Opportunity doesn’t knock, says Terry Hayes; it’s not that clear-cut and obvious. “I say to my four kids, opportunity doesn’t make an appointment,” he says. “You turn around and it’s there, and you don’t even know where it came from. So, you have a choice: you either grab it or you don’t. I’m not saying I made all the right choices, but I did see opportunities and I did grab them as hard as I could. One opportunity was the chance to work with George Miller [on Mad Max 2].”
A decade ago, the now 72-year-old Hayes was dealing with stunning success. His debut spy thriller, I Am Pilgrim, was an overnight sensation. The 600-page techno-thriller was also a rich character study of a terrorist wielding a vaccine-resistant strain of smallpox and a legendary secret agent pulled back into the intelligence underground after a murder near Ground Zero.
“Technology develops much faster than our ability to foresee where it will lead,” says Hayes, his Australian accent resonating over video call from his family’s Lisbon, Portugal, apartment. “As a society, we’re always trying to play catch-up and the problem is the technology is accelerating but we can’t run any faster. So that’s been an interest of mine for a long time. Writing I Am Pilgrim, I had the opportunity to think about that and think about one man’s freedom fighter being another man’s terrorist, depending which side of the divide you’re on.”
Readers, critics and fellow authors raved about Pilgrim. It was an instant bestseller in Hayes’ birthplace – his family emigrated to Australia as “ten-pound poms” in the mid-1950s when he was a boy – and eventually went on to sell more than a million copies in the UK. The accolades rolled on. The book was translated into 20 languages and Hayes was favourably compared to legends like Frederick Forsyth and John Le Carré. By then in his early 60s, the first-time author (though hardly unknown as a storyteller) was suddenly a household name in the crime and thriller-writing community.
By 2014, there were plans for a film, and for a Pilgrim trilogy. But first, Hayes was telling interviewers, would come a genre-blending spy thriller, The Year of the Locust.
While millions of readers hungrily awaited the next book from this new star – a wait much longer than anticipated, as it turned out – Hayes had already spent decades crafting a diverse array of stories and “drilling for drama”, since meeting George Miller in the late 1970s. It was a life-changing opportunity that unexpectedly snuck up on Hayes when he was a Sydney journalist in his late 20s. Future Academy Award winner Miller was a fledgling film-maker in his early 30s.
![George Miller (left) sought out Hayes to write the screenplay for Mad Max 2, starring the then young and unknown actor Mel Gibson. Photos / Getty Images](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/BFWJXT4JZJCDHK346HYLDFQHBY.png?auth=9b401a3b298f8c781ce874635dd7f1c171fed17838d9cd079b6d74f91e101a45&width=16&height=10&quality=70&smart=true)
“A publisher wanted to do a novelisation of George’s film Mad Max and thought I might be a person who could do that,” says Hayes. “So, I met George, this young director making his first feature, and he showed me Mad Max in its very, very unfinished form. To be honest, I couldn’t follow it very well. It had this young actor in it who George thought would be a star. His name was Mel Gibson, though that didn’t mean anything to anybody back then.”
Hayes and Miller hit it off. “I’d seen George’s rough version of the film, but in the novelisation, I had to invent other sequences. George later told me he wished some of those things had been in the film. We were talking a lot. Somewhere in this process, he asked me if I wanted to write a screenplay with him. That became Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, the first screen credit I ever had.”
An auspicious beginning to a new career.
Hayes considers himself lucky that the first film he wrote became so highly regarded “by certain groups of people, maybe not a lot of people”. His mother may have come out of the film saying she didn’t understand any of it, he says with a laugh, but others did. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, released in December 1981, was voted best action film of all time in a 2015 Rolling Stone poll, beating other iconic films such as Alien, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Predator, The Matrix, Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.
Hayes hadn’t watched it for decades, until a US book tour last month in support of The Year of the Locust. “They had a screening as part of a function. I introduced it, sat down to watch the first 20 minutes, and thought, ‘God, it’s a pretty good film.’ I’m not saying it’s the greatest film ever made, but there’s a lot to be proud of in it. Some of its freshness has evaporated because you’ve now seen similar things on many different occasions.”
Doors open
Importantly for Hayes, that opportunity grabbed, not forsaken, opened many other doors, and eventually led to the fulfilment of a lifelong dream, and the life he continues to lead now.
“Mad Max opened a door into doing other things in Australia, that led to a door opening to Hollywood, which opened the door into becoming disillusioned with Hollywood, which opened the door into me writing novels and fulfilling an ambition 50 years in the making.”
The famous saying goes London buses take all day to come then two or three arrive at once. For the millions of fans Hayes earned with I Am Pilgrim, that all-day wait was 10 years long. Then two novels arrived almost at once; one they knew about, one was a big surprise.
Mere weeks after The Year of the Locust came out in Australia, New Zealand and the UK in November – and just before it was published in US hardcover last month – news broke that Hayes had co-written another new novel, Argylle, by Elly Conway.
As Hayes eschews social media, he missed most of the fuss. “I couldn’t imagine anything worse than going on Twitter and giving people my opinions,” he says. “If I’ve got opinions during the writing of my books, I’ll express them in my books. You want me to do that in 140 characters or whatever it is now? Why would I bother?”
Speculation had simmered about the author’s identity since it was announced in late 2021 that Apple+ paid US$200 million ($328 million) for the rights to Argylle, an upcoming film “that could reinvent the spy genre”, based on an unpublished debut novel by reclusive writer Elly Conway.
![The famous saying goes London buses take all day to come then two or three arrive at once. For the millions of fans Hayes earned with I Am Pilgrim, that all-day wait was 10 years long. Then two novels arrived almost at once; one they knew about, one, Argylle, was a big surprise. Photos / Supplied](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/JE4NTD5SSRHKRHGZNQDHOPM5T4.png?auth=9d5e00a4dc45326071b5434fafe49505f95748d5484c8d58acec7c30a645beb4&width=16&height=10&quality=70&smart=true)
The heat turned up last year with “Who is Elly Conway” articles in the likes of the Hollywood Reporter, then boiled over when Taylor Swift fans tried to play detective.
The author bio on the publisher website offered little: “Elly Conway was born and raised in upstate New York. She wrote her first novel about Agent Argylle while working as a waitress in a late-night diner.”
TikToking Swifties would not be deterred, as they uncovered “compelling evidence” that the megastar songstress had written the spy novel on which the new film was based: the first film poster showed a Scottish Fold cat in a travel bag (Swift has two of the same breed of cats and has previously posted pictures of a similar cat-carrying bag); Swift has previously written songs under a pen name; she had portrayed an author in an extended music video; and Elly Conway was the name of a character in Australian soap opera Neighbours, who first appeared on the show on Taylor Swift’s birthday. Case closed!
Or not. In fact, it was Terry and Tammy (Londoner Tammy Cohen), rather than Tay-Tay, who had written Argylle, and the spy novel was not connected to the spy film in quite the same way as had first been reported.
“I’ve known Matthew Vaughn, who’d directed the Kingsman movies, Layer Cake and X-Men, for a very long time and he called me one day and said he was going to make this spy film he’d bought as a spec script,” recalls Hayes. “He explained the plot, which is basically that a spy novelist discovers her real life is becoming entwined with her novels.
“That character is played by Bryce Dallas Howard in the film and is named Elly Conway. Matthew wanted the character to have written her own spy novels in reality. He said it was a very meta idea.
“I had to race off to look up what ‘meta’ meant, then agreed it was the most meta idea I’d ever heard. He said he needed the world’s best spy novelist to write the novel, so that’s when I realised he wasn’t paying much money, because flattery like that is cheaper.”
Hayes laughs easily and often during our interview. He’s voluble and at ease discussing everything from the evolution of the drug trade that featured in his chilling miniseries Bangkok Hilton to the internet allowing previously isolated far-right lunatics to band together, his thoughts on Hollywood, fame and what different societies value, and the family reasons for the decade-long wait between his first two novels.
Opportunities Grabbed
For the latter, it was grabbing opportunity, again. Not for work, this time, or a creative leap into a new endeavour, but the opportunity to spend and enjoy time that can’t be repeated if missed. Hayes’ parents and brother all died during the writing of I Am Pilgrim. He had a wife and four children, so he couldn’t stop long to mourn. So, after the success of his first novel – unshared with those who’d known his writing dream the longest – Hayes prioritised his family and especially his growing kids, attending every cricket training, horse-riding lesson, football game and school production.
He never stopped working on The Year of the Locust, a kind of Frederick Forsyth-meets-Michael Crichton epic tale of a CIA spy going behind the most dangerous enemy lines to prevent global disaster at the hands of a frightening adversary. It just took a lot longer.
Given Hayes was already years behind schedule and deep into writing The Year of the Locust when Vaughn called, he couldn’t wholly commit to writing Argylle as well. Vaughn didn’t want to do it if Hayes wasn’t involved. The solution: co-writing.
![Argylle director Matthew Vaughn recruited Hayes to co-write the novel linked to the movie. Photo / Getty Images](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/VVFXI6RR3FEW3FMU35VV4SQ6BU.jpg?auth=7aac4caf042bb3f1a00125741f065138b09b810c065fa8fd665fc08b17dc6934&width=16&height=11&quality=70&smart=true)
Hayes’ publisher found Tammy Cohen, a Nigerian-born London author of a dozen thrillers and other novels. The pair Zoomed two or three times a week; Hayes focused on plotting a “gripping, exciting, light-hearted but ultimately good book” and Cohen worked on dialogue and descriptive writing for a thriller that’s neither a novelisation of the film, nor its source material as originally reported, but that could have been penned by the spy-writing main character.
Hayes admits that after many years sitting in a room by himself writing I Am Pilgrim then The Year of the Locust, he enjoyed dipping back into collaborative storytelling with Vaughn and Cohen on Argylle. Just a handful of voices, rather than dozens on a screen project.
From the outside, it’s curious that all three of Hayes novels have been spy thrillers, whereas his screen work roamed widely from action like Mad Max, Payback, and Vertical Limit, to horror (From Hell starring Johnny Depp), psychological thrillers (Dead Calm starring Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill, Flightplan starring Jodie Foster) to wartime dramas (Vietnam, The Cowra Breakout) and Australian sporting (Bodyline) and political history (The Dismissal).
“I’ve always had a real interest in the intelligence world since I was a journalist,” he explains. “I was a foreign correspondent in New York and I wrote very extensive coverage of how Australia got involved in the Vietnam War, and how the CIA really manipulated our politicians, and at that stage in the 1970s was completely off mission and interfering in the politics of so many places.
“I wrote a 10,000-word article about what happened after [then-Australian prime minister Gough] Whitlam had pulled troops out of Vietnam, and met a number of people in the intelligence world in America through researching that.”
Spy thrillers are a nexus, Hayes says of his interests in documentary realism, politics and on-ground tragedies that unfold for nations co-opted into wars. He loved Day of the Jackal, thought the Bourne books had a great set-up and had read all of John Le Carré's work. “When you’re writing a screenplay, you have to be interested in the material,” he notes. “You’re drilling down to find how to make a story dramatic, the characters jump off the screen, how to create situations that will be thrilling, scary or whatever. You’re doing all that in a confined among of time. When you’re writing a novel, it’s open ended, and I happen to like epic novels. I’m there for Shōgun, Anna Karenina and The Lord of the Rings.”
Writing epic spy thrillers after his Hollywood years was like the perfect storm of everything coming together, he says. He’s now working on a sequel to I Am Pilgrim and looking ahead to a third instalment.
“I’m very jazzed about the idea. I always intended it to be a trilogy, a Lord of the Rings of the spy world, without Tolkien’s talent. Nevertheless, I try.” l
The Year of the Locust, by Terry Hayes (Bantam, $38), and Argylle, by Elly Conway (Bantam, $38), are both out now.