A Spy Novelist by Nature: The Charles Cumming Interview

A Spy Novelist by Nature: The Charles Cumming Interview

By Wesley Britton

I first heard the name Charles Cumming when we appeared together on a panel for host Fionn Davenport’s “Culture Shock” news-talk radio show out of Dublin, Ireland in May 2008. While Fionn praised Charles’ spy novels, at the time I was in the dark about them—but I can be forgiven my ignorance. None of his books had yet been published in the states.

That August, Penguin and St. Martins rectified that situation by finally releasing the first three novels that had long been available in the U.K. for American readers. The first, A Spy By Nature (2001), a novel partly based on Cumming’s own experiences with MI6, had introduced the flawed anti-hero, Alec Milius. The sequel, The Spanish Game (2006), had been described by The Times “as one of the six finest spy novels of all time.” Gratefully, Penguin sent me review copies of both Milious books, but didn’t include The Hidden Game, the 2003 novel Charles wrote without his now most famous character.

I admit, my favorite of the batch of books Penguin sent me was Typhoon, a new thriller about a clandestine American plot to destabilize China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics. It highlighted the plight of the Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang, a semi-autonomous region of The People's Republic of China. No one could have predicted it at the time, but in July 2009, fiction met fact when Islamic separatists in that region underwent brutal suppression from the Chinese government, a circumstance still unfolding as of this writing.

On top of all this, in March 2008 Charles Cumming published an interactive online story, The 21 Steps as part of a Penguin “We Tell Stories” project. In this new approach of using text with the possibilities of the internet, readers can follow the protagonist's travels through Google Maps.

No wonder, then, Spywise.net wanted a chance to ask Charles a few questions. I admit it took some time to accomplish this—Mr. Cumming is a hard man to nail down—but finally he sat down and responded to a handful of my queries. So here are some insights into one of the most important spy novelists working today:

----
Q: Much of your education dealt with English literature—how much of your formative reading involved espionage? Are there other literary influences that helped shape your style and perspectives on characters who get involved with shadow worlds, corruption, and the other themes you explore?

I wasn’t really a fan of spy novels growing up. I read most of the Bond books when I was very young, but no Deighton or Ludlum or Ambler. I didn’t get to le Carre until I was at university. I came across a copy of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold on holiday in Egypt and read it in a single sitting on an overnight train from Luxor to Cairo. I was blown away by it – the structure is so intricate and precise, it’s like a symphony. I still think it’s le Carre’s best book. Otherwise, my influences were mostly American: I wrote my university thesis on John Updike’s Rabbit books and I love Philip Roth, particularly the later novels. Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter also had a profound effect on me. Growing up, I was far more of a movie fan than a bookworm. Dozens of films – from Sex, Lies and Videotape to The Godfather– also had an influence on the way that I tell stories. I think Tom Rob Smith has also talked about this in the context of Child 44. He came primarily from a movie background, not a literary mindset.

Q: The first part of A Spy By Nature (2001) deals with the recruitment of Alec Milius, a young and rather naïve would-be agent by the S.I.S. It’s often been noted that this section was influenced by your own experiences with MI-6. Beyond describing the procedures and I presume some of the characters, how much autobiography is in these passages?

There are some very autobiographical passages, in the sense that the recruitment chapters are a precise and accurate account of what happened to me back in 1995. But a lot of Alec’s reactions and observations are his and not mine. Of course, we share certain character traits, but Alec is a lot more ambitious than I ever was, and a lot more paranoid. I dropped out of the MI6 recruitment at a very early stage. All of Alec’s experiences in the oil business and as an industrial spy are products of my imagination.

Q: An important element of ASBN is that it isn’t a duel between opposing agencies in the traditional sense, but rather some one-upmanship between British Intelligence and the CIA. Did this result from the fact the story was set after the Cold War and old conflicts were now out-of-date? It seemed to me, from the phony commercial magazine Alec works for to the spy ring he infiltrates, you’re showing that secret manipulation is all around us on a variety of levels.

It was certainly my intention to try something different to the run-of-the-mill Cold War, Us-Against-Them spy plot. One of the key themes in my books is the so-called Special Relationship between Great Britain and the United States. Of course, this is a very one-sided relationship: broadly speaking, we do what we are told by Washington. So I thought that it would be an interesting idea to explore the possibility that these two great allies spy on one another. There have been instances of this in the past: I believe there was an example of the Brits spying on the Americans during the Balkan conflict, for example. As far as Alec’s job at the magazine goes – yes, that was to create an idea that this is a young man who doesn’t have strong ethical beliefs, who is an opportunist and a liar. And he, in turn, is surrounded by liars. He was also unfaithful to Kate, his girlfriend, with a work colleague. In other words, large parts of his life are fabrications.

Q: The sequel, The Spanish Game (2003), was based in Spain, where you’d relocated. What made you decide to go back to Alec Milius after The Hidden Man (2003)?

The Hidden Man was a story that had been turning around in my mind for several years. I had always assumed that I would write it after completing A Spy By Nature. There was no place for Alec in the story, so I left him out. (I’ve done the same thing with Typhoon, my new novel, which doesn’t feature Alec.) Commercially, this was probably a wrongheaded idea: publishers and readers prefer a series with a repeating character. But I was stubborn and followed my heart rather than my head.

Q: The Spanish Game has been compared with the novels of John Le Carre and Len Deighton. For me, the most obvious connection is the fact Alec Milius is very human, very flawed, rather reminiscent of Bernard Sampson. What parallels do you see between your books and those of your predecessors—if any? Were you directly influenced by any of them?

The influence of le Carre on my books is obvious, I suppose: the idea that you could write a spy thriller without necessarily including a lot of action and derring-do had a great impact on me. With le Carre, it’s all about character and the relationships between those characters; that’s also been the case with me. I’m really not that interested in guns and soldiers and ticking clocks on bombs. However, perhaps I absorbed too much of le Carre’s political cynicism. He can be a bit too quick to ridicule the great and the good. As far as Deighton goes, I am ashamed to admit that I have never read the Bernard Samson novels. People keep recommending them to me and I will one day get around to it. I loved Funeral in Berlin and The Ipcress File, but that’s as far as I got with Deighton. Apparently Horse Under Water is also wonderful. Funnily enough, I have his cookbooks, which are excellent.

Q: For me, Typhoon (2008) was a major departure for you in that the scope widened considerably in setting, time, and characters. How did you come to envelope the Chinese Olympics with the rebellion brewing in the Muslim population in China?

There are a number of reasons. First, I was keen to write about China in some capacity, but I wasn’t sure what angle to take. A story set around the Chinese economic boom seemed to make the most sense, until I realized that a story about a character who’s just trying to get rich isn’t particularly interesting for the reader. Then a journalist in Beijing started talking to me about Xinjiang and all the elements fell into place: ethnic unrest and rioting; the cultural clash between the Han and Turkic Muslim Uighurs; the West’s role in contemporary China. I also wanted to find a way of writing about Neo-Con folly in Iraq without writing directly about Iraq. So a crazy American plan to bankroll Muslim separatists in Xinjiang and to land-grab north-west China fitted that purpose perfectly.

Q: It wasn’t until Typhoon that your books became widely available in the States—what took so long?

It was just a commercial thing. A Spy By Nature wasn’t picked up by an American publisher when it first appeared in the UK in 2001. Then, after Spanish Game came out in 2005, Diane Reverand at St Martin’s Press bought my first three books in a block. My current editor, Keith Kahla, bought Typhoon last year, also for St Martin’s. It’s coming out in late October in the States.

Q: I can’t help but think your online book, The 21 Steps, was an enjoyable project, both for the innovation of the concept and the nod to one of the founding fathers of the spy genre, John Buchan. How did this project come about?

It was a joint production between Penguin, who were keen to expand their online activities, and a company called Six to Start, who are cutting-edge innovators in the realm of computer games and so forth. They invited six Penguin authors to contribute stories. I was given The 39 Steps because of my links to spy fiction. I tried to do a very light, very modern update of Buchan’s story, full of cliffhangers, narrow escapes and absurd coincidences. It was fun to do.

Q: A frequent reviewer for Spywise.net (Mark Hooker) thinks the most prevalent genre in contemporary spy fiction is that of novels coming out from ex-members of the espionage community. Do you agree with this assessment? Are there authors you regard highly in this genre—I’m guessing someone you’ve read would be Dame Stella Remington.

Well, not every so-called ex-member of the espionage community is responsible for the work that goes out under his or her name. Over here in the UK, most of the top-selling military and espionage thrillers are ghost written. They’ve been very successful, so I think you’ll see more and more war reporters, former spies and politicians releasing books of this kind. In fact, in ten or fifteen years time, ninety percent of the novelists writing under their own names today will probably be making a living ghostwriting fiction and non-fiction titles for ‘celebrity’ authors. There will be a handful of marquee novelists – the likes of Lee Child, Robert Harris, JK Rowling and so forth – and then a glut of one-off books by people who have become famous in other walks of life: as cooks, reality show contestants, athletes or gardeners. There has probably never been a worse time to be a debut novelist. If I was starting out now, I may not have had the chance to write The Spanish Game or Typhoon. The market has become completely crazy and ruthless and I wouldn’t have been regarded as a safe enough commercial entity.

Q: Any news on film adaptations of your books? What’s next in the pipeline?

A Spy By Nature and The Spanish Game are under option to Red Rum films, a company based in Hollywood. John Hodges, who wrote Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, has signed on to write the script for A Spy By Nature, which is wonderful news. The rights to Typhoon are still up for grabs!

---
The official Charles Cumming website is—

www.charlescumming.co.uk/

You can read The 21 Steps at—

wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week1/
wetellstories.co.uk/authors/charles-cumming

You can read interviews with other spy novelists like Bill Raetz, T.H.E. Hill, Jeremy Duns, and Tod Goldberg by checking out the “Spies in History and Literature” files at—

www.Spywise.net

By Wesley Britton

I first heard the name Charles Cumming when we appeared together on a panel for host Fionn Davenport’s “Culture Shock” news-talk radio show out of Dublin, Ireland in May 2008. While Fionn praised Charles’ spy novels, at the time I was in the dark about them—but I can be forgiven my ignorance. None of his books had yet been published in the states.

That August, Penguin and St. Martins rectified that situation by finally releasing the first three novels that had long been available in the U.K. for American readers. The first, A Spy By Nature (2001), a novel partly based on Cumming’s own experiences with MI6, had introduced the flawed anti-hero, Alec Milius. The sequel, The Spanish Game (2006), had been described by The Times “as one of the six finest spy novels of all time.” Gratefully, Penguin sent me review copies of both Milious books, but didn’t include The Hidden Game, the 2003 novel Charles wrote without his now most famous character.

I admit, my favorite of the batch of books Penguin sent me was Typhoon, a new thriller about a clandestine American plot to destabilize China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics. It highlighted the plight of the Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang, a semi-autonomous region of The People's Republic of China. No one could have predicted it at the time, but in July 2009, fiction met fact when Islamic separatists in that region underwent brutal suppression from the Chinese government, a circumstance still unfolding as of this writing.

On top of all this, in March 2008 Charles Cumming published an interactive online story, The 21 Steps as part of a Penguin “We Tell Stories” project. In this new approach of using text with the possibilities of the internet, readers can follow the protagonist's travels through Google Maps.

No wonder, then, Spywise.net wanted a chance to ask Charles a few questions. I admit it took some time to accomplish this—Mr. Cumming is a hard man to nail down—but finally he sat down and responded to a handful of my queries. So here are some insights into one of the most important spy novelists working today:

----
Q: Much of your education dealt with English literature—how much of your formative reading involved espionage? Are there other literary influences that helped shape your style and perspectives on characters who get involved with shadow worlds, corruption, and the other themes you explore?

I wasn’t really a fan of spy novels growing up. I read most of the Bond books when I was very young, but no Deighton or Ludlum or Ambler. I didn’t get to le Carre until I was at university. I came across a copy of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold on holiday in Egypt and read it in a single sitting on an overnight train from Luxor to Cairo. I was blown away by it – the structure is so intricate and precise, it’s like a symphony. I still think it’s le Carre’s best book. Otherwise, my influences were mostly American: I wrote my university thesis on John Updike’s Rabbit books and I love Philip Roth, particularly the later novels. Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter also had a profound effect on me. Growing up, I was far more of a movie fan than a bookworm. Dozens of films – from Sex, Lies and Videotape to The Godfather– also had an influence on the way that I tell stories. I think Tom Rob Smith has also talked about this in the context of Child 44. He came primarily from a movie background, not a literary mindset.

Q: The first part of A Spy By Nature (2001) deals with the recruitment of Alec Milius, a young and rather naïve would-be agent by the S.I.S. It’s often been noted that this section was influenced by your own experiences with MI-6. Beyond describing the procedures and I presume some of the characters, how much autobiography is in these passages?

There are some very autobiographical passages, in the sense that the recruitment chapters are a precise and accurate account of what happened to me back in 1995. But a lot of Alec’s reactions and observations are his and not mine. Of course, we share certain character traits, but Alec is a lot more ambitious than I ever was, and a lot more paranoid. I dropped out of the MI6 recruitment at a very early stage. All of Alec’s experiences in the oil business and as an industrial spy are products of my imagination.

Q: An important element of ASBN is that it isn’t a duel between opposing agencies in the traditional sense, but rather some one-upmanship between British Intelligence and the CIA. Did this result from the fact the story was set after the Cold War and old conflicts were now out-of-date? It seemed to me, from the phony commercial magazine Alec works for to the spy ring he infiltrates, you’re showing that secret manipulation is all around us on a variety of levels.

It was certainly my intention to try something different to the run-of-the-mill Cold War, Us-Against-Them spy plot. One of the key themes in my books is the so-called Special Relationship between Great Britain and the United States. Of course, this is a very one-sided relationship: broadly speaking, we do what we are told by Washington. So I thought that it would be an interesting idea to explore the possibility that these two great allies spy on one another. There have been instances of this in the past: I believe there was an example of the Brits spying on the Americans during the Balkan conflict, for example. As far as Alec’s job at the magazine goes – yes, that was to create an idea that this is a young man who doesn’t have strong ethical beliefs, who is an opportunist and a liar. And he, in turn, is surrounded by liars. He was also unfaithful to Kate, his girlfriend, with a work colleague. In other words, large parts of his life are fabrications.

Q: The sequel, The Spanish Game (2003), was based in Spain, where you’d relocated. What made you decide to go back to Alec Milius after The Hidden Man (2003)?

The Hidden Man was a story that had been turning around in my mind for several years. I had always assumed that I would write it after completing A Spy By Nature. There was no place for Alec in the story, so I left him out. (I’ve done the same thing with Typhoon, my new novel, which doesn’t feature Alec.) Commercially, this was probably a wrongheaded idea: publishers and readers prefer a series with a repeating character. But I was stubborn and followed my heart rather than my head.

Q: The Spanish Game has been compared with the novels of John Le Carre and Len Deighton. For me, the most obvious connection is the fact Alec Milius is very human, very flawed, rather reminiscent of Bernard Sampson. What parallels do you see between your books and those of your predecessors—if any? Were you directly influenced by any of them?

The influence of le Carre on my books is obvious, I suppose: the idea that you could write a spy thriller without necessarily including a lot of action and derring-do had a great impact on me. With le Carre, it’s all about character and the relationships between those characters; that’s also been the case with me. I’m really not that interested in guns and soldiers and ticking clocks on bombs. However, perhaps I absorbed too much of le Carre’s political cynicism. He can be a bit too quick to ridicule the great and the good. As far as Deighton goes, I am ashamed to admit that I have never read the Bernard Samson novels. People keep recommending them to me and I will one day get around to it. I loved Funeral in Berlin and The Ipcress File, but that’s as far as I got with Deighton. Apparently Horse Under Water is also wonderful. Funnily enough, I have his cookbooks, which are excellent.

Q: For me, Typhoon (2008) was a major departure for you in that the scope widened considerably in setting, time, and characters. How did you come to envelope the Chinese Olympics with the rebellion brewing in the Muslim population in China?

There are a number of reasons. First, I was keen to write about China in some capacity, but I wasn’t sure what angle to take. A story set around the Chinese economic boom seemed to make the most sense, until I realized that a story about a character who’s just trying to get rich isn’t particularly interesting for the reader. Then a journalist in Beijing started talking to me about Xinjiang and all the elements fell into place: ethnic unrest and rioting; the cultural clash between the Han and Turkic Muslim Uighurs; the West’s role in contemporary China. I also wanted to find a way of writing about Neo-Con folly in Iraq without writing directly about Iraq. So a crazy American plan to bankroll Muslim separatists in Xinjiang and to land-grab north-west China fitted that purpose perfectly.

Q: It wasn’t until Typhoon that your books became widely available in the States—what took so long?

It was just a commercial thing. A Spy By Nature wasn’t picked up by an American publisher when it first appeared in the UK in 2001. Then, after Spanish Game came out in 2005, Diane Reverand at St Martin’s Press bought my first three books in a block. My current editor, Keith Kahla, bought Typhoon last year, also for St Martin’s. It’s coming out in late October in the States.

Q: I can’t help but think your online book, The 21 Steps, was an enjoyable project, both for the innovation of the concept and the nod to one of the founding fathers of the spy genre, John Buchan. How did this project come about?

It was a joint production between Penguin, who were keen to expand their online activities, and a company called Six to Start, who are cutting-edge innovators in the realm of computer games and so forth. They invited six Penguin authors to contribute stories. I was given The 39 Steps because of my links to spy fiction. I tried to do a very light, very modern update of Buchan’s story, full of cliffhangers, narrow escapes and absurd coincidences. It was fun to do.

Q: A frequent reviewer for Spywise.net (Mark Hooker) thinks the most prevalent genre in contemporary spy fiction is that of novels coming out from ex-members of the espionage community. Do you agree with this assessment? Are there authors you regard highly in this genre—I’m guessing someone you’ve read would be Dame Stella Remington.

Well, not every so-called ex-member of the espionage community is responsible for the work that goes out under his or her name. Over here in the UK, most of the top-selling military and espionage thrillers are ghost written. They’ve been very successful, so I think you’ll see more and more war reporters, former spies and politicians releasing books of this kind. In fact, in ten or fifteen years time, ninety percent of the novelists writing under their own names today will probably be making a living ghostwriting fiction and non-fiction titles for ‘celebrity’ authors. There will be a handful of marquee novelists – the likes of Lee Child, Robert Harris, JK Rowling and so forth – and then a glut of one-off books by people who have become famous in other walks of life: as cooks, reality show contestants, athletes or gardeners. There has probably never been a worse time to be a debut novelist. If I was starting out now, I may not have had the chance to write The Spanish Game or Typhoon. The market has become completely crazy and ruthless and I wouldn’t have been regarded as a safe enough commercial entity.

Q: Any news on film adaptations of your books? What’s next in the pipeline?

A Spy By Nature and The Spanish Game are under option to Red Rum films, a company based in Hollywood. John Hodges, who wrote Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, has signed on to write the script for A Spy By Nature, which is wonderful news. The rights to Typhoon are still up for grabs!

---
The official Charles Cumming website is—

www.charlescumming.co.uk/

You can read The 21 Steps at—

wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week1/
wetellstories.co.uk/authors/charles-cumming

You can read interviews with other spy novelists like Bill Raetz, T.H.E. Hill, Jeremy Duns, and Tod Goldberg by checking out the “Spies in History and Literature” files at—

www.Spywise.net