Spy fiction

‘People believe what they want to believe,' wrote David to one of his lovers. ‘ALWAYS.' he was referring to the ‘revelation' that Graham Greene had continued working for British intelligence into his seventies. ‘No good me telling them that GG was far too drunk to remember anything, & that his residual connections with the Brit spooks were romantic fantasy.'

It's almost a cliché that spy novels should be dark, gripping, ambiguous. Espionage, after all, is the shadowy business of stealing high-stakes secrets, of manipulation, deception, and betrayal. But after six years of spying for the CIA-then writing my first spy novel-I found the profession was defined by something more fundamental: the enduring weight of unanswered questions.

Writers Kathleen Kent and Alma Katsu are both known for their historical fiction and mysteries, but did you know that, in real life, both worked in the shadowy world of national security and intelligence? In this interview, the authors of BLACK WOLF (Mulholland Books, February 14) and RED LONDON (G.P.  Read more

In an equivocal recommendation letter to the dons at Oxford, R.S. Thompson, a housemaster at Sherborne School, Dorset, wrote that his former pupil David Cornwell "strikes me as the sort who might become either Archbishop of Canterbury or a first-rate criminal!"

No city has been a deeper well for espionage fiction than Berlin. There is a long and growing list of novels that contribute to the city's image as a hotbed of spies and conspirators. The fifty-one years bookended by Kristallnacht in 1938 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provide the rich historical dramas that continue to excite writers' imaginations.  Read more