which includes an interview with Nick Stone--can be found here. To read about last year’s Penguin soirée, click here.)So, after knocking back our drinks at London’s Marques of Granby pub, Penguin authors Nick Stone and Charles Cumming joined the Shots Webzine team of Mike Stotter, Mike Ripley, Ayo Onatade, and I, as we traversed Charing Cross Road and headed to the Union Club in Soho to attend the Penguin fête.
Upon arrival, we quickly doffed our jackets and headed for the bar. There we encountered the usual suspect reviewers, writers, and critics, among them Peter Guttridge of The Observer, Crime Squad editor Chris Simmons, and author Natasha Cooper, as well as men-about-town Barry Forshaw and Maxim Jakubowski.
Penguin senior editor and publisher Rowland White and I chatted about his success with the non-fiction book Vulcan 607, having to do with a British military mission to destroy an Argentinean-held airstrip during the 1982 Falklands War. And I went on from White to strike up a conversation with journalists-turned-crime authors Sean French and Nicci Gerrard, who write under the pseudonym Nicci French. They let me know how impressed they had been to read in The Rap Sheet that poet-crime novelist Sophie Hannah (The Point of Rescue) is a fan of their work. I first met the French duo at Dead-on-Deansgate in 2001, and have enjoyed their paranoiac view of urban relationships and madness ever since. I just received their latest tale, Until It’s Over, and am looking for a chance to read it. (You can catch the first chapter of Until It’s Over here.)
Other Penguin stalwarts in attendance were Andrew Taylor (Bleeding Heart Square), who has recently joined us in the blogosphere, and Jim Kelly, author of the journalist Philip Dryden series (The Coldest Blood). But there were some bright newcomers scattered among this crowd as well, including R.S. “Ruth” Downie (Terra Incognita) and Caro Ramsey (Absolution). The Penguin editorial and publicity staff of Alex Clark, Clare Pollock, and others did their usual bang-up job of keeping us well fed and watered (never let it be said that book critics can’t put away the victuals), and also pointed me to several up-and-coming authors. Among those was the delightful Felix Francis, the son of equine crime-fiction master Dick Francis. It seems that since the loss of his wife, Mary, in 2000, Francis Senior has brought his younger son into the writing fold. Last year they jointly produced Dead Heat (due out presently in paperback), and Felix told me that he’s relishing working with his father on their next novel, Silks, which is due out this coming summer.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a friendly face emerging from the throng. With his Steve Hamilton-style haircut, Marcus Sakey (At the City’s Edge) was easy to spot; but then again, as a man of color, so am I. I was a bit surprised to be shaking Sakey’s hand. It seems he was Penguin UK’s sole American author in attendance at this year’s party (his debut novel, The Blade Itself, having just been released in Britain), and he came over with his charming wife to spend a week in London. While we all chattered away, Stotter tottered over to join in. Since Sakey found Stotter’s cockney rhyming slang a bit of a tough go, I volunteered to interpret. Stotter wanted to give the Sakeys a few tips on where to go while they were in the British capital, including forays to the metropolis’ darker edges, which might be useful for Sakey’s research. (Being a writer is a full-time occupation, after all.) I, meanwhile, was just as interested in talking about plans to turn The Blade Itself into a movie.
Finally, I sought out the inscrutable Charles Cumming once more, hoping to corner him for a quick interview. After ordering a couple of pints of Guinness, we retreated to a private book at the back of the Union Club, where I placed my trusty tape recorder on the table and got down to the tough questioning. No need for the Bush White House’s favorite sport, water-boarding. Cumming cracked like an egg on every subject from his reading history and his association with British Intelligence, to his passion for chess.
Ali Karim: I see you studied English Literature at university. Did you come from a bookish family?
Charles Cumming: Not at all. There were very few books in either house (my parents separated when I was 7). I can’t remember ever seeing my mother reading a novel during my childhood, probably because she was working so hard. She ran a small catering company, then a hotel, so there wasn’t much time for reading. My father read political biographies and Frederick Forsyth, but that was it. For about 15 years all he had beside his bed were three well-thumbed copies of The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, and The Fourth Protocol--and [British politician] Nigel Lawson’s memoirs.
AK: And what of your own early readings?
CC: I tried The Day of the Jackal in about 1982, but I was too young for it. Before that there was Willard Price and Ian Fleming. To be honest, as a child I was a very lazy reader. I much preferred television. At school we would be assigned a book to read over the holidays and the thought of getting through it was almost debilitating. Mansfield Park springs to mind. I remember being dazzled by [Scott Turow’s] Presumed Innocent at 16 or 17. I can still recall the first line: “This is how I always begin.” Then Catcher in the Rye, Less Than Zero, Macbeth, Equus. Those were the books and plays that got under my skin at school. The single most important book of my adolescence was Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. A friend leant it to me the summer I left Eton and it was a complete revelation. I suddenly understood the power of language.
AK: Who encouraged your own writing?
CC: Three people, in particular: my father, who recognized that I had talent and never once, God bless him, advised me to get a proper job; my English teacher at Eton, Angus Graham-Campbell, who was so enigmatic and inscrutable that I wanted to get his attention; and my wife. I wrote A Spy by Nature [2001] to impress her. She says that from a young age she always knew that she was going to marry a writer in a garret …
AK: Are you an aficionado of espionage fiction?
CC: Not really. After what happened with SIS [aka MI6] I read a lot of [John] le Carré, but I really don’t know [Len] Deighton at all, nor the big Americans—[Tom] Clancy, [Robert] Littell, and [Robert] Ludlum. I love Charles McCarry, ditto Dan Fesperman. On a research trip to China I discovered Eric Ambler, who is amazing. Graham Greene is a hero of mine, on and off the page, but obviously his range went beyond pure espionage.
AK: Who have you read that you consider influential not only in your own work, but in the espionage-fiction genre generally?
CC: This might sound strange coming from a spy novelist, but the books which have most inspired me are [John] Updike’s Rabbit novels, late Philip Roth, Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, and everything by Martin Amis up to London Fields. Aside from those, Le Carré is obviously the single biggest influence on my work. If you accept that there are two strands in spy fiction, an escapist strand and a non-escapist strand, then Le Carré is the godfather of the latter. Like Ambler, [John] Buchan, and Greene before him, he has used the world of espionage as a platform for examining issues of morality and conscience, human weakness and personal ambition. That’s definitely what I’ve set out to do. All of us in the present generation--Fesperman, Daniel Silva, Henry Porter--are indebted to what Le Carré has achieved. By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that serious themes are not touched on in the escapist tradition, just that they are not touched on for very long. [For] Ian Fleming and Ludlum, for example, excitement is everything; what you might loosely call emotional or psychological content is sacrificed to the demands of the story.
AK: The last time we met was during ThrillerFest in New York, where you, Barry Eisler, and Nick Stone all ended up drinking Mike Stotter’s malt Scotch. So, apart from that night, please tell us about your highlights from ThrillerFest.
CC: I don’t remember anything after I drank all of Mike’s Scotch.
AK: I read that A Spy by Nature was influenced by a real-life encounter with British Intelligence. Are you still in contact with MI6?
CC: I have a very good friend who works for SIS, who wouldn’t thank me for saying too much about
our relationship. Let’s just say that he/she has been very helpful all the way through my career.AK: I wonder if your public-school background, or your remarkable height had anything to do with SIS’s interest … [In the photo at left, Cumming is the towering presence on the right, while I’m the other bloke.]
CC: The Foreign Office still drools over public schoolboys. There’s a certain sort of very charming, very bright old Etonian (David Cameron is the archetype) who reminds the Foreign Office of what it used to be and therefore allows for a certain continuity in style. The British military is also very pro-public school, possibly for the same reasons. The other day somebody told me that 60 percent of the commanding officers in the SAS [British Special Air Service] are old Etonians. As far as my height is concerned, I don’t think SIS ever had me earmarked for surveillance work, but there’s no doubt I would have stood out from the crowd at a cocktail party in, say, Lima or Seoul. “He’s the spy,” they would have said. “The one who looks like Peter Crouch.”
AK: A Spy by Nature was your first novel published, but was it the first written? Do you a few unpublished manuscripts in your desk drawer?
CC: A Spy by Nature was my first novel and it was bought as a completed manuscript. However, Penguin signed me to a two-book deal. The Hidden Man [2003] is a version of a screenplay that I wrote immediately after leaving university. The screenplay was about a man who walks out on his son and then comes back into his life 20 years later. It wasn’t a spy story. Most of the building blocks of The Hidden Man--the espionage, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Russian mafia in London, the relationship between the two brothers--came later as I was writing the novel.
AK: I really enjoyed The Spanish Game [2006], which featured Alec Milius, who was also in A Spy by Nature, whereas The Hidden Man and your latest novel, Typhoon [2008], are standalones. Which do your prefer--the palpable freedom of a standalone or the comforts of continuity, in series novels?
CC: Of the four books I’ve written, The Spanish Game was by far the easiest to write because I knew Alec Milius already. That made so many decisions so much easier. I didn’t have to ask myself, “How would Alec react in this situation? What would he feel?” I just instinctively knew. Typhoon was by far the hardest, because I was writing about a new character that was the deliberate flip of Alec. Joe Lennox is noble, patriotic, heroic. Also, I had never written a book about a serving SIS officer; up to that point my characters had always been on the outside of the secret world, looking in. Typhoon was also difficult because China is a massive subject in terms of research. With The Spanish Game, I lived in Madrid for three years and knew the city inside out. For Typhoon, I spent less than two weeks in Shanghai, five days in Hong Kong, and five days in Beijing. The rest of the time I was stuck in London with two small children keeping me up all night! I would never have taken on such a big challenge if The Spanish Game hadn’t given me the confidence to write about a foreign country.
AK: Your work has been highly acclaimed for its authenticity and take on the “Alice through the looking-glass” world of espionage. Tell us about your research methods.
CC: A lot of it is common sense. How do you earn someone’s trust? How would you follow a person from A to B? How do you know when a person is lying to you? But I also read a lot, watch a lot of documentaries, and have good contacts in the intelligence community. For example, in The Hidden Man, MI5 break into an office. A friend at Thames House [MI5’s London headquarters] told me that such operations are undertaken twice: once as a dress rehearsal, to iron out any potential problems, and then as the real thing, when they go after the information. There’s no way a layman would know that; as a strategy, it doesn’t seem to make sense. It surely doubles your chances of being caught. But MI5 see it as doubling their chances of being successful.
AK: There was a three-year gap between The Hidden Man and the appearance of The Spanish Game. What happened during that period? Or did the Madrid adventure just take longer to write?
CC: The simple answer is that I don’t find writing particularly easy. It usually takes me two years to write a novel. From memory, Spanish Game was ready for publication in 2005, but was pushed back by six months for marketing reasons. I was relieved to see Nick Stone … saying that he would find it impossible to write a book every year, which is what is now being asked of thriller writers. I would find it very difficult, too, at least in the long-term. Artistically it’s impossible to maintain a level of quality without burn-out unless you’re supremely talented or blessed with extraordinary reserves of mental and physical strength. I also think the reading public will eventually tire of writers who churn out essentially the same book year after year after year.
AK: I notice that like your fellow espionage writer Robert Littell, you are a chess player. Tell me about your relationship with chess.
CC: I love it. I was taught at the age of 10 by a beautiful Scottish babysitter and never looked back! I started up a club when I came back to London from Madrid in 2004. It’s called The Jose-Raul Capablanca Memorial Chess Society. Boris Starling (who wrote Messiah) is a fellow member. I beat him in the quarter-finals at the last tournament. He still hasn’t properly recovered.
AK: Fancy a game, as I am a little bit of chess player myself? It would give us the chance to record a lengthier interview in the process of your defeat.
CC: [Laughing] That is a challenge you will regret. Bring it on, Ali. I will destroy you.
AK: [Laughing] In your dreams! Anyway, back to the subject of your work … Your latest novel, Typhoon,
is backdropped by the friction between the United States and its biggest trading partner, China. Can you give us some background on that work?CC: When I finished writing The Spanish Game in 2004, I started to look around for a new subject and China just seemed the obvious choice. The economic boom, the Olympics--it was obviously going to be The Next Big Thing. Editors were sick of Al-Qaeda, sick of 9/11, and I was aware that nobody had really touched China since The Honourable Schoolboy [1977]. Thematically, it was also riveting: the West’s economic greed versus its commitment to human rights; Britain’s colonial past in Hong Kong and Shanghai; the apparent decline of the American empire and the rampant growth of 21st-century China.
AK: Were you nervous writing about something so topical, especially in light of the U.S. economy’s recent financial problems, linked as they are to the weakness of the American dollar and that nation’s relationship with China?
CC: The hardest problem was finding a way to make China interesting to western readers. Writing about people making money isn’t particularly fascinating, and China is all about people making money. That’s where [the] Xinjiang [region of northwestern China] came in. As soon as I learned about the plight of the Uighur people, and Xinjiang’s strategic importance in what Lutz Kleveman calls “the New Great Game,” I was in. If it doesn’t sound too grandiose, Typhoon became a metaphor for the lunacy of American intervention overseas, a way of talking about Iraq without actually writing a novel about Iraq.
AK: When is Typhoon due for release? And are there any plans for a Chinese edition?
CC: Typhoon is out in June [in the UK]. If the Chinese have any sense, they’ll ban it.
AK: What books have passed over your reading table recently that you’ve enjoyed?
CC: I absolutely loved The Ghost, by Robert Harris, and said so in a review I wrote for The Mail on Sunday. Harris gave me a wonderful plug for A Spy by Nature, so it looked as though I was scratching his back. But I genuinely thought it was first-class: funny, smart, gripping, and very well-written. I’m also reading Putin’s Progress, a fascinating biography of the all-new “Vlad the Impaler,” by Peter Truscott. It’s research for a novel I’m planning.
AK: And lastly, considering your own education, when you see fellow public-school boys such as Jeremy Irons and Alan Rickman--both featured as baddies in the Die Hard films--why do you think the British public school boy makes such a wonderful movie bad-guy?
CC: It must be something to do with the gap between an audience’s expectations of a well-spoken, impeccably dressed, refined English gentleman and the reality of their behavior. You only have to think of Kim Philby: charming, witty, attractive, well-connected--and yet underneath it all, completely ruthless and amoral.
* * *
After this grilling, Cumming and I returned to the party, where a number of us toasted to the success of Typhoon, before thanking the Penguin team for their hospitality and heading off for our various destinations. I knew this wouldn’t be my last encounter with Charles Cumming, however. There’s still that chess challenge to be had.If you would like to see all of the photos from the Penguin crime-fiction party, click here.
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