Charles Cumming can pinpoint the precise moment that launched his career in espionage fiction.
The best-selling author, whose latest contemporary Cold War thriller is “A Divided Spy,” was fresh out of college in 1995 when he was approached for recruitment by the U.K.’s Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6.
“I didn’t go to work for them,” Cumming says. “But my experiences with them, the interviews and exams and so forth, piqued my interest. I became fascinated with the world of intelligence, and I often mused about what would have become of me had I gone into that field.
“If I hadn’t had that experience, I’m quite sure my books would be about something completely different.”
“A Divided Spy” is Cumming’s eighth spy thriller — and the third to feature Thomas Kell, a former MI6 officer tormented by things he has done, filled with guilt about lives and relationships he has destroyed.
Kell thought he was out of the business. Then comes an unexpected chance to ruin a top Russian agent who’s responsible for the death of the woman Kell loved. He sets a trap, all the while not entirely sure if he is actually the one being played in a cat-and-mouse game.
Cumming tends to focus on the cerebral side of the spy game, in the tradition of John le Carre. He leaves it to others to write over-the-top espionage adventures, with explosions and gunplay in every chapter.
“The themes of spy fiction that have always been fascinating to me have more to do with the human costs of spying, like obscuring your identity and living under a false identity, and being forced to choose between telling the truth and telling lies.”
That said, there is an ISIS terror threat looming in “A Divided Spy.” Naturally, Kell will have to race the clock to stop it. The author’s intellectual and more realistic approach notwithstanding, some rules of the genre never change.
Cumming was home in London, preparing for a U.S. book tour, when we chatted with him about “A Divided Spy” and the global unrest that inspired it.
Aside from occasional email and text messages, and the presence of an Islamic terrorist, the book feels like a throwback to the original Cold War era of the 1950s and 1960s. Do contemporary spies still use the old methods, relying more on instincts and relationships than on technology?
It’s still a relationship business. That hasn’t changed in 150 years.
If you’re a British spy or American spy or Iranian spy and you want to find something out, you identify the person or people who have that information and then you set about cultivating that relationship, approaching that person and offering money or however you were going to get that information.
Because of the big advances in technology, because of the things people can do with computers and the internet and mobile phones, it’s much easier to find out things about people and to follow them around and to listen to their calls and to read their emails.
But there’s still no substitute for human intelligence, for having someone in a room saying, “This thing is going to happen and this is when it’s going to happen.” That’s what everyone is after, a human source inside a government or inside a terrorist cell or wherever it might be.
The terrorist plot in the book isn’t a big, showy bombing. This attack plan is much more modest in scale. Nevertheless, it certainly would be devastating if successful. But I’m wondering if the threat will feel as terrifying to American readers. Your thoughts?
For everyone living in Europe, this sort of attack is a very real threat all the time: the terrible situation in Nice last summer with the lorry driver, the beach attack in Tunisia, the shootings in Paris. Here in London, we’re on edge, just sort of waiting for some kind of similar atrocity.
I don’t think this is an existential threat in America to the extent that it is here. You’ve had tragedies as well, but I don’t think you have the same problem with widespread Islamic terror that we have here, where it’s part and parcel of 21st century life, unfortunately.
Meanwhile, the other adversary in the book is Russia and Putin’s intelligence regime. How big a threat does Russia pose to world peace?
With President Putin’s background as a KGB spy, it’s generally considered that his idea is to restore not necessarily Soviet borders, but Russian might. He wants to make Russia a superpower again.
That has led politically and in espionage terms to a new Cold War. So in a lot of ways, he’s been a boon to spy novelists, if not to anyone else in the world.