John le Carre and Elmore Leonard

John le Carre has maintained that for the late twentieth century at least, the spy novel is the central fictional form because it alone tackles the implementations of the hidden agendas that - we suspect, and as the evening news tends to confirm - surround us on all sides. Similarly, Elmore Leonard might argue - if he were given to argument, which he is not - that a novel with some sort of a crime or a scam in it can hardly claim to be an accurate representation of today's reality.