When news broke recently of two Chinese spies who were caught but then allowed to walk away on legal grounds, followed by MI5’s warning that a proposed super-embassy could conceal a nest of intelligence operatives, it felt like an echo from another age. Espionage had slipped back into public view. That sense of déjà vu took me straight back to the 1960s, when I first got hooked on spy novels and films, a decade when spies were being unmasked in the newspapers, the Cold War was at its most febrile, and cinema - British, American, and European - was saturated with espionage. The air at the time seemed permanently charged: secret agents defecting, intelligence scandals breaking, Berlin divided, Cuba on the brink.

On screen and on the page there were fast cars, shadowy encounters, exotic locations, and beautiful women whose sexuality was far more explicit than anything the upright heroes of earlier adventure fiction might encounter. Compared with the earnest patriotism of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, or even the morally alert but essentially innocent protagonists of Eric Ambler, these new spies felt dangerous, compromised, and unmistakably modern.

James Bond dominated the landscape, but around him gathered darker, subtler figures - Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer, John le Carré’s George Smiley, and later the stripped-back professionals created by Adam Hall and Alan Furst. What fascinated me then, and still does, is that beneath the glamour, cynicism, and political complexity, these stories are all telling a much older tale. However modern the settings, however contemporary the anxieties, the spy novel keeps returning to an ancient narrative pattern: the hero’s journey.

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) argued that myths across cultures share a common underlying structure - a pattern he famously called the monomyth. The hero receives a call to adventure, crosses a threshold into danger, faces trials, confronts a Shadow, enters an abyss or supreme ordeal, and emerges transformed. Along the way appear recurring archetypal figures: the Mentor, the Ally, the Threshold Guardian. While Campbell’s universalism has often been challenged, his model remains a powerful way of reading popular genres that thrive on variation within familiar structures. Few modern forms reveal this more clearly than spy fiction.

Ian Fleming’s James Bond is the most overtly mythic expression of Campbell’s pattern. Bond’s calls to adventure are clear and irresistible, enacted amid the sadistic card table of Casino Royale, the poisoned glamour of From Russia with Love, the underwater battles of Thunderball, the vaults of Fort Knox in Goldfinger. His Mentors are explicit - M as authority and moral anchor, Q as provider of what Campbell would recognise as supernatural aid - and his Allies range from Felix Leiter to women who assist, betray, or test him. Threshold Guardians are spectacularly physical: henchmen, lasers, fortresses, deathtraps. The Shadow is unmistakable in figures such as Blofeld, Goldfinger, or Le Chiffre, embodiments of greed, nihilism, or ideological threat. Bond repeatedly enters the abyss, survives through skill and luck, and returns scarcely altered, ready to be sent out again. Fleming’s achievement was to fuse ancient archetype with post-war fantasy and consumerist excess, creating a superhero who feels timeless even when his world is extravagantly of its moment.

Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer appears, at first glance, to dismantle this heroic ideal. Introduced in The Ipcress File and developed through Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain, Palmer is irritable, class-conscious, resentful of authority, and openly sceptical of ideology. Named in the films but anonymous in print, he dislikes being pushed around, mistrusts his superiors, and survives less through brilliance than through alertness and dogged persistence. Yet Palmer still follows the archetypal path. He answers the call, crosses thresholds into danger, confronts betrayal and manipulation, and repeatedly enters an abyss - psychological in The Ipcress File, ideological in Billion Dollar Brain. His Mentors are bureaucratic rather than paternal, his Threshold Guardians procedural rather than theatrical, but the structure remains intact. Palmer is an anti-hero, not an anti-myth. His cynicism modernises Campbell’s Hero, transforming triumph into endurance and victory into survival.

John le Carré drives the journey inward and darkens it further. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the call to adventure is rarely welcomed. George Smiley does not stride across thresholds but listens, waits, cogitates, reconstructs. The Shadow - most powerfully embodied by the Russian spymaster Karla - is not a monster to be destroyed but a distorted mirror of the hero himself, a doubling that Campbell explicitly identifies as central to mythic confrontation. Mentorship is compromised, Allies unreliable, and Threshold Guardians are secrecy, silence, and institutional inertia. The abyss is ethical: betrayal, sacrifice, and the recognition that one’s own side is morally compromised. Even Smiley’s private life offers no refuge; his wife is serially unfaithful. His transformation is inward and permanent. He survives, but at the cost of isolation and moral exhaustion. Le Carré shows that the hero’s journey can persist even when stripped of glamour, catharsis, or clear moral reward.

Adam Hall’s Quiller novels - written by Elleston Trevor, better known as the author of The Flight of the Phoenix - complete the Cold War stoic evolution of the archetype. Quiller is the purest professional in spy fiction: he is nameless, emotionally controlled, deliberately anonymous. He is unmistakably an anti-hero, devoid of glamour, stripped of romance and recognition, but he remains deeply archetypal. Quiller answers the call without hesitation, crosses thresholds with precision, confronts brutally human Shadows, and repeatedly enters operational abysses where a single mistake means death. His Mentors are tactical, his Allies minimal, his Threshold Guardians procedural and environmental. Like Palmer, Quiller modernises the Hero by stripping away vanity and spectacle. His transformation lies in stoicism, discipline, and survival. Anti-heroism here does not dismantle Campbell’s model; it refines it for an age of invisible warfare.

A misunderstanding of Quiller helps explain why many critics dismissed The Quiller Memorandum (1966), adapted from The Berlin Memorandum. Scripted by Harold Pinter, the film was criticised for being slow, opaque, and emotionally flat - judgments that miss its purpose entirely. Pinter drains espionage of exposition and melodrama, allowing silence, pauses, and unease to carry meaning. It captures perfectly the deliberately downbeat, beaten-down nature of Hall’s hero. George Segal’s performance, often misread as disengaged, is in fact a superb exercise in underacting. His Quiller survives through watchfulness, restraint, and professional control. The lack of catharsis is not failure but intent. The journey is completed without reward.

Alan Furst, whose novels began appearing in the late 1980s, disperses heroism further still. Set largely in the gathering darkness of 1930s and early 1940s Europe - Paris, Prague, Berlin, Sofia - his protagonists are rarely professional spies at all. They are journalists, writers, sailors, film producers, refugees: ordinary men drawn into espionage by accident, loyalty, love, or conscience. The call to adventure in novels such as Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, and Kingdom of Shadows is often indirect and reluctant. They hinge on conversation overheard in a café, a border crossed too easily, a favour done for the wrong person. Thresholds are slipped across rather than dramatically breached.

In Campbellian terms, Furst radically downplays the visible architecture of the journey while preserving its emotional logic. Mentors exist, but they are shadowy, compromised, and transient figures - resistance organisers, Comintern agents, smugglers - offering partial guidance rather than certainty. Allies are fragile and temporary; love affairs are intense but brief, shadowed by betrayal or disappearance. The Shadow is not a single villain but a pervasive historical force: fascism, secret police, informers, fear itself. There is rarely a single abyss; danger accumulates gradually, decision by decision.

Transformation in Furst’s work is cumulative and melancholic. His heroes do not return victorious or enlightened but wasted by attrition. They learn when to speak, when to disappear, when to betray a cause in order to preserve a person. Survival itself becomes the heroic achievement. In The Polish Officer, the journey unfolds across years of resistance, exile, and loss, with no final catharsis - just endurance and memory. In Night Soldiers, initiation into espionage is not revelation but erosion. In Furst’s world, Campbell’s cycle never quite closes. The hero keeps moving because stopping would mean capture, betrayal, or death.

Taken together, Bond, Palmer, Smiley, Quiller, and Furst’s operatives demonstrate the extraordinary resilience of Campbell’s archetypes. Bond embodies the heroic ideal in its most flamboyant form; Palmer and Quiller show how anti-heroes still pursue the same journey under harsher, more sceptical conditions; Smiley exposes its ethical cost; Furst reveals how it dissolves into endurance alone. The surfaces change, the tone darkens, the victories shrink, but the structure persists.

Looking back to the 1960s, when spy fiction felt dangerous and intoxicating, it becomes clear why these stories resonated so deeply. They spoke to a world of hidden threats, shifting loyalties, and moral uncertainty - yet they did so using patterns as old as myth. Whether in a tuxedo or a raincoat, armed with gadgets or silence, the spy remains a Hero - tested, transformed, and sent back into the shadows once more.