Basic Trope: A city with a disproportionate amount of spies operating in it.
- Straight: Schattenstadt, the capital city of Spionia, has agents from every world power operating in it, with secret exchanges and dead drop locations all over the place.
- Exaggerated: Every citizen of Schattenstadt is either a spy for some power (be it some government, some corporation, some Ancient Conspiracy, some Brotherhood of Funny Hats...), a freelance Knowledge Broker, or a member of the service industry that provides the spies with things they need.
- Downplayed: Schattenstadt attracts spies due to being an industrial center, but not to the point that they start bumping into each other.
- Justified: Spionia is located right between the Eastern and Western powers during the Cold War, so it's essentially a frontline of the covert war between the two, and naturally attracts a lot of agents.
- Inverted: Schattenstadt doesn't actually have any spies, but all the best spies who operate around the world are either born or trained there.
- Subverted: The protagonist is told Schattenstadt is full of spies, but when he moves there, everyone's perfectly normal...
- Double Subverted: ...because that's what The Conspiracy wants him to believe.
- Parodied:
- The work Spionia is in is a spy comedy, and the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist has to do things like wait in line to a dead drop location, try to find his contact among a hundred of spies wearing identical fedoras and reading identical newspapers in the park, throw dozens of Incredibly Obvious Bugs out the window before talking to his handler, and so on. The whole thing is treated like a boring, monotone office job, and the tagline of the work is "In this city, espionage becomes routine - fast."
- Rather than being an actual City of Spies, Schattenstadt is a small village where all the kids are playing spies - and yet, said kids take the whole thing very seriously and employ actual espionage techniques to piece together the relationships and moves of the village's residents.
- Zig Zagged: The story is told from the perspective of a severely paranoid person - but Schattenstadt is located in a strategically important location, so it's not clear how many spies are actually spies, and how many are just average people who look like spies to the protagonist.
- Averted: There are no, or very few, spies in the city.
- Enforced: The author wanted to showcase a place where anyone could concievably be a spy - so he wrote Schattenstadt as a hotbed of espionage and other covert activity.
- Lampshaded: The protagonist is given coordinates to a dead drop location "in the cloakroom at Dagger's club".
- Invoked: The Powers That Be arrange for Spionia to be the middle-ground between the world powers, and as a result many spies are relocated there.
- Exploited: A rogue spy sets up his operations in Schattenstadt, figuring that trying to find him there would be like searching for a Needle in a Stack of Needles.
- Defied: The government of Spionia really beefs up its counterintellegence services when the foreign spies start just casually exchanging Classified Information folders and briefcases full of money in the city streets, and clears Schattenstadt of all but the most elusive agents.
- Discussed: "Vulture, this is Falcon. I think I might have been compromised - I bumped into two enemy operatives last night." "Don't bother about it, Falcon. Our Double Agent reported that there were a dozen more who missed you completely."
- Conversed: "In these spy novels, there always seems to be an awful lot of agents per capita in the city where all the action happens..."
- Implied: We never actually get to see Schattenstadt, but the main characters' newspapers and TV news have reports about espionage scandals tying in to that city every other day.
- Deconstructed: Due to incredible amount of spies working in Schattenstadt, they can't actually do their work without drawing attention, sometimes literally bumping into eachother while trying to tail someone or retrieve a dead drop - and woe to you if you're one of the few civilians caught in the middle of this spy war...
- Reconstructed: While indeed a city with a great amount of spies in it, Schattenstadt is big, with urban sprawl extending for dozens of miles - so even if there are a lot of spies in it, there's a lot of elbow room for them to act too. As a result, situations like several agents bumping into eachother are practically unheard of.
- Played For Laughs: The protagonist is blissfully oblivious to all the espionage and assassination going on around him all the time.
- Played For Drama: A former intelligence officer retires to Schattenstadt to live out the rest of his life in peace, but the city is full of agents working for his former enemies who want to interrogate him, and agents working for his former employer who want to kill him to prevent him from talking, and his dreams of a normal life are shattered.
- Played For Horror: The story follows a regular citizen of Schattenstadt who silently sees his city turning into a cesspool full of cloak-and-dagger atrocities, everyone he loves be quietly (or not so quietly) exterminated as collateral damage, and he becomes crazy with paranoia that he will eventually do something stupid that will draw the attention of all of the spies and make them decide he's got to go next…
Hey, you! No questions - get in the van. You must get to the City of Spies by tomorrow...
