Secret Service

Secret Service is a historical adventure novel by Cyrus Townsend Brady, the prolific American writer, journalist, and Episcopal clergyman who produced more than seventy books across a long career around the turn of the twentieth century. Brady, who lived from 1861 to 1920, specialised in historical fiction set in various periods of American history, particularly the colonial wars, the Revolution, the Civil War, and the western frontier expansion of the nineteenth century.

The novel is set during the American Civil War and follows the activities of a group of operatives working in what would now be called intelligence or covert operations for one of the sides in the conflict. The Civil War saw the development of substantial intelligence operations by both Union and Confederate governments, with networks of spies, couriers, and saboteurs operating in the contested border states and behind enemy lines. Brady’s novel draws on the documented history of these operations to construct an adventure plot involving danger, deception, divided loyalties, and the kind of moral complications that intelligence work characteristically involves.

Brady’s Civil War fiction is generally even handed between the two sides, in the tradition that Joseph Alexander Altsheler later took further in his Civil War Series. Brady had personal connections to both Union and Confederate veterans and his fiction tends to present soldiers on both sides as honourable men doing their duty according to their understanding. The intelligence operations he describes in Secret Service involve characters from both sides, with the moral weight of the various actions assessed on their individual merits rather than according to a partisan framework.

As with most of Brady’s fiction, the writing combines adventure plot with a moralizing tone that reflected his clerical background and his understanding of fiction as a vehicle for character formation as well as entertainment. The story moves at a brisk pace through the various episodes of the central operation and reaches a resolution that ties up the major plot threads while giving the principal characters the chance for the kind of moral development that Brady favoured.

The book is of moderate length, around two hundred and fifty pages, and reads well as a single weekend project. For readers interested in early twentieth century American historical fiction about the Civil War, this is a representative example of the period’s adventure mode. It pairs naturally with Brady’s other Civil War novels and with the work of Altsheler and Mary Johnston.