Box 88

"I wanted to include something contemporary because the whole point about a genre is that it is a tradition. I wanted to include somebody who was doing serious literary espionage fiction now and I think Charles Cumming is by some distance the best of the inheritors of the le Carré crown. He is a superb author. I was writing about his latest book in the Observer the other day, and I do feel that with this Box 88 series, he is creating something that will last and is serious literature as well as hugely entertaining. The hero of Box 88 is Lachlan Kite, who is recruited from school into a shadowy espionage group that operates outside of the law and is hardly known by MI6 and the CIA. I’ve always been a sucker for a school story, and this is basically a school story and a spy story merged together. It’s a coming-of-age novel—a little bit like A Perfect Spy in the way that it takes this character and his very interesting upbringing, and then brings him into a world that is compromised and challenged and where he has to make really profound decisions. In the book, in the present day, he has been abducted by Iranian agents, as has his wife, who is pregnant with their child. But then he looks back on his younger life, to the late 1980s. It’s this dual timeline that operates so well. It’s so smartly put together as a novel of how he came to be where he is. It’s also about what has changed for spies, what has changed in the world, on the other side of the fall of communism. The other thing that Cumming does so well is that he uses real-world geopolitical events. Lockerbie is absolutely central to Box 88; his latest novel, Icarus 17, starts with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. So the books use contemporary and real-life frameworks to play out this extraordinary story of espionage. I think it’s the best new series of novels to come out in this world. He really transcends any idea that these are just spy novels. The spy novel is a lever into more interesting and emotionally and psychologically resonant pieces of work. Everyone in my family has read them, including my 15-year-old daughter, my wife and my father. We all love them. They are just wonderfully readable but also super smart novels. There are the Iranians who abduct him, but a lot of it is actually set on the Côte d’Azur, which allows for a lot of beautiful set pieces with palm trees. The second book in the series, Judas 62 , is set largely in Russia and does a brilliant job of bringing that to life. The next one, Kennedy 35, starts in Senegal. The whole idea is that these are people whose job is to ping from one crisis to the next. That’s Lachlan’s role. So you get these globetrotting, geopolitical novels. Total pleasure. Lovely to chat to you."