Remembrance Day

"It’s a brilliant opening scene. As far as I’m aware, he was the only new British writer to get any sort of publishing deal for a spy novel in the UK in this decade that the spy novel forgot. He has gone on to write at least half a dozen thrillers in that British tradition of the spy story that goes back to The Riddle of the Sands and Somerset Maugham , to Eric Ambler and Graham Greene , and eventually to le Carré and Deighton. The spy novel, I think, is a uniquely British genre. There are one or two exceptional American spy novelists—we’ll come to Jason Matthews and Dan Fesperman later—but generally the books tend to be much more gung-ho, militaristic. They’re less concerned with the business of intelligence gathering, the psychological minutiae of the characters, and instead put the emphasis on dirty bombs going off in Times Square, nuclear weapons being stolen or consignments of anthrax being leaked, that sort of thing. You could say that the British write for television; American spy novels are much more like big-budget Hollywood movies. It’s an IRA story, a throwback to the sorts of novels Gerald Seymour or Jack Higgins used to write. Before Putin and 9/11, the principal existential threat to the UK was Irish Republicanism: a bomb going off in Harrods, say, or a shopping centre in Manchester. After 9/11, groups like ETA and the IRA were effectively put out of business. The people who had been giving them financial or political support for idealistic or nationalist reasons—I’m thinking of the Irish diaspora in America, or Basque sympathizers in Spain and France—suddenly vanished. Terrorism was no longer romantic."