The Berlin Wall was coming down was fantastic for human rights and all that, but seriously I do think it was the end of the Golden Age for espionage writing. Who doesn’t love reading a good book, where you feel the border guards are after you and somehow you must get over the Wall and rescue the Western world from an evil plan hatched in the brain in some godforsaken Communist?
Or dog-fighting between your jet and a swarm of MiGS?
Or what about submarine movies, as terrorists nowadays don’t have submarines as they are a bit lame in gadgets. They might rig up a bomb to a mobile phone, but anybody can do that after watching a few episodes of the A-Team or Burn Notice or Chuck.

With the Soviets, you could identify or empathise with them as they looked like us, but a bit materially poorer obviously, and you could easily see yourself as the Head of the KGB, crushing evil Western Imperialist Spies and maybe launching the Red Army through Western Europe and invading the UK, but it’s a struggle nowadays reading a book and thinking of yourself hiding in a cave and your great master plan is to send a human or a truck bomb into a marketplace. Reading Cold War Fiction makes me believe I could be spy as I would blend in, but in fiction now I would look out of place standing in Kabul or in the Middle East.

The Cold War also had Vietnam and IRA fighting SAS veterans who rarely suffered battle fatigue, rather they would pick up ninja-esque tactics from their enemy before hosing down a few Communists, where now we have in fiction veterans who after therapy and drugs, and who only serve their country by fighting drug lords, people smugglers or a nutter in a cave, even though the newer trend is now to create enemies from our country/establishment as we have fictional Al-Qaeda fatigue.

The Cold War allowed writers to use all the terrorist organisations as being supported by evil Communist madmen in opulent palaces across Eastern Europe or the odd nutter in a tent, where now in the fictional world we are left with terrorists being supported by the nutters in a tent or a cave. With Russia getting stronger under Putin, we are having Cold War Mark II, but it’s too high-tech with no care-factor for us and limited to industrial espionage rather than a battle of ideas of Us against Them.

This Us against Them gave us a sense of identity and it permeated throughout the culture and so we could identify with say Doc Brown screaming about the Libyans and thinking that he in later life is wearing a radiation suit because of all the fallout from the atomic wars, but nowadays as a people we seem more divisive than ever and are fighting amongst ourselves over immigration, jobs, money etc.. and maybe this is because human nature needs us to have a big bully on the block and with the Soviets and the Nazis before them, gone, who are we now joined up against?

I don’t want films of the calibre of Red Dawn, The Hunt for Red October, TV Series like the Sandbaggers replaced with modern day rubbish like The International, Phantom Below, or Two and a Half Men (why is this crap even on TV, is there a joke in it?) I miss the tacky computers and their graphics from the Cold War, the glamour of a dinner-suited super spies dancing under disco balls before using a set of dodgy papers and going over and smuggling out a key defector.

I’m not for one second suggesting the Wall coming down was bad thing, but instead can we just forget the Wall fell down and carry on writing the good stuff?