How the Cold War and a largely imagined China made spy novels cool
In the 1960s and 70s, Cold War pulp fiction’s portrayal of China and the region around it was steeped in cliché, with writers churning out paperbacks for the masses set largely in imagined lands
The phrase a “new Cold War” is regularly tossed about in discussions of mainland China, the United States and Taiwan. Russian-American pundit Dmitri Alperovitch has even gone so far as to declare that “Taiwan is the new Berlin.”
Mostly, it is the hawks on both sides who have kept this kind of “new Cold War” talk in circulation, but if some hardliners are touting a new Cold War, how might this version compare to the original? The spy-novel genre of the 1960s offers one measure for comparison, and their authors, to paraphrase psychologist Carl Jung, could be seen as “the unwitting mouthpieces of the psychic secrets” of their time.
Early espionage thrillers, set in or including areas in or around China, featured racy cover art and sensational titles such as The Bamboo Bomb, Chinese Roulette and 14 Seconds to Hell. They mostly arrived in the 1960s as part of a wave of cheap paperback spy stories that sold in the millions, and bombarded the Western psych with every sort of clichéd Cold War narrative – nuclear intrigue, defectors, double agents, sleeper spies, secret weapons and plots of world domination. The books were also packed full of sex, action and the exotic.
The Chinese Communists, or ChiComs, were regular if poorly understood villains in these novels – though not nearly so common as the Russians. But what is strange is that Taiwan, despite its position on the front lines of the Cold War in Asia and home to US military bases from the early 50s to 1979, appeared only rarely within the genre.
Perhaps only three Cold War spy novels used the Taiwan-mainland China conflict as a major plot element, Assignment Peking (1969), by Edward S. Aarons, The Dragon’s Eye (1969), by Scott C.S. Stone, and Operation Checkmate (1972), by Dan J. Marlowe. All were published by one of America’s top imprints for mass-market pulp fiction, Fawcett Gold Medal.
“Why isn’t Taiwan featured more in cold-war spy novels?” writes Lawrence Maddox, a Los Angeles-based crime-fiction author and spy-novel aficionado, in an email interview. “I think the answer might be in Ian Fleming’s travelogue Thrilling Cities”, he says, referencing a 1963 book by the author-inventor of James Bond on the exotic locations that inspired his spy novels. The guide included three Asian cities, Hong Kong, Macau and Tokyo, but “Taiwan is never mentioned as even a possible location. Perhaps in that era, Taiwan just wasn’t considered thrilling.”
