I was doing some Googling to research ideas for both this blog and my Real Spies, Real Lives Podcast, and it was great to see a past blog post of mine on writing about spies come up first in the search results. Quite the ego boost.

I did come across a great article by the author Graeme Shimmin, a writer of speculative history, spy-ish novels. His essay was titled, “Spy Novel Plots – Four Great Spy Story Ideas.” Naturally, I had to read it to see how close I came to matching his criteria. It’s a great article, and I’m going to use it for inspiration for some future blog posts and podcasts. So, thanks Graeme.

I’m going to get a bit down in the weeds with these posts, but aspiring writers are everywhere. I feel “established” writers should help out other writers, especially beginning ones. So, let’s start with the basics.

It turns out the archetypes for a spy novel or story are pretty much the same as for any fiction: a protagonist, an antagonist, a mentor, and the prize. Not exactly an MFA definition, but I think you’ll see that they fit when you’re writing about spies.

What’s an Archetype, You Ask?

In literature, an archetype is a universal concept or situation or a recurring character, image, or pattern. Carl Jung developed the concept of archetypes, and although there is some overlap between archetypes and stereotypes, an archetype provides a writer guidelines for characters while stereotype is pejorative. The words aren’t synonyms.

Examples of literary archetypes include the mentor, the everyman, the bully, the creature of nightmare, the damsel in distress—ugh, the person in distress—and the devil figure. Not all of these show up in the same story, though they can, but you’ll find one or more of them in every story.

So, back to the spy story archetypes. First, you must have a protagonist.

The Protagonist

Shimmin defines a protagonist of a spy story as the person who “drives most of the action in a story.” I would add that the protagonist is the main person in the story with whom the reader identifies. The protagonist also resolves the conflict in the plot. In most cases, the protagonist’s POV is the one you’ll see the most.

If you’re a Joseph Campbell fan, you know the protagonist as the hero, the good guy, as it were. The hero is brave, of course, kind, naturally, and motivated by justice—yes! Think Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope or Frodo in Lord of the Rings. Or James Bond in any Fleming novel. Again, we, the readers, identify with the protagonist, and we all want to be the hero at some point.

However . . . the protagonist can be an antihero, the person in the story who is opposite the hero but not necessarily the bad guy or the villain. An antihero might be a coward who thinks only of him- or herself or who is amoral. However, if the antihero drives the story, resolves the conflict, and the reader identifies with him or her, that’s a protagonist.

For me, an example of an antihero is Din Djarin from The Mandalorian. Din has a sense of achieving justice and he obviously loves his foundling, Grogu, and is committed to returning him to his people, but he will kill anyone who gets in his way. Don’t get me wrong. I like Din Djarin, but sometimes I have to question if his Mandalorian creed is too rigid.

Then, there’s the villain as protagonist. What, you say? A bad guy as a protagonist? Impossible. If you’ve watched the show, Dexter, you know that he’s a traditional villain; what he does—he’s a serial killer of killers—is evildoing by any moral standard. Yet, he’s the protagonist of that story.

Here’s another example of villain as protagonist. I recently finished binging the new streaming series The Day of the Jackal, based on Frederick Forsythe’s 1971 novel. Despite the great acting performances from everybody in it, I actually didn’t like it that much, but I understand that a story originally about an assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle is outdated and that the writers had to bring the plot into the 21^st century. The Jackal is still clearly an evildoer. He kills people for money. However, in this version, the writers bring in a back story that makes you identify with the character. The Jackal drives the story sometimes more so than the traditional protagonist who’s hunting him. And, without giving away too many spoilers, he resolves the conflict in the end. So, yeah, protagonist.

Finally, we have the supporting character as protagonist. The supporting or secondary character becomes a protagonist when the main story is told from their POV. That is, the sidekick who observes but ends up telling the story. Think Dr. Watson. Sherlock Holmes is certainly the traditional protagonist, but the stories are always from Watson’s perspective.

The Antagonist

Per Shimmin, the antagonist is the primary obstacle to the protagonist. Same in most fiction. Think Blofeld to James Bond, Kylo Ren to Rae Skywalker. Sometimes the antagonist is way more interesting than the protagonist. Other examples are Professor Moriarty and Lord Voldemort. In Cold War spy fiction, the main antagonist was almost always a KGB agent or the KGB itself versus the CIA and MI-6 (protagonists). Think Karla to George Smiley in several of John le Carre’s novels

The antagonist’s main job in the story is to impede the protagonist’s progress to conflict resolution. The antagonist is also the foil or a way to highlight and contrast the protagonist’s positive attributes, i.e., to make you identify or like the protagonist more. The antagonist usually does this by being self-centered or self-serving. A lack of empathy for others or being deceitful definitely contrasts with the protagonist who thinks of others and has a moral compass.

The Mentor

In Shimmin’s spy novel archetypes, he includes the mentor, a person who helps the protagonist. Remember, the mentor is also a fiction archetype as well. The mentor can also be the trainer or an advisor. In the James Bond saga, M is Bond’s boss, but he advises Bond also, sometimes to no avail. The Jedi Master in Star Wars is the mentor to a padawan. In my books, Alexei Bukharin trained his partner, Mai Fisher, but remains her advisor even after his retirement, i.e., her mentor.

The reason a protagonist needs a mentor is that the protagonist is not perfect. He or she has good qualities. They’re the good guy after all, but along the way, the protagonist will have setbacks, even failures and doubts. The mentor, usually older, wiser, more experienced, needs to be there to adjust performance, offer guidance, and erase doubts.

The Prize

This is what the protagonist intends to win, what the antagonist may also want to win, and what the whole novel revolves around. This is the ultimate resolution of the conflict, winning that prize.

Frodo’s prize is he destroys the Ring. Holmes’ prize is thwarting Moriarty’s plans or solving a seemingly unsolvable mystery. Bond’s prize is stopping the bad guy from taking over the world or destroying it. Harry Potter’s prize–ridding the world of Voldemort and restoring Hogwarts.

The prize is what the protagonist has been striving for throughout the whole story, what makes the protagonist the driver of the story. Many times the protagonist and the antagonist want the same prize for different reasons. See, both the protagonist and the antagonist can seek justice. It’s that their definition of what is justice that differs. That’s also quite often the cause of the conflict that must be resolved.

Since I’m a writer of historical not speculative fiction, I don’t change the outcome of a specific historical event I write about. So, in my works my protagonists may be striving for a specific outcome, say, preventing the bombing of a federal building. They don’t achieve that “prize,” but they do, as in real life, bring the antagonist to justice, a consolation prize, as it were.

So, protagonist, antagonist, mentor, and prize are the four basic requirements for a spy novel.

There are also four types of spy novel plots according to Shimmin. He calls them “genre boundaries,” and they’re as follows:

1. The Mission
2. The Mystery
3. On the Run
4. Playing Defense

But that’s not for today. Over the next several weeks, I’ll opine on Shimmin’s definitions and examples of these genre boundaries in espionage fiction. Stay tuned.