The New Spy Story

Is our long love affair with espionage thrillers about to change?

When asked how I came to write my first spy novel Red Widow, after having written five novels that were not spy thrillers, I always tell this story: It was 2017. I’d just retired from a career in intelligence. My editor at the time suggested a write a spy novel. She knew I’d always wanted to. But more so, she wanted me to write something that showed the spy’s internal life. Family, friends. The TV show The Americans was coming to an end, and this was the part of the show that she enjoyed. The domesticity.

And also this story: Whenever I was asked in interviews why I wrote Red Widow, I said it was because I wanted to show what it means to have a life in intelligence. The compromises, the demands. In my 35 years, I paid attention not only to my disappointments and lessons, but to the disappointments and lessons of others. I contrasted what it took to keep a security clearance to the lives of my friends without one: the freedoms they took for granted, the paper trail of foreign friends and personal finances they did not have to surrender to their employer on an annual basis, their jobs (all that they had done, all they had yet to accomplish) hanging in the balance.

On one hand, spy stories have always been personal. Fiction demands it: you must make the reader understand who the person is before they will feel any empathy for him or her. Look at LeCarre or Greene or Ignatius or Littell. They make their protagonists real people with wants and hopes beyond simply satisfying the mission.

The problem (from my point of view) is that they often write the same person. A man who’s had a more than a few years in, jaded, maybe even a little bitter, but is going to do his duty even though he’s long come to the conclusion that he doesn’t agree with the way the game is played. Duty above all, etc etc. You know the drill.

In terms of TV and movies, the emphasis has traditionally been on action sequences. The plot didn’t have to make much sense because all that mattered was getting the hero to the next gunfight or fistfight or car chase. Spy movies were full of beautiful people fighting in glamorous places: discos, ski chalets, backstage at the opera, in anti-gravity, in some tech bro’s mansion.

But in real life, operations officers don’t usually fire a weapon or drive their car into the bad guys. If you did it more than once in your career, you’d be called in for an evaluation. Spying is supposed to be about secrecy.

So I was really pleased to see this article (gift link) in the NY Times, claiming that the latest wave of TV spy stories are focused on the internal life of the spy. “It’s really about the intensity of the sacrifice that is asked of these people. It isn’t a flashy spy show. It’s showing the reality of people who exist for this work,” says one of the actors on The Agency. Or, “I would call it a relationship drama that takes place in the world of espionage rather than a full on spy show,” said Joe Barton, the Black Doves writer, creator and executive producer. “For me, the espionage element was secondary to the human relationships.”

Iy’s about time. I feel vindicated. Seen. My ego can’t help but wonder if any of these producers or writers listened to any of the interviews I’ve given over the years and thought, maybe there’s something there. “The political tensions really just serve as highly detailed atmospherics,” another actor said in an interview, something I’ve told former colleagues asking for advice as they contemplate writing their own spy novel. Most people read for the human connection; they could case less about your expert insights on tensions in the Middle East or changes to China’s defense posture. The geopolitical part is there to move the story along. The characters are the stars.¹

I wonder what these mean for the three of my properties currently in development for TV series. I want to send the link to all my producers, hoping to give them a little juice. Let’s go! Times a-wasting! It’s finally time to tell these stories. My colleagues’ stories. My stories.

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Hey, not to give you genre whiplash but you can now pre-order my next novel, a horror novel titled Fiend. The logline I kept in the front of my mind as I was writing was Succession, but horror, but it’s really about generational trauma.

1. The NYT article mentions the show Severance, too, though it says it has nothing to do with espionage. But something about the show—where employees have agreed to a surgical procedure that prevents them from remembering their work life once they leave the office, effectively separating the two spheres of their lives—reminded me immediately of working in intelligence. You have a life inside and a life outside, and never the twain shall meet.