The fall of the Berlin Wall forever changed the face of spy fiction and left many novelists struggling to come to terms with a new world where there were no missions behind the Iron Curtain and no exchanges at Checkpoint Charlie.

Some pundits were even quick to pronounce the death of the espionage novel, saying that without the Russian "Evil Empire" there was no longer a credible nemesis for American and British fictional spies.

Cold comforts: Espionage classics such as John le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, remain hugely popular.

For a while publishers also seemed to lose interest in the espionage novel and a number of good spy writers found themselves out in the cold without a publisher. Some iconic authors of spy fiction, such as Len Deighton, gave it away and even John Le Carre floundered and struggled to come to terms with the end of the Cold War.

As a result, a number of authors decided that the contemporary world was too hard to deal with, and instead looked backwards and wrote historical spy novels about a more certain time. Espionage novels set around the World War II period suddenly became popular and authors, such as John Lawton and Philip Kerr, established several good series based in the 1940s and '50s.