John Hopkins

Some even claim he has been turned and is now working for the KGB.

The silence around his death gets filled with myth, as those who knew him or simply heard of him share stories and embellish the tales he had already polished in his own lifetime.

The title, Ace of Spies, begins to circulate, half ironic at first, then becoming more admiring and reverent as it takes hold.

His former colleague, Robert Bruce Lockhart, publishes his own account of revolutionary Moscow, though much of his biography was drafted by another colleague who'd known Riley in the early days and had taken his tales of daring do at face value.

In Lockhart's book, Riley appears as a daring, shadowy figure, part conspirator, part romantic adventurer.

Soon, in the Evening Standard newspaper, a comic strip called Master Spy dramatizes the exploits of a thinly-veiled version of Sidney Riley, a glamorous, resourceful spy outwitting enemies across Europe.

Among its readers is a young naval intelligence officer named Ian Fleming.

Fleming would later insist that James Bond was a composite character, drawn from many men he encountered during the war.

But the template for him was already in circulation in the shape of Sidney Riley.

The impeccably dressed, lone operative, fluent in danger, always one step ahead.

The truth, as ever with Riley, is less tidy.

He was brilliant, opportunistic, manipulative, often self-serving, at times courageous and at times reckless.

But he was not the unflappable superhero of later fiction.

He was a man operating in a chaotic world, exploiting its fractures for personal gain until the system he tried to outplay closed around him.

James Bond survives every mission.

Sidney Riley did not.

And though the man has long since gone to his grave, the myth has proved harder to kill.

Next time on Short History, I will bring you a short history of the Haitian Revolution.

That's next time.

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