became the pre-eminent British spy novelist. His well-written stories portray the Great War as a "clash of civilisations" between Western civilization and barbarism. His notable novels are The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916) and sequels, all featuring the heroic Scotsman Richard Hannay. In France Gaston Leroux published the spy thriller Rouletabille chez Krupp (1917), in which a detective, Joseph Rouletabille, engages in espionage. Inter-war period After the Russian Revolution (1917), the quality of spy fiction declined, perhaps because the Bolshevik enemy won the Russian Civil War (1917–23). Thus, the inter-war spy story usually concerns combating the Red Menace, which was perceived as another "clash of civilizations". Spy fiction was dominated by British authors during this period, initially former intelligence officers and agents writing from inside the trade. Examples include Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928) by W. Somerset Maugham, which accurately portrays spying in the First World War, and The Mystery of Tunnel 51 (1928) by Alexander Wilson whose novels convey an uncanny portrait of the first head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the original 'C'. In the book Literary Agents (1987), Anthony Masters wrote: "Ashenden's adventures come nearest to the real-life experiences of his creator"'. John Le Carré described Ashenden stories as a major influence on his novels as praised Maugham as "the first person to write anything about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality". At a more popular level, Leslie Charteris' popular and long-running Saint series began, featuring Simon Templar, with Meet the Tiger (1928). Water on the Brain (1933) by former intelligence officer Compton Mackenzie was the first successful spy novel satire. Prolific author Dennis Wheatley also wrote his first spy novel, The Eunuch of Stamboul (1935) during this period. In the sham state of Manchukuo, spies often featured in stories published in its government-sponsored magazines as villains threatening Manchukuo. Manchukuo had been presented since its founding in 1931 as an idealistic Pan-Asian experiment, where the officially designated "five races" of the Japanese, Han Chinese, Manchus, Koreans and Mongols had come together to built an utopian society. Manchukuo also had a substantial Russian minority who initially been considered as the "sixth race", but had been excluded. The spy stories of Manchukuo such as "A Mixed Race Woman" by the writer Ding Na often linked the willingness to serve as spies with having a mixed Russian-Han heritage; the implication being that people