Spy fiction  is mostly a gently conservative genre. The reader is usually asked to sympathize with the status quo and against those attempting to radically alter it; when a government is portrayed as behaving badly, it is generally also portrayed as malfunctioning. The genre also has a conservative relationship with realism. Since so much of spying happens behind closed doors, hidden by design from the general public, it is hard to know what counts as verisimilitude or plausibility, or even whether and in what way this might matter. In tandem, there has always been a permeable membrane between spying, spies, and writers of spy fiction. The two undisputed giants of the genre, John Le Carré and Graham Greene, were also, famously, practicing intelligence officers before becoming writers, and a great deal of Le Carré’s invented spylish—“mole,” “honeytrap,” “lamplighter”—has entered the vernacular of actual espionage practitioners.…