“Contraband” marks the latest depressing venture into Hollywood by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, who has made some agreeably weird films in Europe but seems to be magically transformed into a maroon through contact with large amounts of United States currency. (His previous English-language films are “Inhale” and “A Little Trip to Heaven,” and if you’ve seen either of those, I’m genuinely sorry.) All you can say about this movie is that some of it is OK — the gritty, downscale settings in the Big Easy or the back-street barrios of Panama City, the satisfying if highly generic action scenes, Wahlberg’s agreeable performance as the family man who thinks he’s left his criminal past behind — and that, for a minute or so at a time, it can even seem pretty good. Giovanni Ribisi plays a scum-sucking New Orleans criminal with dubious facial hair, who enjoys terrorizing women and children but is constantly getting his ass kicked by Wahlberg. It’s like the ur-Giovanni Ribisi character! There’s also Ben Foster with his head shaved tight, playing a supposedly good guy who is backsliding into alcoholism and associated depravity of all kinds.

But while Kormákur occasionally conveys the impression that this might be an enjoyably mindless entertainment, it’s much more like a cynical hash job, whose faux-realistic manner can’t hide all the hackneyed crime-movie situations. Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, a supposedly legendary New Orleans smuggler who has gone straight but gets dragged back into dirty business when his stringy-haired brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) winds up owing 700 G’s to Ribisi’s character, who sits around all day in dive bars drinking tall boys and referring to muscular, meathead-type fellows as “bitches.” Now, of course you can get away with a setup this familiar if you’re going to deliver an archetypal or classic crime movie, but this one’s an exhausting muddle. In fact, I get a strong whiff of condescension off “Contraband,” as if Kormákur and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (adapting the 2008 film “Reykjavik-Rotterdam,” which Kormákur produced) believe they’re giving the masses what they want: tough dudes talkin’ tough, bustin’ heads, crashin’ cars and droppin’ their terminal G’s, pseudo-gangsta white-boy style.

So Chris and his buddy Danny (Lukas Haas) sign onto a freighter crew presided over by the always-enjoyable J.K. Simmons, as the irascible and corrupt captain, in order to smuggle a bunch of counterfeit money back from Panama to pay off his brother-in-law’s debt. It all goes ludicrously wrong: The ship crashes into the docks in Panama City, the counterfeit bills are no good, the Panamanian crime lord played by Diego Luna turns out to be both nutso and bloodthirsty (now there’s a twist), and somehow Danny and Chris wind up in the middle of an armored-car heist that involves the entire population of Panama City getting killed except for them. (As you know if you have seen enough movies, white dudes are invulnerable to bullets, although ugly facial hair, smallness of stature or uncertain sexual orientations have been known to counteract this.)

Back in New Orleans, Ribisi’s character is stalking Chris’ wife and kids — and let me say a word on behalf of Kate Beckinsale, who has to play the most retrograde, whiny, picked-on and permanently victimized wife character in the history of the movies. The word is: Kate, you’re still looking good, and please give your agent a stern talking-to about this one. I realize the “Underworld” franchise has gotten pretty stale, but sometimes taking a role just for the heck of it is not the right move. And then there’s Foster as Chris’ red-eyed, stubble-headed old buddy Sebastian, whose A.A. attendance is slipping and who’s making all kinds of sinister, Judas-flavored phone calls. See, there’s a whole bunch of arcane plot to “Contraband,” it’s just that none of it is in any way interesting or surprising.

I spent much of December complaining about the onslaught of sober-sided prestige movies and halfway looking forward to the flotsam and jetsam of the new year. I was forgetting how bad Hollywood’s January output can actually be, and I would now officially like to walk that back. You definitely ought to be able to make an agreeable thriller out of this cast, these settings and this basic story, and the fact that Kormákur doesn’t is a powerful negative endorsement. Watching “Contraband,” you feel like a cascade of bad decisions were made all along the line, from the cut-and-paste dialogue to the muddled editing to the fact that we spend lots of time watching the process of smuggling — basically, people hiding stuff in dark places — while the characterization and storytelling feel like afterthoughts. Wahlberg, who also produced this fiasco, is a canny star who generally makes good decisions, but he needs to boot this director back to the Althing.

Surprisingly, one of the biggest improvements over Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 Swedish-language version (which, in fairness, is pretty good — a whole lot better than its successors) lies in the acting. Rooney Mara is a revelation as Lisbeth Salander, the damaged, aggressive computer geek and feminist revenge angel, playing the character as far more feral and vulnerable than Noomi Rapace’s borderline-stereotype sexpot Goth girl. And Daniel Craig leaves his Bond manner and wardrobe at home, playing disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist as a wry, bespectacled, middle-aged dad, who never considers the idea of being Lisbeth’s sexual partner until it happens, and never seems at ease with it after that. I like Michael Nyqvist, the Swedish actor who played Blomkvist in the first series, but there’s a reason he’s moved on to playing Hollywood villains. There’s a bit too much wolfish swagger about Nyqvist, a bit too much leather jacket, a bit too much confidence that he can outdrink younger guys and bag younger women. Craig can certainly turn on the masculine charm, as required, but his Blomkvist is a driven professional in search of redemption, not a wallowing Hemingway romantic.

Surely there’s somebody out there who hasn’t read the book or seen the previous movie, and doesn’t know the story. On the other hand, maybe not; my usual focus group consists of my mother and my mother-in-law, and they’ve both read it. Let’s cut to the chase by saying that Fincher and Zaillian remain generally true to Larsson’s novel while perhaps rearranging its emphasis a bit, but also that — as you may have heard, O frequenter of the Internet — they have indeed crafted a clever new solution to the central mystery, as well as a final scene that’s quite different from the Oplev film (but closer to the novel). No doubt all sorts of people will complain for all sorts of reasons. In my view the rewrite is a canny adjustment, far more in keeping with the nature of the characters, and a solution Larsson — who was a terrific storyteller, if an indifferent writer — might well have approved of were he around to do so.

Undone by his own sloppiness and facing a major libel judgment, Craig’s Blomkvist walks away from his investigative magazine and his long-running relationship with Erika (Robin Wright), his married editor. He goes into a bar, orders a coffee and a pack of Marlboro Reds, smokes one and throws the pack in the trash — exactly one of those character-defining actions Fincher handles so exquisitely. That’s when he gets the call from a shadowy lawyer who works for Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), an aging, reclusive tycoon who just happens to be the former boss of the guy who ruined Blomkvist’s career. As we already know, Vanger’s people have employed Lisbeth to compile a confidential and not necessarily legal report on Blomkvist. (She doesn’t think he performs cunnilingus on Erika often enough.)

While Blomkvist begins to investigate the presumed murder of Vanger’s beloved great-niece 40 years earlier — she disappeared from the remote family-owned island Vanger describes as a nest of thieves, misers, bullies and Nazis — Lisbeth is in Stockholm, battling skinheads on the subway and wreaking vengeance on Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), her abusive guardian. I realize that Lisbeth’s brutal rape by Bjurman, and the equally cruel and violent payback, are supposed to be crucial moments in her life and her story. Furthermore, I think I get the point: In a corrupt and chaotic universe, you have to fight fire with fire, and those with no power must find a way to get it, by any means and at any cost. But the whole knife-edge equation between Lisbeth as victim and Lisbeth as avenger, both on the page and in both screen versions, is simultaneously too schematic and more than a little queasy-making.

With her pale eyebrows, shapeless clothing and careless haircut, Mara’s Lisbeth is quite a different creation from the one in the Swedish movies, and much closer to the literary heroine. She craves attention and deflects it with almost every gesture, and her hard shell can’t conceal the fact that her emotions are too close to the surface. Her awkward manner, along with her photographic memory and exaggerated computational skills, suggest the possibility of an autism-spectrum disorder. When she decides to go to bed with Blomkvist, once they’re finally united on Vanger’s Nazi-infected island, she simply takes off her clothes, comes into his room and gets on top of him. Of course most of us know it’s coming, but I still felt almost as surprised as Blomkvist does.

Fincher’s not the kind of director to leave a psychological detail unnoticed, and I think he uses the sex scenes between Blomkvist and Lisbeth to disquiet us as much as turn us on. Almost a hostile stick figure with her clothes on, Mara’s Lisbeth is a voluptuous, spectacular nude, and Blomkvist literally can’t believe his good luck. (Discussion of Mara’s nude scenes has returned the word “merkin” to the popular lexicon, and surely that’s a win for everybody.) Nor does he trust it; in a subtle but significant departure from Larsson’s book, it is Mikael rather than Lisbeth who remains emotionally distant, uncertain about the prospect of true love with a whack-job nearly young enough to be his daughter.

The case of the long-missing Harriet Vanger turns out, of course, to open up a whole series of gruesome, biblically themed murders of women that the Swedish cops have pretty much bungled or ignored. But isn’t it nice that Harriet’s brother Martin (Stellan Skarsgård), who now runs the Vanger company, is being so helpful and giving our investigators everything they need? Rather quietly, and in late middle age, Skarsgård has become one of the most reliable and charismatic performers in world cinema, capable of elevating mediocre material by his presence. (If you haven’t seen his hilarious starring role in the Norwegian film “A Somewhat Gentle Man,” do so immediately.) Unfortunately, by the time Martin appears, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” has indeed lapsed into the kind of middling whodunit where long-hidden clues are distressingly easy to find and the villain takes a long timeout, Goldfinger-style, to explain his motives before he kills you.

As mentioned, I really do like the way Fincher and Zaillian wrap things up, and even during the movie’s slower patches cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (who also shot Fincher’s “Social Network”) delivers spectacular images of the Scandinavian winter and the severe interiors. Fincher’s movies always have density and atmosphere to burn, and those things are arguably the point of the Millennium trilogy, more than its frankly nonsensical story line. This is an immersive and powerful thriller, driven by terrific leading performances. It’s mostly really good and then it wears out its welcome. Now, seriously, can’t we quit while we’re ahead? I’m not sure I can stand two more rounds with Lisbeth and Blomkvist (and a pile of villains we haven’t even met yet), not to mention sit through two more movies made in that deadly “international style,” where everybody speaks English with a Nordic-Slavic, Greta Garbo-meets-Ingmar Bergman accent. (Craig doesn’t even do that, although other Anglophones in the cast do, including Mara, Wright and Plummer.) The Nazi-Soviet woman-hating butler did it. Is that good enough?

I’m not going to claim any degree of redeeming social value or trenchant political critique in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.” It reflects a 21st-century climate of profound paranoia, high-tech espionage and renewed superpower tension between Russia and the United States, and that’s all accurate enough. But Cruise, as the executive producer who controls this franchise, is crafty enough to avoid anything that smacks of ideology; the bad guy here isn’t an Arab jihadi or a Moscow crime lord or a deranged American general or anything like that. Indeed, he’s almost a standard-issue Bond-style supervillain: Hendricks, aka Cobalt (Michael Nyqvist, of the Swedish “Dragon Tattoo” trilogy), is a Scandinavian scientist gone nutso, who has decided that the only way to save civilization is to erase it with nuclear war and start over again. (I find myself strangely willing to entertain this argument, on the intellectual plane — but the surgery required does seem radical.)

As the story begins, Cruise’s Agent Hunt is out of the picture, moldering in a Russian prison on unknown charges. (Remember, any IMF agent who gets caught is disavowed by the U.S. government: “Who, him? No idea; total bad apple. Go ahead and lock him up.”) Another team of agents, headed by newcomer Jane Carter (Paula Patton) and Anglo tech-geek and comic relief Benjy Dunn (Simon Pegg), run a mission that goes badly wrong in Budapest, thanks to an ice-blond French assassin (Léa Seydoux). Then they’re sent to Russia to spring Hunt from prison, in the first of several terrific action set pieces, whereupon they pick up their next assignment, a self-destructing video message (of course) in a decrepit Soviet-era phone booth (of course). It’s a simple mission: Break into a high-security archive inside the Kremlin and extract some important records before Cobalt gets them.

I shouldn’t give away much more, except to say that however ingenious and delightful the IMF’s plots and schemes are in this part of the movie, Cobalt is a step ahead of them the whole time. He sabotages their Kremlin break-in in spectacular fashion, not merely staging a headline-grabbing terrorist attack but making it bear the fingerprints of Ethan and friends and pushing the Russians and Americans right to the brink of war. This initiates “Ghost Protocol,” as Tom Wilkinson helpfully explains during a brief appearance as “the Secretary,” a shadowy U.S. government official in charge of the superspooks. Instead of pretending to be unauthorized, now the IMF team really is unauthorized. They’re supposed to stop Cobalt from blowing up the world, but without any government support or sanction or information, covert or otherwise.

Bird’s direction has such brio, and Cruise’s performance as the unkempt, long-haired version of Ethan is so relaxed and charming, that even when “Ghost Protocol” resorts to empty showmanship it feels like good fun rather than pure pandering. (The impressive cinematography, much of it in huge-format IMAX, is by Robert Elswit.) Oh, I could explain how and why Ethan winds up climbing the outside of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, currently the world’s tallest building, using only magnetic “gecko gloves” that don’t quite work as well as advertised. But does it really matter? It’s a dazzling sequence with a smashing conclusion, that left the audience of cynical Manhattanites, at the preview screening I attended, first breathless and then cheering. (Cruise is such a madman that much of what we see in the film is really him stuck to the windows of the 2,700-foot skyscraper, although I’m not saying that stunt work and digital trickery aren’t also involved.)

First of all, Hunt, Carter and Dunn — joined by Jeremy Renner as Brandt, a CIA analyst with a troubled past — try to run a complicated sting on Cobalt, who is meeting the French killer-babe assassin in Dubai to haggle over stolen Russian nuclear codes he needs to launch his yearned-for Armageddon. Then there’s a pulse-pounding chase, on foot and by sports car, through a zero-visibility sandstorm. And then — what the hell? — the tour of nefarious night spots of the developing world moves on to Mumbai, where a lecherous Indian tycoon (Anil Kapoor) hosts a lavish party, Renner’s character dons magnetic chain-mail underwear, and Cobalt hopes to use a second-string telecom satellite to launch a Russian nuclear strike on San Francisco. (I wouldn’t call Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec’s screenplay profound drama, but it conceals its twists artfully.)

My only questions about Brad Bird as a director are: 1) Why the hell has he only made three movies in 12 years; and 2) If Tom Cruise saw that he could do this, why didn’t anybody else? Given Bird’s excellent animated features, you’d expect him to be adept with humor, character byplay and rapid-fire storytelling, and you’d be right. (He does especially well using Pegg’s character as the foil who continually punctures the hardass atmosphere.) But this movie has not just one or two but four or five of the most coherent and exciting action sequences in recent history, culminating with a beautifully choreographed final face-off between Cobalt and Ethan in a vertical Mumbai parking garage. Looking back at the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, each of the films has had a strong directorial signature, beginning with Brian De Palma’s 1999 original and continuing with subsequent entries by John Woo and J.J. Abrams. Whether “Ghost Protocol” is the best in that expensive series of helicopter shots and exploding speedboats is up for debate, naturally, but it’s pretty doggone close. This is pure escapist cinema at its best, without morality or apology or guilt.

“Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” is now playing worldwide in IMAX theaters only, with wide release to follow beginning Dec. 21.

You also need to remember that Ritchie is a technician of undoubted visual prowess with almost no interest in telling a story (let alone ability to do so), and that he’s apparently stuck in an early-2000s, post-”Matrix” action-movie aesthetic. Slowing stuff way the heck down and then speeding it up again; showing fight sequences multiple times so we’re never quite sure which of them “really” happened; bleaching out all the color with sepia tones and then bringing it back, lysergic-style — we get all that and more in “Game of Shadows.” This movie may not technically qualify as steampunk, but it’s somewhere in that “Wild Wild West” neighborhood: While the heavy explosives and firearms used so generously herein could hypothetically have existed in the 1890s, the period is not generally depicted with such an intense and stupid degree of boom and blammo.

That said, I could not entirely resist the idiotic allure of “Game of Shadows,” the second movie in Ritchie’s series that has loosed the most unhinged, unkempt and unclean version of Conan Doyle’s legendary detective ever seen. Downey appears to have concocted the character from fragments of free-floating fantasy. At one moment Holmes has the mannerisms of a fussy Victorian lady, telling the newly minted Mrs. Watson (Kelly Reilly), whose existence he clearly deplores, “May I say it was a lovely ceremony? Many a tear was shed in joy.” At the next he’s an ass-kicking martial arts expert, locked in hand-to-hand combat with a Cossack assassin in a London brothel or facing the private Teutonic army of the infamous professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris), noted mathematician and “Napoleon of crime.”

Holmes’ disguises — as a Chinese opium addict, or a female train passenger, or an article of furniture — are entirely ridiculous (in the books, they’re supposed to be mind-bendingly convincing), and Downey never remotely seems like a plausible 19th-century gentleman instead of a creative, funny performer who’s making it up as he goes along. Still, that’s just it: This is Bob Downey, simultaneously playing the fool and pulling your leg, and even at his dumbest he’s semi-irresistible. “Madam, this is a glorious hedgehog goulash,” he tells his hostess in a Gypsy caravan. (She’s played by Noomi Rapace of the Swedish “Dragon Tattoo” trilogy.) “I can’t remember when I’ve had better.” Sherlock Holmes? Not much. But did it get a laugh? You bet. Indeed, I can only hope Downey is in improv mode much of the time, because if not, someone actually wrote the verb “noshing” and then put it in the mouth of a fictional character 120 years ago.

Speaking of writers, this time around, Ritchie has a new writing team, husband-and-wife duo Kieran and Michele Mulroney. They have separated Holmes from Watson, once again agreeably played by Jude Law. (It’s nice to see the good doctor portrayed as less of a buffoon than usual, even if Law seems wrong for the part in terms of age, physique, class and most other attributes I can think of.) But the petulant Holmes wants to pry his beloved companion and sidekick free from his bride, of course, and anyway from the vengeful Moriarty, who is apparently bent on starting the Great War 20 years early, yearns to exterminate them both and Mrs. Watson too, just for the hell of it. Twitchy and irritable, with beady eyes and little Chiclet teeth, Harris’ Moriarty is one of this movie’s great strengths, along with Stephen Fry as Holmes’ even more eccentric brother, Mycroft. (Although once again — and I’m tired of saying this — he’s nothing like the reclusive Mycroft in Conan Doyle.)

There’s no point wasting your time or mine with plot summary, is there? There’s a whole lot of fighting and shooting, like 600 times the action of the entire Holmes opus in one two-hour movie. Holmes hardly ever uses his legendary deductive powers, except when he’s in bitchy, oh-snap rivalry mode with his brother. Moriarty is apparently behind a series of anarchist-related assassinations and bombings in Europe, mostly just because he’s an evil genius in an action movie. You could argue that some parallel is made with the current terrorist hysteria — and indeed the word came to prominence at exactly that historical period — but that sort of thing goes way beyond Ritchie’s mission statement.

I will mention that Rachel McAdams returns, briefly, as Irene Adler, the only woman ever to challenge Holmes’ commitment to homosocial chastity and cocaine, but also that the level of semi-gay double entendre between Holmes and Watson is carried almost to an offensive locker-room extreme. “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” is occasionally thrilling, sometimes hilarious and mostly absolute claptrap. Think of it as a lot like drinking a fourth cup of holiday eggnog: Not really a good idea at all, but you might have fun.

Jeffery Deaver, bestselling thriller writer and author of “Carte Blanche”

I don’t see much of a change [since the end of the Cold War], frankly. The crux of good espionage fiction has always been micro: a compelling story of one or two individuals up against an enemy. The ideology of the bad guys and whether or not they are state- or non-state actors are to me irrelevant. A good spy story draws us into a small but compelling world filled with overwhelming threats, duplicity, moral questions and heroism. A competent author can do this regardless of the allegiance of his antagonist. Look, for instance, at John le Carré’s novels of the post-Cold War period (“The Night Manager,” for instance, about drugs and arms), Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers in the ’50s and ’60s, during the height of that era, or one of Graham Greene’s pre-Cold War spy novels, like “Ministry of Fear.”

The most significant distinction in the post-Cold War era is coincidental: the rise of technology. Much of today’s espionage is SIGINT and related intelligence gathering, with the bulk of a spy’s job being conducted electronically from high-tech locations in suburban Colorado and Maryland. Ah, for the good old days: spying on your nemesis while sipping pastis in a Parisian cafe, with your fedora pulled down and your trench coat collar pulled up.

Eric Van Lustbader, bestselling author of “The Bourne Dominion” and “Blood Trust”

First, you have to ask how the Cold War affected the spy novel. In those days, many of the spy fiction writers had served in World War II; others, like Ian Fleming, were actually in the secret service. Those who weren’t directly linked to the clandestine services, like Bob Ludlum, developed many contacts within them.

Second, Cold War tales resonate so deeply because in the past we had one monolithic, brutal regime, accurately named the Evil Empire. During the Cold War, international politics was relatively simple: it was Us versus the Soviet Union. One on one. Capitalism versus Communism. Easy to understand and to write about.

The end of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet Union, came about in a totally surprising manner. It wasn’t a series of military or political victories on our part that brought it about: it was an economic collapse. The Soviet Union had simply grown too big for Moscow to keep control over its sprawling expanse. I’m quite certain there wasn’t a single spy fiction writer in the Cold War era who had foreseen this conclusion.

But there was another, more subtle reason for the Soviet Union’s breakup, and that was religion. The Kremlin had been largely successful in snuffing out the influence of Catholicism and Judaism among its population, but it had had much less success in repressing the various, more numerous Muslims in the far-flung countries under its control.

The end of the Cold War brought a relatively short period of what can only be termed “international calm.” Sadly, this was short-lived. The enemies of the West, not merely capitalism, were now many, many splintered cells, operating all over the world. There was no central hub, no unifying concept, except death to Infidels. The rise of radical Islam has been breathtakingly swift and undoubtedly frightening to many. Islam is not well understood in the West. It is, therefore, all too easy to look upon every Islamic as a radical, an enemy. Islam is a religion of peace. But, as with any religion, there are fringe elements – vocally and demonstrably rageful – who turn religious principles to their own violent ends. Abject poverty and ignorance are massive contributors to the rise of Islamic terrorism.

Demonization of the Other has always played a major role in spy fiction. It was easy when writing about the KGB, but in today’s fractured international climate the ability to set the right tone and achieve a proper balance between good and evil is becoming ever more complex, ever more difficult.

R. J. Hillhouse, intelligence analyst, blogger and author of spy novels

The end of the Cold War set both the spy novelist and real spies adrift in search of new enemies. Both novelists and the real-life intelligence officers they portray struggled to come to terms with the new international playing field without such a clear-cut enemy. The reaction of most spy novelists was to ignore politics and move on to less weighty affairs.

Sept. 11 brought order to the fictional world of spies just as it did to their role models. Terrorists became the enemy; the multibillion-dollar military, intelligence and homeland-security industries aligned themselves behind this paradigm. One by one spy novelists returned to politics and jumped on board with one-dimensional terrorists as the new bad guys and gave cultural credence to the new boogeyman. The spy novel has found itself back in a similar position as in the early decades of the Cold War when the Soviets were evil and morality was an American monopoly. The few notable exceptions included my own “Outsourced,” which took a critical look at the murky world of the multibillion-dollar private intelligence and military industries.

As the Cold War dragged on, the spy novel matured and began to take a more critical examination of who we were because of the enemy and our response to him. We can hope that spy novelists tire of the War on Terror narrative and the post-9/11 spy novel has a similar coming of age.

Robert Baer, former intelligence analyst and author

Who thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall would also take the air out of spy fiction. Frankly, I find the current stuff unreadable — wheel kicking Islamic terrorists, defusing at the last minute a bomb that’s about to take down civilization as we know it. The stuff belongs either in the comics or war novels. In any case, no one’s going to top Forsyth’s “Day of the Jackal” for tick-tock drama. I think that’s why we miss Cold War espionage fiction, its subtlety and three-dimensional characters. For my money, the classic espionage novel is le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” The writing’s good, but what makes it great is the brilliant, believable enemy, Karla, the KGB master spy. And he’s not a stretch — the KGB really was that good. In fact, I’d say most of the time they were better than both us and the British. Outwitting the KGB, catching Karla mole inside MI6, is the stuff of drama. And let’s not forget the Soviet Union truly was an existential threat — unlike Bin Laden.

The other day I heard the CIA has had to resurrect some old Moscow hands, operatives who’d spent their careers working against the KGB. It was in reaction to a recent CIA compromise in Beirut in which the Islamic militant group Hezbollah outwitted the CIA. The CIA apparently has to relearn spycraft. So maybe the espionage novel is on its way back.

Gayle Lynds, bestselling spy novelist

All governments lie. All spies lie. They’re supposed to. But that doesn’t make it right; on the other hand, sometimes it does. All novelists lie, too, but we call it fiction. This is a natural alignment that sold hundreds of millions of espionage thrillers during the Cold War.

Then the Iron Curtain crashed. As New York Times critic Walter Goodman announced funereally in November 1989, the same month the Berlin Wall crumbled: “The future looks dismal for the trenchcoat set.”

He was right. The field with its big, exciting books of Cold Warriors facing off against agents of the Evil Empire was about to be liquidated, eliminated, scrubbed.

The espionage sea change began almost immediately. Exhausted by paying attention to the world at large, Americans cocooned. In this shadowy lull, we liked to think we were at peace and, as the last standing superpower, untouchable. Overseas press coverage plummeted.  International reporters and photojournalists couldn’t find jobs. At the same time New York publishers warned editors not to buy new spy fiction because the field was as dead as the Cold War.

Of course publishers continued to bring out spy thrillers by box-office names like Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy, but their sales plummeted. By 1998 thriller icons Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré had declared it was time to accept reality: The black business of international espionage no longer interested readers. Both men fled to fresh literary turf.

Still, many of the stars who stayed tried to reinvigorate the field. I remember one editor telling me Ludlum was in trouble because his numbers were circling the toilet, so he was going to do something daring — write a female villain. The result was “Scorpio Illusion,” published in 1993, a New York Times bestseller. Other authors introduced female lead protagonists. Taking a different tack, still others wrote female heroes, female villains, and set their novels in the past, not only during the Cold War but also frequently during World War II, which seemed a safer bet.

Little helped — until 9/11. That was the spy game changer. Applications to the CIA soared, and so did the demand for international journalists. Any American who spoke Arabic or Farsi could get a job. The horrific events of 9/11 had shown us we could no longer afford to ignore the world at large. Definitely we needed to know more about it. In fact, it was interesting.

We are a nation of readers, so of course we turned to books. One of our favored resources for information has long been through the lens of quality political fiction, such as the best espionage novels.

9/11 birthed the modern spy novel. Assassins became antiheroes. Females abounded in both heroic and villainous roles. Without the old Soviet Union to narrow our focus, novels grew wide-ranging and rich — examining not only al-Qaeda and terrorism, but also merchants of death plying the gray market arms trade, intelligence community links to corporate espionage, the legality and role of government contractors, worldwide interrogation practices as a form of warfare, technological advances that can both aid or hinder, disagreements within the international spy community that lead to willful mistakes, the effect of White House policy in shaping intelligence analysis, espionage as a source of not only power but revenge.

Readers responded. By 2003, the “espionage/thriller” novel category had leaped a whopping 34 percent in sales, according to PW Newsline. And Le Carré and Forsyth rejoined the field with very contemporary spy stories. But then there’s so much to write about, so many enemies to explore, and what better field than the international spy thriller, proving again what J. Edgar Hoover said many years ago: “There’s something about a secret that’s addicting.”

Tom Nichols, professor of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College

The end of the Cold War killed off the modern spy novel. Purists will object, and say that the greatness of the spy novel lies not in politics, but in character studies, especially of flawed people in toxic moral circumstances. Even James Bond once referred to spying as just a game of “Red Indians,” and he has to be sent at one point to Jamaica to prevent him from having a nervous breakdown.

The problem is that for the spy to live such a high-voltage life, something grand and terrible must be at stake. Like, say, World War III, or even Civilization As We Know It. And without the Soviet Union (or Nazi Germany before it) and the struggle with a titanic power, there’s really not much to the genre. The kind of novel where the world itself hangs in the balance, where moral choices are stark because they are moral choices — that’s gone now, for three main reasons.

First, suspense novels are now generic. A beautiful journalist meets a tormented spy, and together they unravel a plot that will go all the way to the Oval Office and shake the world to … well, you get the idea. The plot is never really all that world-shaking, and the Oval Office is usually just a nest of creeps and nincompoops.

Second, they’re cynical. Nothing is ever as it seems, because no one really cares about anything anyway, and when they do, it’s usually the wrong things, like how much all governments really stink. (However, there has since been a recent trend of perfectly awful right-wing spy novels where the hero is always a military officer or military reservist, but out of respect for both the military and literature, we’ll ignore them.)

Finally, and most importantly, the bad guys — usually greedy businessmen or terrorists — are now uninteresting. Terrorists are especially uninteresting, because for a spy novel to work, the agent needs a worthy adversary. A spy novel also has to include spying, not law enforcement. (Indeed, one of the worst barbs ever aimed at James Bond was Dr. No’s zinger that Bond is just a “stupid policeman.” Ouch.) … Spies no longer engage their professional equals, but rather are like playground monitors in a field full of children with machine guns. There’s not a lot of suspense to be had if MI-6’s top agent is up against some nerd with a couple of arrests for soliciting hookers back in Southern California and is hiding in Yemen while advising other guys over the Internet on how to make bombs. (I don’t know if MI-6 still has any top agents, but that second guy is actually the late Anwar al-Awlaki.)

The Soviet and Nazi totalitarians, worthy and dangerous enemies both, are gone. Sadly, they took the great spy novels with them, but it’s a small price to pay.

Charles Cumming, British spy novelist and author of “The Trinity Six”

I’m not sure that [the end of the Cold War] did change the spy novel, per se; I think technology and greater freedom of information changed it. During the Cold War, there was no Internet, no mobile phones, very few security cameras on the streets, limited opportunities for travel behind the Iron Curtain, and only primitive satellite surveillance. At the same time the general public knew very little about how their intelligence services operated. They had to get their information from Clancy or le Carré or Spycatcher, all books which – for different reasons — needed to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Nowadays, most people in London could point to the headquarters of MI5 and MI6. The Chiefs of both Services are public figures. Vast amounts of information about espionage – from tradecraft to budgetary cuts – is available online and in print. In other words, the mystique surrounding spying has been stripped away. That this has happened in the 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall is just a coincidence.

Why is it that Cold War tales still seem to resonate so deeply with international audiences? I think it’s a mixture of nostalgia for the period and a sense that the Cold War, for all of the misery that it wrought behind the Iron Curtain, was not a particularly dangerous or oppressive time for people in the West. Of course, Europeans and Americans lived with the theoretical threat of nuclear armageddon, but they were never attacked by the Soviet bloc. The tension between the two systems – Communist and Capitalist – was played out at the level of diplomacy and propaganda. What was the worst that could happen? The Soviets could try to stockpile missiles in Cuba. An old Etonian might turn out to be working for the KGB.

You can’t say that about the threat posed by radical Islam. In the last 15 years, al-Qaida has struck at the heart of cities in Europe, Africa and America and been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. In other words, there’s nothing playful or mysterious about what they’re up to; al-Qaida is a death cult which isn’t choosy about its victims. Furthermore, I think people are sick of reading about Iraq and Afghanistan. They would rather go back to the great playgrounds of the post-war era – Moscow, Berlin, London, Vienna – and to the reassuring certainties of East versus West. This is what I mean by nostalgia for the Cold War. It’s an aesthetic choice.

Olen Steinhauer, author of “The Tourist”

I’m not sure the end of the Cold War changed the spy novel in any significant way. What it did was take from espionage novelists the greatest and most dependable of enemies — but was the fight against Soviet communism really what Cold War spy fiction was about?  The triumphalist stuff, maybe, but the better work used that conflict as an excuse to investigate the effects of betrayal and deception on the individual — and betrayal and deception haven’t gone away with the disappearance of Soviet communism.

Yet there’s no doubt that the texture of the Cold War provided great material for writers in the genre, and those stories touched readers deeply — arguably more deeply than most contemporary spy fiction. Why? For Western audiences, the “other” of Cold War fiction was recognizable. Those communist infiltrators looked like us, dressed like us, and held a fork the same way we do. These sound ridiculously surface, but they’re not, particularly when you add in a Marxist philosophy that most Westerners could understand and relate to, even if they disagreed with it. The chain-smoking agents who trailed our protagonists weren’t just believable; they could easily be sympathetic — we could see ourselves in them.

These days, the identity of the “enemy” feels so fragmented, as if the threat to the nation is from a million little cuts — financial, terroristic, sociological and military — rather than a single hard blow. The closest we have to a generally agreed-upon monolithic enemy is Islamic extremism, and there’s the rub: It’s hard to write a believable suicide bomber who isn’t just a dupe for a higher-ranking mastermind; and when a mastermind sends children off to blow themselves up, it’s hard to get an audience to empathize with his philosophy or his job troubles or his problematic love life. Not that this can’t be done — anything can be accomplished in fiction — but it’s a hell of a task. And without enemies that readers can feel for, espionage novels tend to just run in place, going through the motions.

Additionally, the truly great spy novels of the Cold War achieved their effect by stripping away our romantic notions about ourselves. Brilliant English public school boys with the world before them could become Soviet spies (Le Carré), and so could our wives (Deighton). Charles McCarry’s spy was a model of absolute morality — the intelligence world’s morality, which it turns out is in sharp contrast to what the rest of us think of as moral. The great works of espionage shocked us by revealing the terrors we were capable of and making them feel utterly believable.

By now, though, we already believe in the evil man can do to man — motivated by greed or simple incompetence — because journalism trumps fiction day after day, showing us how the sausage is made. Is there really anything that can surprise us anymore?

Which is another way of saying that today’s spy novelist has some real challenges, and each writer deals with this in his own way. The enemy in a contemporary spy novel may say less about the world as it is than it does about that particular writer, and his insecurities toward his craft — the enemies he avoids may be the ones he’s not sure he can write. It’s why suicide bombers and their masterminds haven’t made it into my own novels … yet.