“The name is Bond, James Bond.” This iconic catchphrase come to us through the James Bond films, which, since the early 1960s, have been the gold standard for all espionage thrillers. Bond, ever the cool man of daring, is widely seen as a masculine idol: a manly man who always gets the girl while at the same time thwarting Great Britain’s enemies. He is essentially the pulp hero turned government agent, and as a result, he has become, like Sherlock Holmes before him, the unattainable apex of what a secret agent is supposed to be.

The truth is that spying, in the words of author and journalist Kevin D. Williamson, “is among the world’s most boring occupations.” Sure, real-life spies have been known to get themselves into dangerous situations on occasion, but like lawyers who spend most of their time out of the drama of the court room, spies spend more hours researching and acclimating themselves to all the ins and outs of their assigned nations or individuals rather than drinking or gambling in fancy casinos.

Well, isn’t it an old adage that the truth should never get in the way of a good story? The realities of espionage have never deterred fiction writers, even those who were writing spy thrillers at the very moment when modern espionage was being born. These authors, who wrote years before James Bond’s first appearance in 1953’s Casino Royale, not only created the spy fiction genre that we know today, but like their detective fiction counterparts, they essentially built from scratch the model of the gentleman agent: the dashing G man with a gun, a license to kill and an ability to defeat all adversaries while still getting the girl.