To the Lions

"What we haven’t really mentioned so far is female spies and female spy writers, largely because they are few and far between. It’s always been a very male genre on both sides of the Atlantic. One exception was Helen MacInnes, who died in 1985 and isn’t read much anymore. In the post-Cold War, post-9/11 world, however, you have Holly Watt and Charlotte Philby , who are writing not specifically spy stories, but political thrillers from a female point of view. In the case of To the Lions , Holly Watt’s first book, it’s about a tough, hard-bitten female journalist, Casey Benedict. Journalism and spying are quite similar professions. They’re both about finding out information, about scoops and employing cloak-and-dagger tradecraft to get what you want. Holly and Charlotte are both doing something new, which is to put women front and center in stories which have been typically male-dominated—from James Bond to George Smiley to Jackson Lamb. That international dimension is almost a trope of spy fiction. You don’t really get it in crime fiction , because it tends to be a murder and so everybody has to stay in one place, working out whodunnit. If it’s a detective story , a policeman is going to have an area of a city or a town that he or she is responsible for. Whereas spy fiction tends to roam from country to country, largely because that’s what the CIA and MI6 do: their job is to go to far-flung places and to save the world. Holly’s plots work on a big canvas and the journalists seem to have bottomless pits of money, but there’s a moral purpose to her books too. She wants to educate readers about what’s going on in the world and what might happen next. That makes them doubly interesting in my view."