Double-crosses, dead drops and desperate dashes across London – the spy story is back. The most obvious indication is the return this weekend of Spooks, resurrected on the big screen four years after the TV series came to an end. Then there is the arrival on BBC2 of 70s-set spy drama The Game, which channels John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to tell a seductive tale of subterfuge, divided loyalties and secret wars.

The highly anticipated London Spy, written by bestselling author Tom Rob Smith, starring Ben Whishaw, Charlotte Rampling and Jim Broadbent, will arrive on the same channel later this year, while in the US the spy drama The Americans continues to win critical acclaim (UK audiences can watch the first two series on Amazon Prime Instant Video).

Spy fiction is also back in vogue, from last year’s summer hit I Am Pilgrim to the popular recent reissue of Lionel Davidson’s 1994 cold war-set Kolymsky Heights, hailed by Philip Pullman as “the best thriller I’ve ever read”.

What’s driving the revival? bestsellers back towards more ambiguous fare. “Modern spy dramas are more sophisticated, they’re bleaker and darker,” says spy novelist Jeremy Duns, whose Paul Dark series centres on a KGB agent anti-hero. “While writers such as John le Carré and Graham Greene have always had that moral uncertainty, it left spy fiction in the 90s and post-9/11 you had a glut of tough macho thrillers about special forces heroes. That’s now shifting back towards the morally grey … You can root for a protagonist even if you don’t like what they do, so in Homeland you’re not condemning Brody to the degree you would have done 10 years ago, while The Americans has us rooting for Russian agents in 1980s America in a way that would have been impossible on US TV in the actual 80s.”

Hannah Griffiths, Fiction Publisher at Faber & Faber, who reissued Kolymsky Heights, agrees: “There’s a moral ambiguity with spy fiction that appeals to readers,” she says. “Readers respond to the fact it’s not as straightforward as right and wrong, good and evil, which means they can find their own way morally and make up their own minds.”

There is also the sense that the cold war era provides an interesting counterpoint to our own turbulent times. “Even modern-set spy thrillers such as the Bourne films feel very cold war to me, with the chases through the German underground being straight out of [1966 spy movie] The Quiller Memorandum,” says Duns. “Homeland, with the cat- and-mouse chase of its traitor, a former American soldier, [or] the Daniel Craig Bonds, which are a world away from the [Pierce] Brosnan era, combine genuine suspense with an emotional weight that wasn’t there before. The spectre of the cold war is all over this stuff … [I think because] it’s our very recent past and we tend to be interested in the recent past.”

According to Toby Whithouse, the writer behind The Game: “The 70s don’t feel far away at all. What attracted me to the period was the idea of this secret war where great victories could never be celebrated or conspicuously rewarded and great losses were dealt with in private. I wanted to look at an entire war conducted in the shadows and the effect that would have on personalities. There’s also a romantic element – the whole idea of secret codes and rendezvous and the low-fi nature of the work.”

Yet not everyone is as happy with the genre’s continued cold war focus. Simon Conway, whose most recent thriller, the dark, brutal The Agent Runner, moves from the backstreets of Bethnal Green to Pakistan’s border badlands, feels that our obsession with one particular strain of spy fiction prevents the genre from saying anything new. “We love that whole idea of a game of rules and elegant suits and period costumes and gentlemen’s clubs, but if we want to understand the world as it is today, then we need to understand what’s happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he says.

“The trouble is that those stories appear too alien and asymmetric. They can’t be reduced to a game of chess between equals, so its easier to write comfortable period pieces than to try to understand what’s going on in Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. I thought The Honourable Woman was great, and Spooks is fun, and always reminds me of The Professionals [but] there’s a tendency to forget how very angry le Carré’s original novels are.

“The spy thriller should reflect the world as it is, rather than becoming reassuring Sunday-evening TV.”