Honour Among Spies

"Yes, that’s right. So at the very beginning of the book, there is an author’s note where she says that it was written prior to the horrible events of October 2023. In an interview, she said she actually submitted her manuscript on October 5th. The world is so fast moving right now, you have to feel for these spy writers. Honour Among Spies revolves around the station chief for Mossad in London, Eli. It’s the second book she’s written about him, but it can be read as a standalone. Nygate says she had read The Little Drummer Girl and, much as she’s a fan of John le Carré, she didn’t feel he writes women very well, which is true. She also felt that he didn’t write Jews very well, so she wanted to have a stab at rectifying that. She absolutely insists she’s not a Mossad agent. Of course she’s going to say no, but the reason I asked her is because the book feels like she’s had experience of working as a spy. It feels authentic. Like the Len Deighton novels , it’s not just the global espionage, you also have office politics. In the Deighton books, it’s about class. It’s the upper classes versus Bernard Samson, who is working class. In Honour Among Spies , you have the more fundamentalist right-wing Israelis, and the more liberal Israelis, of which our main character is one. Eli believes in Israel and puts his life on the line, but he’s not an extremist and has to navigate the office politics to get the job done. The central plot is skullduggery. Eli is trying to doctor Russian drones so that they backfire. There’s a lot of following arms dealers and hoods. He puts his marriage on the line. Eli is an expert agent handler, and he runs his wife like an agent. His wife is a therapist, who is working with the relative of someone he wants the goods on. So Eli does the one thing you should never do in a relationship: he gets on her computer and raids her files. That’s the moral dilemma: I have to do this for world peace, even though I might lose my marriage. Petra is the female heroine of the book; she’s been a spy and is now a private contractor. She’s in a relationship with a man who doesn’t know her background and that has repercussions on that relationship as well. So you have the spy story, you have the personal decisions, and you also have really good tradecraft in the book. Nygate uses a term ‘vinyl tradecraft,’ which I really like. It’s tradecraft that can’t be detected electronically. It could be someone on a bus who holds up a Post-it note with the meeting place destination scrawled on it. Mossad do have a tech van, the gadgets and the toys, but there’s much old school tradecraft for us traditionalists. I love the realism of these books. And whereas I went and cooked a goulash when I read Karla’s Choice , on reading Honour Among Spies , I had to go and find some really good hummus. There is one particular scene where they’re in a van doing a stake out. It’s winter and it’s freezing cold. Petra always brings a packed lunch with her, which is really practical: you don’t know how long you’re going to be sitting in a van or on a park bench. And they start talking about someone’s hummus back in Israel. And I’m like, ‘I want some good hummus now!’ You don’t see much of that in shoot ’em up spy books: they’re too busy polishing their guns and counting their bullets. Whereas our heroes are talking about hummus. It just feels real. Not a huge number. Merle cites the nonfiction book Gideon’s Spies for her research. She says that’s one of the best books on Mossad. There’s also a couple of other ones that have come out since. It’s a fascinating history. When you look at their raison d’etre, what they are all about, what they are trying to preserve, and by any means necessary…"