The Kremlin Letter

"This is the only American book on my list, written by Noel Behn. It was made into a film, which I haven’t seen, by John Huston, with lots of stars in it (Orson Welles, Richard Boone and others). On the surface, it’s one of those men-with-a-mission things, like The Guns of Navarone . On the back, it goes through the characters: you have the highwayman, the puppet-maker – they’re all called different things. The thing that’s striking about this book is that it’s just unbelievably bleak. You’re almost wincing reading it, because it’s just not the sort of behaviour that should be in thrillers. It’s basically these assorted mercenary spies who are on a mission to get this famous Kremlin Letter, which is nothing – I can’t even remember what it’s about. The thing that is impressive is that the guys who are doing it are so cynical they will do absolutely anything. So they have honey traps, they betray everyone. You get a feeling that it might be an Alistair MacLean, but when you read it, you feel like you’re reading Chekhov or something. It’s an incredibly dense, incredibly dark, incredibly closely described novel, and it’s only really nominally about espionage. What it’s really about is extraordinarily brutalist and cynical men betraying each other. It’s a very dark but quite fascinating read. Yes, it’s the only spy thriller that I’ve read that I really thought, ‘Oh God, that is just a bit too unpleasant.’ They’re just so nasty. Though that’s probably what it’s like. You probably really do have to have a stomach made out of steel to do what these people are doing… I have. You’re probably completely terrified that I’m an absolute nutter, reading all these Cold War spy books . I got really into them and read dozens and dozens and dozens of them. And that is what led me to want to write one myself. But then I had to unlearn all of it, because of course lots of them are just nonsense. They’re not about how real spies are at all. So when I began to do my own, I put all of that a little bit to one side, and started researching MI6 and the CIA and the KGB. There are a lot of writers who have had experience of intelligence work. I have no experience of it as a person, so it’s all second-hand; talking to people and reading books. But I don’t think you probably want to make it too realistic, otherwise it could just be boring."