RogerBW's Blog: Taxonomy of the Occult Secret Service

John Dallman invented the term Occult Secret Service to describe the Laundry novels of Charles Stross (from 2001) and the Broom Cupboard novels of David Devereux (from 2008). It's become popular in other fiction and in role-playing games. Is it useful to analyse it further?

Unlike many genre labels, it's pretty easy to define. The setting (1) is a recognisable real (modern or historical) world; (2) it also has magic (broadly defined), but (3) this is not universally known (or the world wouldn't be recognisable); (4) the protagonists are fighting against nasty magical things in the world (some of them are probably magicians themselves); (5) they are working for a formal government organisation that also knows about magic.

So the RPG settings Unknown Armies (1998) and The Esoterrorists (2006), which tick many of the boxes, nevertheless aren't OSS because their heroes don't have direct pull with the government. They can't call up the police and have a street closed off, or a crime scene handed over to their jurisdiction. (The Esoterrorists does have a very powerful organisation as patron to the heroes, but it's a secret one, not part of any formal structure.)

James Oswald's book series about Inspector McLean (from 2012) isn't quite OSS because McLean is the only policeman who has any clue about magical weirdness, and even he doesn't know much. Paul Cornell's London Falling (also from 2012) is similarly on the edge: it has protagonists who are police officers and know about magic, but if they want backup from outside their immediate circle they have to concoct purely mundane explanations. There's no "Magic Division".

John Lambshead's Wolf in Shadow (2013) has The Commission as one of several OSS-type organisations fighting turf wars with each other; I gather he's written a novelette dealing with it directly, though I haven't read it. Similarly, the Charlie Higson TV series Jekyll and Hyde (2015) features a government department ("MI-O") responsible for monster-hunting in the 1930s. Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London (from 2011) has a secret branch of the Metropolitan Police which (while it's just as small as in London Falling) is an official "Magic Division", and can say that it needs something done without too many people asking silly questions.

Another usual, if not perhaps defining, characteristic of OSS books is that fights with bureaucracy may be as important as fights with monsters. Not every enemy has claws and goes "rar"; entirely mundane and non-violent foes may end up doing far more damage than a casually-summoned demon.

An obvious tool for subdivision is to look at how the organisation fits into the overall structure of government. Usually it's mostly off the books: other branches of government are aware that something exists, but they don't really know what it does, and the Civil Service doesn't encourage curiosity.

The Broom Cupboard doesn't seem to have any connections that get talked about, but is at least a few hundred years old. Organisationally it's an heir of John Dee and Walsingham – something that's since become quite popular in these books, with the Laundry claiming it in The Apocalypse Codex (2012), and the Commission growing from a research unit based in John Dee's library. But I asked the author for more information on the mundane side: as far as the rest of the structures of power are concerned, it's a boring logistical support branch which coordinates aid requests between agencies – so it can call up the Army and say "lend us a Lynx and a half-brick of your finest nutters", and there's a name to go on the paperwork. On the other hand, it clearly has unofficial sources too; in Eagle Rising our hero is implanted as a courier between MI5 and GCHQ in order to give him a chance to read some documents recovered from a crime scene.

Through a mundane lens, the Laundry is the sole heir of SOE – though mostly its agents get by with magically-boosted warrant cards. The Commission is opposed by, and has vicious jurisdiction battles with, the Black Museum, which is – not what you might think it was from that name – more or less the British Museum's Special Operations Division. (As opposed to the British Library's Special Operations Division, which I got from the anime series Read or Die and may yet use in modified form in an OSS game). All of these lack cover excuses: they have a place in the org chart, but they don't say what they do or for the most part have an excuse for the requests they make. Aaronovitch's Folly is generally held to be a boring section within Economic and Specialist Crime… except that senior policemen clearly know it's "X-Files shit", and I have trouble believing in the discretion of all senior policemen. Particularly in the more recent books, it's pretty clear that there's a lot of weird stuff going on and these are known to be the people to handle it.

One of my own unpublished contributions to this genre, which I'd like to expand on some day, gives the Civil Nuclear Constabulary a new division, BCU Black, to deal with ontological threats; that provides an actual known organisation name to appear on the paperwork. This setup is closest to Aaronovich's, but the CNC is less of a police force and more of an armed security force for nuclear materials at rest or in transit; it has jurisdiction anywhere in the UK if nuclear materials are (plausibly believed to be) involved. Here the heroes will have the problem of being coppers or specialists in a force that, well, doesn't exactly value traditional policing skills in its core culture, and certainly isn't going to be open to the idea of weird stuff. (Since I came up with this, I've learned that the UKAEA has a Special Techniques Group. Well, how can one resist something like that?)

None of these, I note, is based in the regular armed services, even in military intelligence, though there may be an historical connection. Most OSS agents aren't front-line combat types, though they can hold their own. Magic accessible to protagonists tends to be slow and fiddly, or defensive; they aren't casually throwing fireballs around, though the enemy may be. To me one of the good things about most examples of the OSS is relatively weak people against relatively powerful enemies: as in Reign of Steel, taking on the bad guys head-on just gets you dead, so protagonists have to be sneaky and clever. Being able to call on soldiers is just more responsibility: they may be handy against human enemies, but against the sort of end-stage threat the heroes are dealing with they're fodder more than fire support.

Combine that with the tension of trying to defend the innocent, but perhaps being called on instead to defend the guilty in high places, and there are all sorts of opportunities for challenges to character that don't just involve having a bigger wand than the other guys – while allowing tedious details, like "who pays our keep while we run around chasing monsters", to be bypassed.

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