‘An actor in desperate earnest’: Informers and Secret Agency

Abstract

Shortly before his death, Adolph Verloc makes an important admission to his wife Winnie about his work as a secret agent: ‘There isn’t a murdering plot for the last eleven years that I hadn’t my finger in at the risk of my life. There’s scores of these revolutionists I’ve sent off with their bombs in their blamed pockets, to get themselves caught on the frontier’ (180). At this crucial point, with Winnie failing to come to terms with her husband’s cowardly use of her brother as a bomb-carrier, Verloc discloses the true extent of his role on behalf of the Metropolitan Police and the Embassy in Chesham Square (anonymized, but obviously the Russian Embassy). In doing so, Verloc answers a question implicit in the novel’s title: what is the extent of his agency? Has he, as the spymaster Vladimir sarcastically alleged, merely been the passive reporter of the vapid discussions of the International Red Committee taking place in his parlour? Or has he in fact already fulfilled the role that Vladimir urged him to perform — that of agent provocateur, an agent in every sense of the word, who makes things happen? Verloc’s admission reveals that he has supplied revolutionists with bombs so that they would have evidence in their pockets when they were apprehended. Verloc is a career agent provocateur.