Mystery purists tend to exclude the spy thriller from their bookcases. They argue that many spy thrillers do not follow the time-honored mystery structure: someone commits a crime, clues pop up everywhere, some leads point to red herrings, and the sleuth (and reader) sorts through the evidence and puts it all together. That is, there may very well be murders in spy fiction, but they are a byproduct of the spy job, and not the central focus of the novel.

A classic mystery centers everything on the murder-as-puzzle. Such a mystery should leave readers with smiles on their faces as they look back over all the interconnecting pieces of evidence, and see how every last fact supports the conclusion. The best mysteries have the daunting task of building enough clues into the plot that readers find themselves completely engaged, thinking that they can figure out the crime – and yet including enough false leads, red herrings, and other literary sleight-of-hand to support an unexpected twist ending. These mysteries must seem to be accessible puzzles while containing hidden depths.

Mystery purists, especially classic- and cozy-fans want a puzzle. The other purists demand a certain environment: the mean streets of the private-investigator as immortalized by Raymond Chandler, or the pitch-perfect realism of the police procedural as done by Ed McBain. Either way, the spy thriller gets scorned as a page-turner that substitutes exotic locales and hair-raising action for logic or the appropriate environment.

But there are things to like about spy thrillers. Some are written with an emphasis on a puzzle. The very nature of espionage lends itself well to the same themes that drive crime detection such as motive. Which characters are double-agents, and what side are they really spying for? And why? Plus the hardened toughness of the classic spy and his isolation are reminiscent of the traits of the private-investigator. Both spy and PI are outsiders, and are often deeply cynical of the very same mainstream society that they strive to protect.

Those spy thrillers that do not emphasize a puzzle probably contain the right sort of ingredients to satisfy the mystery gourmand: an environment of danger and intrigue, and pulse-pounding scenes of action. Mystery gourmands have no problems with branching away from the more-exacting plotlines that demand deductive reasoning as popularized in the Sherlock Holmes mysteries of old.

In fact it is due to the approval of the mystery gourmand that the majority of mystery authors nowadays have relaxed the emphasis on puzzles and deductive reasoning, and have allowed other things to take center-stage: the gruesome nature of the crime, for instance. Also, the eccentricities of the sleuth, the character interactions, and the level of terror that the author can manufacture all engage the readers’ attention. There is still a crime to solve, but information is withheld from the reader, and things happen at random as in real life.

So the mystery gourmands need no convincing as to the escapist value of the spy thriller. It is the purists who are missing out. Perhaps they will take a second look when they realize that the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the pre-eminent prize in the Mystery Genre, has recognized spy thrillers for literary excellence: among them, The Eye Of The Needle by Ken Follett in 1979, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carre in 1965, and The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson in 2007 for Best First Novel. Rejoice, mystery fans, at the wealth of spy novels that await you!

Try out the spy classic The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. You can find it on Amazon through this link below: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold