Pity the modern-day spy novelist
From our UK edition
I write spy thrillers that attempt to deal authentically with the world around us. The Syrian civil war. Spy games with Vladimir Putin. Russian meddling in the US. The shadow war between Israel and Iran. Tension inside the US-UK intelligence partnership. These are the settings for my first five novels, and in all of them fast moving and unexpected events in the real world have disrupted my plotlines, rendering portions of the books ‘OBE’, as we used to say back at Langley: overcome by events. The real world, more and more, is scooping the spy novelist. Exploding pagers? That would be too much. It would strain credulity Spy novels, of course, have always been in conversation with reality.
