Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time To Die. Photo / Supplied
OPINION:
It is as far away from James Bond as it is possible to go. Halfway through the first episode of Apple TV+'s new British spy series, Slow Horses, adapted from Mick Herron's novels, we find the MI5 agent River Cartwright scrabbling around on the floor of his dilapidated office in a pair of yellow marigolds. He is wading through the putrescent contents of a bin bag belonging to a right-wing journalist. Casino Royale it is not.
Unlike Ian Fleming's, Herron's work celebrates failure. The Slow Horses lead is Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb, a lank-haired, fat and spectacularly flatulent creation who presides over a washed-up group of failed spooks, banished from MI5 headquarters to a crepuscular backwater known as Slough House.
Yet while Lamb resembles M if he was forced to live in a cardboard box, Herron stands firmly in the line of descent from Fleming. It is fitting that he has been given the broadcast treatment because — following the death of John le Carré — he is at the summit of what I believe is a new golden age of spy fiction. Not since the 1970s has there been such a crop of talented spy writers all at the peak of their powers together.
When I was recently drawing up a list of the top 125 spy authors for the Spybrary website — where fans (and quite a few authors) gather — I was struck that more than a third of the Top 30 are working now.
What's more, ITV's recent launch of a stylish series based on Len Deighton's first novel, The Ipcress File (1962), shows that spies are cool again.
It wasn't always so. For most of the past two decades new psychological thrillers and detective stories were what was selling. Matthew Richardson, author of the spy thrillers My Name Is Nobody and The Insider, says: "At book festivals the spy writers have one fringe panel, crime writers have whole festivals."
Herron began writing about a private detective and switched to spy thrillers in 2010, but it was eight years before he made it big. While he won awards, his books barely sold. His second, Dead Lions (2013), did not even secure a hardback release in the UK. It was only when the publisher John Murray rescued him from obscurity that he began to enjoy commercial success — he recently topped one million sales for the Slough House series.
It is striking that two of Herron's three closest rivals in the pantheon of modern British spy writing — Henry Porter and Simon Conway — had long periods where they were not published (six years in Conway's case, nine in Porter's) and the third, Charles Cumming, had to change publisher to get the support he needed. Porter is now three books into a new series and Cumming is doing some of his best work (with HarperCollins). Conway, with The Stranger and The Saboteur, has devised one of the greatest villains in 21st-century spy literature.
Where they have blazed a trail, others are now following. James Wolff and Oliver Harris, another who switched recently from detective to spy fiction, are seeing their careers take off. And there are a raft of accomplished female authors who have penned "spychological" thrillers, merging espionage with personal drama. Most prominent is Charlotte Philby, granddaughter of the defector Kim Philby. Her new one, Edith and Kim, based on the relationship between her grandfather and Edith Tudor-Hart, who introduced him to his Soviet handler, is due out at the end of this month and getting a lot of buzz.
I have been reading spy fiction since I discovered Bond aged 15. My attraction to it is that, at its best, it is a means of reflecting on both the meaning of international events and our relationship to other countries and our own pasts. Its most interesting characters are people in extreme circumstance brought into conflict with foreign rivals, their own bosses and frequently themselves. It can be thrilling but also profoundly serious.
The rebirth of espionage as a powerhouse genre owes a lot to the return of Russia and China as a security threat and the war in Ukraine. There is revived interest in state-to-state intelligence battles, after two decades where the War on Terror pitted Western intelligence against a shifting group of Islamist terrorists, who were inherently harder for authors to humanise.
"We are going through a new Cold War, now getting hot," Herron says. "That's what a lot of writers are responding to." On a recent podcast for Crime Time FM Paul Vidich told me: "It's easier for us to write about Russians and Germans than it is about Iranians."
When I spoke to Joseph Kanon, probably the most accomplished spy writer working today, last week, he added: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often produces a pretty powerful echo. What has forced it to linger is that the Russians never accepted that the Cold War was over. It's almost as if Putin is stamping his foot and insisting that he is not going to leave the stage. Espionage is in their DNA."
Kanon has always written historical books because the Cold War was when "the spy was centre stage". He says: "They were the shock troops and the intelligence agencies were the ground forces. They were the ones in the field risking capture, imprisonment and even death. They get to be the star of the show."
Whatever era they are set in, the dramatic appeal of spies is obvious. Kanon says: "What makes spies interesting is that they are living a lie. Everything he does is a lie. The dichotomy between the private self and the public self is there the whole time."
Also striking has been the growing number of American writers who are choosing serious spy writing over the shoot-em-up exploits of special forces operatives that dominate US bestseller lists, dismissed by aficionados as "the Kalashnikov Kids".
Kanon has stiff competition from Olen Steinhauer, Paul Vidich and now David McCloskey, whose book, Damascus Station, published in September, was hailed as the best debut for years. Both Kanon and Vidich have new books out that are set in Berlin (Kanon's The Berlin Exchange in 1963, after the wall went up, Vidich's The Matchmaker in 1989, just as it came down).
Shane Whaley, who founded Spybrary, says: "This is the strongest group of authors for a long time. I think it started with Herron. The American authors coming through, like Vidich and McCloskey, have chosen to write more realistic, gritty character and dialogue-driven books, rather than going the easier way to commercial success, which is a Rambo-style book masquerading as a spy thriller."
Herron is quick to admit what he owes to previous generations. He said: "I reread the early Len Deightons last year for the first time in a long time and I was amazed by how much I'm in debt to him without realising it."
Deighton's innovation was to make his spy a working-class lad battling the middle-class spook establishment — an outsiders theme Herron has taken further with the rejects of Slough House. Deighton's characters are often amusing, but Herron has managed to blend thrills with broad comedy and no little satire. "The times are so crazy, especially since 2016," he says, "that I think the appropriate response is incredulous laughter, deep sarcasm and bad-tempered humour."
His opportunist politician, Peter Judd, is a barely veiled facsimile of Boris Johnson. Has Herron, who is notorious for killing off characters, contemplated a sticky end for this tribute act? "He's certainly one of the characters I wouldn't be sad to arrange a bad end for. Let's see."
So what is next for this golden generation of writers? They are keen to get their teeth into a new target. Vidich observed: "There aren't many novels that deal with the intelligence wars between the West and China, yet that is one of the major contemporary dramas." Vidich's grandfather was a protestant minister in Shanghai and two of his three grandchildren are half-Chinese. "I haven't yet gone there — but I might." Kanon also admits he is "intrigued" by China, "a rich opportunity for stories".
My hope is that when television commissioning editors look for the next big hit, they realise there is the same rich opportunity to adapt stories by Herron's contemporaries as there is Deighton's.
Mick Herron
At 58, Herron is the king of spy thrillers, called "the John le Carré of our generation" by Val McDermid. His eighth Slough House novel is out in May, after the April adaptation on Apple TV+.
Simon Conway
Conway, 55, has experienced the thrills he writes about - he served as a British Army officer and later worked in international aid, clearing landmines and other debris of war.
Joseph Kanon
Kanon had a high-flying career long before his writing success. The 75-year-old was editor in chief, chief executive and president of two New York publishing houses.
Henry Porter
He was brought up in a military family, but Porter chose journalism instead. He was British editor of Vanity Fair for 25 years and, at 69, writes columns, often on MI5's surveillance power.
Written by: Tim Shipman
© The Times of London
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