan only highlights what small fragments we’re granted. And, much to the chagrin of spooks, it’s a truism that we only get glimpses of the intelligence world when something goes wrong. If much of the genre concentrates on the Cold War, and exists on a border with historical fiction, it’s not just because this was the golden era of espionage, but because it’s a challenge to find out what’s been going on more recently.
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