There’s no shortage of spy content right now.
The past year or two brought a new adaptation of “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Amateur,” “The Agency,” “Black Doves,” Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag,” yet another blockbuster iteration of “Mission Impossible” and, on the page, further entries in the “Slough House” and Jason Bourne series, not to mention a new George Smiley novel. As Hollywood seeks more and more excuses to shoot outside the U.S., the future of the genre looks more global than ever. Spy stories remain one of the most popular windows onto the way the world works.
Too bad the glass in that window is pretty wavy. Let me illustrate. The Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera “Madama Butterfly,” which gets rightful flak for its bumbling Orientalism, is almost as hilariously clueless about the U.S. The villain’s name is Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton — the modern-day equivalent would be something like “Ronald Reagan Microsoft.” Americans may not be used to this kind of naïveté about their own culture, but it’s exactly the level of thought many Western writers of spy novels and films bring to their attempts at naming Eastern European and Baltic characters.
The 1984 novel “The Hunt for the Red October” is a classic for a reason, and Tom Clancy’s geopolitical research is rock solid, but trust me when I tell you that no Lithuanian had ever been named Marko Ramius. The word ramus means “peaceful,” which fits the character, but the only remotely common name in which it shows up is Ramintas. Arkady Renko, the protagonist of Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park” and its sequels, sounds like he lost the first half of a Ukrainian surname (Titarenko? Limarenko?) in a gruesome accident. His journalist lover is often referred to as “Tatiana Petrovna,” a case of patronymic misuse that makes it sound like he’s dating his schoolteacher.
Then there are lesser sins — names that aren’t wrong, per se, just odd. The parents of Dominika Egorova, the main character in Jason Matthews’s “Red Sparrow” trilogy, have certainly made a bold choice for their daughter’s name. (Indeed, in Russia, the film’s dubbers changed it to the more traditional “Veronika.”) In 2002’s “The Bourne Identity,” Bourne’s Russian alias is Foma Kiniaev. Foma is a more traditional name than Dominika — so traditional, in fact, that it is mostly associated with 19th-century peasants. Imagine, in a serious spy film, a foreign agent producing a passport in the name of, say, Jebediah Hoggs. (The Cyrillic characters in the same passport actually transliterate to “Ashch’f Lshtshfum,” but that’s for the film’s prop master to live down).
Mind you, these are just the cultures I know well, having grown up in the Soviet-occupied Baltics before arriving in the U.S. in my teens. No evidence suggests that anyone else has it any better. I shudder to think what mangled names readers of Arab or East Asian descent could add.
Is spy fiction a particularly dreadful offender? Perhaps not — but, more so than any other genre, it is built upon an illusion that the author has an inside, possibly clandestine, knowledge of the people and places being described. If a sci-fi writer gets a name wrong, it doesn’t impact our trust in their grasp of society and technology. But the least one demands of a spy novelist — or a real spy, for that matter — is an understanding of a culture not one’s own. It is also one of the last realms in modern literature where, in spite of recent progress, expertise with a colonial whiff — the author used to be a C.I.A. station chief in Baghdad! — can trump actual representation.
So, what to do? No one is omniscient, of course. The internet is often of limited help. One time-honored way of mitigating risk has been to pluck names straight off the bookshelf — after all, if there was a famous writer or historical figure with a given name, it must be legitimate, right? This gambit, however, carries risks of its own. If the writer is a little too famous back home, we’re back to the Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton problem. Anyone who took a semester of Russian literature will snort at the moment in the 1987 Bond movie “The Living Daylights” when General Pushkin succeeds General Gogol.
Perhaps the best solution is the most straightforward: Consult native speakers. Every time. It’s fun and takes seconds, anathema though it may be to the antisocial nature of the writing life.
A book I am writing has a German character, mentioned in passing, whose name had to be believable as a contemporary politician. I have lived in Berlin for several years and speak halting German, but still wouldn’t trust myself to hazard a guess. I have a doctor named Reschke and am a fan of the director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, so I started by simply smashing the two names together. Then I took to Threads with a simple query: “Does the name ‘Florian Reschke’ sound OK to you for a fictional government minister?”
I expected it to get a handful of replies at most. Instead, it went viral. Before I knew it, Germans were coming up with Reschke’s hometown, biography and political leanings. I learned that “Florian” is a youngish name, so the character would have to be in his late 30s or early 40s. He was also likely from the country’s north, where the name was evidently more popular. In a remarkable instance of unanimous online consensus, every commenter felt he belonged to the center-left Social Democratic Party.
Some of the guesses were so on the money I couldn’t even respond without giving away the book’s plot. “Hands-on kinda guy, former middle-class entrepreneur turned politician, divorced, one kid,” was a typical one. Some went much farther. One theorized he’d been born in 1977 in Neumünster, Schleswig-Holstein, and joined the Social Democrats’ youth wing after the party lost the 1994 election. An entire résumé followed.
Almost all of the replies had something in common. As they piled up by the hundreds, I noticed how happy people were that I’d bothered to ask. “Usually Hans and Gretchen are used by English or American writers,” one commenter wrote. “Nobody is named like that nowadays.” Soon, the discussion spread beyond Germany, with people of other nationalities voicing their frustration with lazy character naming across the board.
I saw only one dissenting voice, an American writer who said he simply used a name generator app. “I write for the North American market,” he explained. “If Europeans find my work accidentally hilarious, then so be it.”
That’s the issue in a nutshell. Cultural accuracy is ultimately not a matter of talent, political sensitivity or obsessive quality control. It’s a matter of the reader you imagine. In most cases, that reader will look like you, which is where spy fiction’s tendency to defer to so-called experts over locals becomes a problem. Even when casting someone as a villain — especially then, one could argue — we owe them our understanding. And that starts with a name.
I don’t think Clancy cared if “Red October” would ever be read by a single Balt. I doubt Tony Gilroy, who wrote “The Bourne Identity” script, lost any sleep over some Russian speaker finding the name Foma a touch quaint. I’m not their target audience. I’m not sure I’m anybody’s target audience. But growing up between cultures has its benefits, too. To quote Mr. Gilroy’s brilliant recent series, “Andor”: “I have friends everywhere.”
Michael Idov is a Latvian American novelist and screenwriter who co-founded the nonprofit Russian-language streaming platform, Votvot. His latest novel is “The Collaborators.”
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