[If you've been following along with the Secret Services rundown, this will be old news to you, but I wanted to put an introductory post at the head of the list, so that anyone who stumbles on this in future won't have to dig through my back posts to find all the entries. Feel free to ignore, if you like.]

As a reader and a writer, I have several obsessions, ideas and themes I return to again and again. Multiple realities and alternate histories. Masked avengers and heroic legacies. Immortal swordsmen and daring explorers. But one of my obsessions as a reader has been little exercised as a writer, until now.

I've always had a fondness for what I like to call "Secret Services," clandestine government agencies tasked with investigating and policing the supernatural. Last fall, after rereading all of Mike Mignola's Hellboy and its related series with its BPRD, and watching with my daughter the first episodes of Jay Stephens's sublime Secret Saturdays (which ironically doesn't make my list, as the Saturdays don't appear to have any connection with the government, clandestine or otherwise), I got a wild hair. I would track down all of the examples of Secret Services I could find on my shelves, and profile each of them on my blog.

I figured that it would probably take me a few weeks to get through them all. Ha. Ha ha.

Now, months later, I've finally reached the end of my completely arbitrary analysis of Secret Services, ending with my own contribution to the list, MI8 as seen in my new novel End of the Century. And here they all are, for your delectation and diversion.

• Introduction
• The Guardians
• Department 7
• Bureau 13
• Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense
• Vector 13
• The Diogenes Club
• Delta Green
• The Hellsing Organization
• CIB
• Section Zero
• Q
• The Laundry
• Department Q
• Bureau of Extra-Dimensional Liabilities and Management
• Torchwood
• MI-13
• The Lodge
• Occult Crimes Taskforce
• MI8

There are a number of other examples that were suggested to me as I went along, which ultimately didn't make the cut--usually because the agencies in question weren't "clandestine" but instead operated in worlds that knew all about them and the existence of the supernatural, or because they were clandestine but didn't have ties to any government. I am positive, though, that there are examples that I've missed, in which case I can only humbly point to that word "arbitrary" above.

Labels: secret_services