Kruger’s Secret Service was written by “One Who Was In It.” “One Who Was In It” was the pseudonym of Douglas Blackburn (1857-1929). Blackburn was a journalist and a member of the Secret Service of Paul Kruger (1825-1904), the President of the Transvaal Republic during the First Boer War (1899). Blackburn went on to become a novelist and can be counted as a major link in South African literature between Olive Schreiner and the twentieth-century authors of South Africa’s canon.¹

Kruger’s Secret Service is a peculiar book, an oddity whose obscurity is undoubtedly the result of Blackburn’s approach to the book’s subject matter. The nameless narrator of Kruger’s Secret Service is an English businessman in Johannesburg in 1895. His business is ruined by the unrest in the Transvaal, and during the days of the Jameson Raid he is persuaded to join the Australian Dismounted Corps. After Jameson’s surrender the narrator becomes a traveling salesman and falls in love with the daughter of an inventor, but the inventor is arrested by the Boer government. The narrator successfully pleads for the inventor’s release, but this brings the narrator to the attention of the Boer Secret Service, the spy agency of the South African Republic. The narrator helps the Secret Service by telling them of the existence of some guns, which is one of their obsessions, and this leads to the narrator being hired in person by Doctor Leyds, the State Secretary of the Transvaal. The narrator carries out several missions for the Boers, including stealing a set of valuable papers, spying on other Boer spies, and even participating in the planning of an assassination attempt on Cecil Rhodes himself.

But the narrator is a patriotic Englishman, and his work for the Boer Secret Service is done purely as a swindle. The narrator takes the Boer government for as much money as he can, feeds them false information, and after receiving the plans to kill Rhodes, the narrator goes to Rhodes himself and discloses all. (Rhodes, smartly, asks for proof in writing, so that he can take it to London. The narrator, equally smartly, is reluctant to do so, as it would betray his own position). The narrator investigates some corrupt Boer officials who are complicit in the illegal liquor trade, but his fortunes turn for the worse, and he is drugged and a compromising set of papers are taken from him. Then he gets involved in a series of incidents in which he is unable to hold his temper and lets his pro-Rhodes, pro-English, anti-Kruger, anti-Boer sympathies be known. These put him in a bad light with the Boer leadership, who dismiss him from their service. When the war between the Boers and the English begins in 1899 the narrator goes to fight for the English, participates in a couple of harrowing battles, and is stricken with enteric fever. The book ends with the narrator convalescing in a hospital.

Kruger’s Secret Service is odd and interesting for a number of reasons. In 1900 there was no coherent, distinct genre of espionage novels. Spy novels as they are currently thought of first appeared in the seventeenth century, when a Genoese journalist and political refugee in Paris, Giovanni Paolo Marana (1642-1693), wrote Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1684). The narrator, Mahmut, is a spy sent by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to Paris to observe French and European culture and report his findings. Although Marana used the work to comment on the manners and cultural foibles of Western culture and the French government, there are a number of observations about French politics and the French army, and readers uninterested in satirical commentary enjoyed the stories of Mahmut’s adventures in Paris and his attempts to stay alive despite the best efforts of Parisian street criminals. Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy created the literary genre of the foreign observer novel. Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy was translated into English in 1687. Between 1691 and 1694 an unknown author, possibly the bookseller Mr. Hindmarsh, published an additional seven volumes. Over the next forty years numerous imitations were published, including The French Spy, The London Spy, The York Spy, The German Spy, and The Jewish Spy. The Baron de Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721) and Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711-1712) were both written in imitation of Marana’s work. Nearly all of these novels retained the espionage plot of Letters.

During the late eighteenth century the popular image of a spy changed from one who acted out of self-interest to one who acted out of patriotism. By 1821, when James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Spy, the idea that the heroic protagonist of a novel could be a double agent was not an alien one. But it was not until later in the century, during the most intense years of competition for Empire and influence between the European powers, that the positive portrayal of a spy became more common. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, the portrayals of spies differed greatly. In some novels, like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, espionage was a risky but essentially innocent act carried out in an exotic foreign land. In other works, like E. Phillips Oppenheim’s Mysterious Mr. Sabin, espionage is either tawdry and low-class or, when performed by Sabin’s “Me” character protagonists, the highest of high stakes games played by members of Society. Other spy novels, like The Chronicles of Michael Danevitch of the Russian Secret Service (1897), by “Dick Donovan” (see: The Dick Donovan Mysteries), were essentially detective stories in which investigators in the service of a government solved the crimes of various government officials, most of which had nothing to do with espionage.

Kruger’s Secret Service was practically alone in portraying espionage as a dangerous, desperate, and serious profession. In all likelihood this element of realism was due to Douglas Blackburn actually having been a spy, unlike outsiders (like Kipling) or poseurs (like Oppenheim).

So Blackburn was in some ways forging new ground. His work is an anticipation of the grittier spy novels of the twentieth century. But Kruger’s Secret Service does not emerge from an established fictional tradition, and some of the elements of the spy novel which the reader expects to find are missing from Kruger’s Secret Service. The novel is neither a spy novel nor, despite its final section, a war novel. Kruger’s Secret Service has elements from both genres but falls comfortably into neither. The key to the novel is that Blackburn wrote it to persuade English readers that the Boer Secret Service was in fact just as venal, corrupt, and incompetent as they had heard and wished to believe. (Predictably, the venality and corruption was Blackburn’s own, while the real Boer Secret Service was no better or worse than other contemporary spy agencies). Blackburn’s fictional South Africa is the opposite of what his readers believed England to be, so that South African officials are corrupt and self-serving, the workers are alcoholics and drug users, and malfeasance and incompetence is rampant. Despite Blackburn’s politically motivated reasons for writing the book, however, Kruger’s Secret Service remains of interest to the modern reader, although perhaps not for the reasons which Blackburn might have anticipated.

The novel has a distinctive feel of reality. There is a great amount of local detail, from names to historical events to customs. Blackburn’s journalistic veneer, his insistence that his portrayal of South Africa is an accurate one, and his depiction of the emotional tenor of the times are all convincing. Kruger’s Secret Service is a credible portrayal of life in South Africa for the English before and during the Boer wars. Blackburn likewise writes memorably about some of the local scenery and vividly describes a local leper colony.

One of the novel’s failings is that it provides no context for the historical events it portrays and refers to, so that the American reader who is not familiar with the events of the Jameson Raid and the 1899 Boer War will likely feel lost. That consideration likely never entered Blackburn’s mind, as he was writing about current events for his contemporary audience, but over a century later it is a problem for the reader. Blackburn’s intended audience influences the novel in another way. Blackburn is writing didactically and with political motives, and much of the novel is concerned with arguing for and justifying recent events, especially English actions in South Africa. Kruger’s Secret Service is by no means an objective treatment of history, but rather a piece of propaganda–entertaining propaganda, but propaganda nonetheless.

Accompanying this propaganda is Blackburn’s bigotry against those who are not English. The narrator is not notably racist, relative to his contemporaries, but neither is he lacking in it, and his comments about the “kaffirs” (blacks), “low Dutch,” and the Jews are as bigoted as might be expected from the average Englishman in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. His opinion of the Boers is little better. He sees them as ignorant and superstitious peasants, but he is insistent that most of the Boers were innocents led astray by evil leadership, rather than actively supporting the actions of Kruger and his cronies. This is not historically accurate, but, again, Blackburn was writing propaganda.

Blackburn’s descriptions of South Africa and its people are good, and the book even includes a photo of a telegram he received from a military officer supporting the novel’s events, but what really makes the novel interesting reading is the realistic depiction of the narrator as a new spy and a new soldier. On his first missions as a spy the narrator is a nervous bumbler, bumping into walls, knocking over a vase, accidentally setting drapes on fire during a housebreaking, and in general acting in a realistic fashion, rather than acting like the super-competent master spy who writers like Oppenheim and William Le Queux would later portray. Nor is the narrator is blasé about his spy work; he suffers from pangs of guilt and great nervousness while doing his job.

The best part of the novel is its final section, in which the narrator describes his experiences in the Boer War. The narrator compellingly describes the emotional and physical feelings of soldiers, from fear to nausea to exultation to stress to despair, and the awful sights and sounds which men in battle are exposed to. Blackburn does not romanticize war or pretend that it is a glorious thing. He shows it in all its awfulness, in a voice that can only be one of experience. Kruger’s Secret Service contains some excellent writing on war, and it is a shame so few people have ever read it.

Print: Douglas Blackburn, Kruger’s Secret Service. London: Forgotten Books, 2015.

¹ See Stephen Gray’s Douglas Blackburn (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984) for a proper appraisal of Blackburn and his place in the history of South African fiction.