It’s no secret I like crime novels. In fact one of my favourite forms of relaxation at the end of the day is to read some decent well written crime fiction for half an hour or so before dropping off to sleep.

It can’t be any old rubbish. It has got to have a plot complicated enough to engage and well written to allow me to suspend my disbelief

Basically it has got to feel real.

At it’s best, good crime fiction tells you things, sometimes uncomfortable things, about a society and how it works.

Much the same can be said for these foreign language cop shows on SBS. They’re a society talking to itself, and in search of verisimilitude, they mention those aspects of life that are less than stellar, such as the prejudice against black Israelis and overseas guest workers in Israel, or the exploitation of illegal migrant workers in the Spanish fruit and vegetable industry.

And so it used to be with spy fiction. It had to feel real, You had to smell the dark tobacco smoke and black espresso at some meeting to make things seem real. And when I went to Budapest a few years ago I was astounded at how Keleti station was still just as shabby and atmospheric as I had imagined it.

But spy fiction doesn’t work anymore. The world’s changed. Carrying out an SQL injection attack against some unsecured foreign database from an anonymous open plan office in a building in a business park on the outskirts of Novosibirsk or Basingstoke doesn’t have the same drama as a furtive meeting in a Bucharest cafe to pass over a film cartridge containing pictures of some secret document.

There’s no atmospheric exotic scene to conjure, there’s no secret police watching – apart from the Serco guys watching the CCTV, and they’re supposed to be on your side, and at the end of the day, your paid hacker gets in their car and drives home to a microwave lasagne and a glass of wine.

Yes, obviously you could make drama there, and there have been some credible attempts to write modern spy fiction but they lack the grittiness of classic espionage fiction, and in a sense slide into crime fiction – you hacker’s partner is kidnapped in an attempt to find out who knows what about what, but many of these really play on how, quite often, the traditional authorities don’t quite understand what is going on.

Events such the Marcus Hutchins saga and Clifford Stoll’s, tracking down of a hacker don’t seem to have inspired much in the way of spy novels, perhaps because some authors are uncomfortable with explaining the technology, or even perhaps they fear that some of the technical details might be beyond their audiences.

Whatever the reason, we don’t yet seem to have a George Smiley or Harry Palmer for the twenty first century …