Charles Cumming's Reading List

"That was a key part of the research for A Spy by Nature . Bower’s book is a biography of Sir Dick White, who was the head of MI5 between 1953 and 1956 and of SIS [MI6] between 1956 and 1968. In other words, right the way through the trauma of the Cambridge spies: Old Etonians, gentlemen, hoodwinking the Establishment. What I was really interested in when I was starting A Spy by Nature was this notion of treachery. Do people in my generation still have that sense of loyalty to Queen and Country? Is there still a state to betray, a sense of patriotism in our blood?"

"Chapman Pincher is about 95, still alive, and has been a thorn in the side of the Establishment throughout his long career as a journalist. In the early 1980s, he published Their Trade is Treachery in which he alleged that Sir Roger Hollis, who had been the head of MI5, was a Soviet agent. The book caused a great scandal when it was published. Most of Pincher’s information came from a man called Peter Wright, who wrote Spycatcher . Wright now has something of a reputation as a paranoid fantasist. The recent official history of MI5, compiled by Professor Christopher Andrew, categorically states that Hollis was not in the pay of the Russians, but I think we’re never likely to know the truth, one way or another. The great problem about writing about spying – and this applies as much to fiction as it does to nonfiction – is that nobody has access to ‘the truth’. It’s a wilderness of mirrors, to use a well-worn phrase. For the same reason that they are interested in TV series about doctors and cops. These are perceived as glamorous, mysterious professions in which dramatic things happen all the time. Most people live pretty mundane lives, work in fairly mundane jobs: they don’t save lives, chase bad guys down the street, run agents behind enemy lines. The fascination with spying also has something to do with James Bond. People grew up with the James Bond movies, so they think all spies carry gadgets and sleep with beautiful women, fly first class everywhere and eat anchovies on toast for breakfast. I also believe that people have different masks, different faces that they put on, and there’s something in spy fiction that accesses that private, secret part of ourselves. The world of espionage fiction, with its lies and manipulations, is not so far removed from the lies and manipulations we are all guilty of, to a greater or lesser extent, in our own lives. Did I say that? Somebody who was working for one of the intelligence agencies was helping me with the detail for one of my books and we happened to go to a football game. I tell this story only because it helps to illustrate how a professional intelligence officer thinks. I have a bad back – I’m 6ft 6in. About halfway through the game, I stood up and tilted backwards, to free the tension in my spine. My friend turned to me and said: ‘Are you sending a signal?’ Obviously she was joking, but that’s what jumped into her mind – there is no such thing a normal, ordinary behaviour in the mind of a spy. Everything has a double meaning."

"Eric Ambler is the grandfather of the serious spy novel. Exactly. Broadly speaking, there are two schools of spy novel : the Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum school, which is purely escapist and highly entertaining, full of guns and gadgets and fast women; and then there’s the more serious, literary strand, which is interested in character and behaviour as much as in story. Ambler was the same generation as Graham Greene, and he was, like a lot of educated people at that time, a kind of proto-Marxist, a socialist. He believed that he could use the thriller not only to entertain but also as a political tool, to say something about the state of the nation. Then Le Carré picks up that ball and runs with it, and takes the idea of the serious spy novel to another level – partly because Ambler had laid the groundwork and partly because Le Carré is an infinitely more gifted writer who was fortunate enough to have the Cold War as his canvas."

"There is actually only one spy in The Constant Gardener , an MI6 officer in Kenya, who I think at one point is involved with Quayle, the lead character, because he needs a piece of information about his dead wife. I chose it simply because it was a huge influence on Typhoon, my latest novel. The idea of having a thriller that was also a love story, and then the political dimension as well. In The Constant Gardener , Le Carré is having a go at big pharmaceutical companies which are testing products on people in Africa. In Typhoon I was trying to let people know what is going on in terms of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the Uighur Muslim province in Northwest China. Having said all that, the most important thing that I can do is to keep people reading the books that I write – to entertain them and interest them in the characters I have created. Writers shouldn’t be preachy. But if at the same time I can add a layer of political commitment to my books, or whatever you want to call it, then that’s a laudable goal, as far as I’m concerned."

"The story of sex, lies and videotape is the story of a marriage between a lawyer, who is having an affair with his wife’s sister, a savvy, sassy barmaid, and his rather straitlaced, you might say frigid, wife, played by Andy MacDowell. And into their lives comes a character played by James Spader, an old university friend of the husband. It’s at least ten years since they were at college. Spader’s character has changed a great deal in that time and has rejected corporate, bourgeois suburban life. He’s also impotent. He gets his kicks by winning the trust of women – he’s very honest about who he is and what his problem is – and getting them to talk about their sex lives on camera. It sounds like the seediest film, but it works, principally because all the characters – with the exception of the husband – are sympathetic. Damaged and strange, but sympathetic. That in itself is an achievement. For a reason that I can’t quite isolate, the film had a big creative impact on me when I was very young. The only point in the movie in which anyone is really honest is when the women are on camera, talking about their sex lives. The rest of the time everybody is lying to everybody. And there was something else – something about the way that the characters talked, or the mood of the film…it was just very different to anything I’d seen before. I really believe that the books and movies that a writer is exposed to between the ages of, say, 16 and 23 are vitally important to their later development. After I was interviewed by MI6, I wrote A Spy By Nature because I was thinking about what would happen to me if I had done that job. What effect would it have had on my relationships with my girlfriend, with my family, my friends? I would have gone into a parallel life, a pretty complicated and difficult to manage parallel life. And something of the tone of that novel is echoed in sex, lies… I watched it again the other day and the parallels were striking."

"They’re the five most interesting examples. The first one I’d like to discuss is Kolymsky Heights because it spans the late 1980s and the early 1990s. It’s a crossover novel: Lionel Davidson was writing it before the collapse of the Soviet Union , but it was published shortly afterwards. In many ways, it’s a throwback, an old-fashioned Cold War novel. But it had great success when it was first published in the mid-1990s and then had a reboot here in the UK about five years ago and sold like hotcakes, largely thanks to Waterstones getting behind it. It’s a fabulous book, very detailed, very strange. It’s got a slightly ludicrous plot about a secret scientific facility in Russia and a very unusual hero: an Indigenous Canadian. It’s fantastically well written and the last third of the novel, the exfiltration out of Siberia across the Bering Strait into Alaska, is breathtaking. Like Deighton and le Carré, Davidson came of age at the height of the Cold War . His first book was The Night of Wenceslas , the story of a young man who goes to Prague and becomes embroiled in the secret world. That’s a classic East versus West thriller. I don’t think he was ever in the intelligence services but probably, like me, he had access to people who were. Yes, that’s the trick. You believe in it, even though the idea of a secret Soviet factory that’s doing research on strange monkeys—I can’t quite remember—is so fantastical. It’s almost like something out of science fiction, and you keep turning the pages. The choice of protagonist is also unusual. Apart from anything else, it’s an amazing feat of imagination."

"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."

"When people think of American spy novels, they almost certainly think of Jason Bourne in the series by Robert Ludlum or of Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy . As I said, they tend to be on a much bigger canvas. You might have the American president himself playing a key role or a senior general inside the Pentagon doing dastardly things to aid the military-industrial complex. You won’t have a George Smiley, sitting in a library painstakingly going through files or spending eighty pages talking to Connie Sachs. The Americans just don’t do it that way: they believe in heroes, action, sex and violence. Red Sparrow is a really good example of an American spy novel. One of the reasons for that is that Jason Matthews, who sadly died this year, was himself a CIA officer. It’s almost always the case that the best spy novelists were themselves touched by the intelligence services in real life in some way. Charles McCarry , for example, was also in the CIA. Red Sparrow is a fantastically well written and authentic spy novel, but it also has those American characteristics of giving Vladimir Putin a walk-on part, scenes of fairly unrealistic, kinky sex, and violent characters meeting violent ends. Then, bizarrely, there’s a recipe at the end of each chapter, which is charming, but quite disarming at the same time. The book was a huge, huge bestseller in the United States when it came out and they made a film of it with Jennifer Lawrence. I wish they would do the same with some of Dan Fesperman’s books . He’s also a really first-class American spy writer who deserves a bigger readership. The book came out nearly a decade ago, and I think probably in the #MeToo era, a lot of the attitudes towards women and sex might fail to clear hurdles in American publishing today. That’s not to accuse Jason of sexism, it’s just that times have changed so much. I’m in the British tradition of broadly realistic stories of individuals working inside or outside the secret world, and the scrapes that they get into and the psychological impact of working in that world over a long period of time. I see myself in the tradition of Len Deighton, John le Carré and Eric Ambler, rather than in the tradition of Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, and Jason Matthews. You could say that British spy fiction is quieter and more nuanced. And we usually make less money! Hitchcock is a really significant figure in the spy genre. A number of films he made: Notorious , North by Northwest , Saboteur , Foreign Correspondent , The Man Who Knew Too Much are spy stories. They have tropes—either that Hitchcock borrowed from source novels or that he and his screenwriters invented—which served the spy genre, both on and off-screen, for the next half-century. In this respect, Hitchcock is almost as important to the serious thriller as John Buchan or Eric Ambler or Erskine Childers, the writer of The Riddle of the Sands . It began with a book called Box 88 , which is coming out in the States next month. BOX 88 is an Anglo-American intelligence service operating without political oversight, under the radar, made up of various members of the CIA, MI5 and MI6 as well as Special Forces. They do the jobs that government-sanctioned intelligence services can’t or won’t do. In movie terms, it’s a kind of Mission Impossible unit, but they don’t have melting masks or Tom Cruise clinging to the side of a cargo plane as it takes off. I’d always wanted to write a novel set in the 1990s, to examine what MI5 and MI6 were up to in that decade without spy stories. What you get in Box 88 —and its sequel, Judas 62 —is two stories for the price of one. You see the recruitment and the development of a young spy called Lachlan Kite. He’s recruited in 1989, straight out of school, at the age of 18. You see his early operations as fledgling spy through the 1990s. But you also see him in the present day when those operations have come back to haunt him. He’s a man of 50 who has lived in this strange, compelling world for 30 years; you see the person he has become. That’s always been the juice for me. I love going to these places, eating the food, smelling the air and talking to people on the ground, getting stories and information out of them that inspire a work of fiction. Judas 62 was unusual in that I couldn’t go to Voronezh to research the Russian parts because of the pandemic. I was relying completely on people who had been there or had lived there, or secondary sources, YouTube, Google Maps. But I did go to Dubai two or three times. Unlike most people, I really liked it. It’s a fascinating place. The other major change to spy fiction in the last 30 years—apart from Putin, al Qaeda and ISIS, Snowden and Assange—is technology. Judas 62 tries to show you how the world of spying has changed since the Cold War. In the 1993 section, Kite obviously has no access to mobile phones, to Wi-Fi, to satellites: he’s completely isolated in Russia and has to fend for himself. The Kite of 2020 in Dubai, on the other hand, is under 24-hour surveillance from CCTV and number plate recognition cameras. His phone, his credit cards, his search engine metadata give him away all the time. The mobile phone has totally changed not only intelligence work, but also storytelling. Yes. You can always call for help. If somebody needs to get hold of you, you can be reached. You can be followed. Somebody can demonstrate from your mobile phone that you were in a place where you shouldn’t have been. If you don’t have a mobile phone with you because you’re going to meet somebody you shouldn’t be meeting—a Russian intelligence officer for example—that, in itself, is suspicious. Why would somebody ever be without their mobile phone? So they always have to be taken into account, in the field and on the page. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Technology has inverted spying and spy fiction. For example, it’s now more or less impossible for an intelligence officer to take on a fake identity in a hostile state. In the classic Cold War novels, the hero could go to East Germany as Mark Jones and it would be very easy to stand that legend up. If they fell under suspicion, the Stasi would make a phone call to London and ask, ‘Have you ever heard of Mark Jones?’ And the answer would be, ‘Oh yes, we know Mark very well’ because it would be MI6 answering the phone. Nowadays, if a spy goes to Dubai and pretends to be Mark Jones it’s impossible because of online banking records, Twitter, Facebook, retinal scans, biometric passports and all the rest. The authorities can check out your story in a thousand different ways. It’s impossible to make a legend stand up under even moderate scrutiny. The skills needed are still quite similar. Obviously, they need people with technical proficiency, computer wonks and programmers. They also need people who can speak Mandarin, Farsi, Russian, Arabic. It’s almost put six foot six white, old Etonian men like me out of business; they want people who have an ethnic background that will allow them to blend into different environments in the Middle East, Russia, China or wherever."

"In culture, if you do something new, something original, something that hasn’t been seen before, you will be rewarded. Mick’s books are hugely popular, not just here, but everywhere and I think the principal reason for that is that he’s done something new, which is almost to send up the world of John le Carré, to satirize it. His world is located somewhere between the Circus and The Office . The books are very funny, they celebrate failure, heroism against the odds, and have an old-fashioned bawdy, music hall humor. It’s a very clever reimagining of a world that was extremely familiar to readers, from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold onwards. Yes, they’re clever, intricate plots. The books are addictive and funny but shot through with political seriousness."

"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."