![]() 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. The spy novel, I think, is a uniquely British genre. 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. 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. Let’s turn to Remembrance Day by Henry Porter, which opens-very grippingly-with a terror attack in London. Apart from anything else, it’s an amazing feat of imagination. The choice of protagonist is also unusual. ![]() ![]() It’s almost like something out of science fiction, and you keep turning the pages. 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. The places he describes, the characters: I felt like I was in Siberia. After you recommended it, I ordered every other book by Lionel Davidson I could find. I don’t think he was ever in the intelligence services but probably, like me, he had access to people who were. That’s a classic East versus West thriller.Īnd he lived some of it, didn’t he? He spent time in Prague. 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. Like Deighton and le Carré, Davidson came of age at the height of the Cold War. 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. It’s got a slightly ludicrous plot about a secret scientific facility in Russia and a very unusual hero: an Indigenous Canadian. It’s a fabulous book, very detailed, very strange. 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. In many ways, it’s a throwback, an old-fashioned Cold War novel. It’s a crossover novel: Lionel Davidson was writing it before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was published shortly afterwards. The first one I’d like to discuss is Kolymsky Heights because it spans the late 1980s and the early 1990s. They’re the five most interesting examples. Are these other books you’ve picked your five favourite post-Soviet spy novels? ![]() The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq also provided huge amounts of material for spy writers, ditto Messrs Assange and Snowden. You had Putin’s spy cronies poisoning the likes of Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal and, more recently, Alexei Navalny (the theme of Judas 62). Suddenly there was a completely new canvas on which to draw, whether it was Islamist terrorism or Russia as an emerging gangster state. Both were game changers for the intelligence services and therefore for spy novelists. The first was the ascent of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency. So, the 1990s was a dead decade, then suddenly the genre came back to life again?Įxactly. On this side of the Pond, with the exception of le Carré-who published four or five post-Cold War thrillers-there was only Remembrance Day by Henry Porter. So you could say that the 1990s is the decade that the spy novel forgot. This was a crisis in the real-life intelligence services too they didn’t necessarily know what useful purpose they were serving. What else was there to write about? You’d had four or five decades of Len Deighton, John le Carré, Robert Ludlum and many others, mining the seam of the Cold War-East versus West, Smiley versus Karla-all those wonderful novels. Can you describe what’s been going on?Īs soon as the Berlin Wall came down and Yeltsin stood on his tank, readers and publishers alike felt that the spy novel was effectively over. I suppose, back in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, I might have naively thought that spy novels were going to disappear as a genre. You’ve picked five post-Soviet spy thrillers for us. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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