Shortly afterward, Conrad came across a book of recollections by an Assistant Commissioner of Police during the period a line in the work stimulated Conrad to write the novel. The friend recalled that the man's sister committed suicide afterward. For Conrad, all this had accomplished was a man who died for nothing-not for an idea or for anything else. In the course of the conversation, Conrad and his friend remembered the story of an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, an act that Conrad thought was 'so fatuous.that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought' (229). Conrad believed that anarchism was dangerous because it preyed on humankind's tendency to be eager for its own self-destruction.

The Secret Agent is one of the first spy novels and is written in such a way as to require great attention on the part of the reader to make sense of the plot developments that occur (Simmons and Stape, viii).Ĭonrad writes in an Author's Note to the work (written twelve years after the initial publication) that he was motivated to write the book after having a brief conversation with a friend about anarchism. The book is also taken to be Conrad's greatest metropolitan novel and makes use both of Continental and English writing styles.

Joseph Conrad published The Secret Agent in 1907 and the work is often taken to be the major work in a trilogy of political works that Conrad published around this time (the other two are Nostromo and Under Western Eyes).

The secret agent novel