Women Spies

If ever anyone had an incentive to establish a channel of communication by rigorously excluding third parties, it is surely the spy with hard-earned intelligence to transmit from behind enemy lines. This chapter examines how the thriller as a genre adapted to the increasing range and sophistication of telecommunications technologies. Examples discussed include John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), and the film Hitchcock made of it, The 39 Steps (1935); Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu (1913); and Jose Luis Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (1941). But the main focus is on espionage as an extension of the ‘feminization of channelling’ (Jill Galvan) which had long seen women act as go-betweens under a variety of circumstances. Examples discussed include Marthe Cnockaert McKenna’s neglected memoir, I Was a Spy! (1932), and British spy films from Victor Saville’s Dark Journey (1937) to Charles Crichton’s Against the Wind (1948).