Charles Cumming

From a BookBrowse interview with Charles Cumming:

(BookBrowse Note: A Spy by Nature was published in the UK in 2001 but not released in the USA until 2007. The Hidden Man was published in the UK in 2003 but is not yet released in the US.)

Your first novel, A Spy By Nature, was written by a first person narrator in the continuous present tense. The Hidden Man is a more traditional novel told by a 3rd person narrator in the past tense. Was that a conscious decision?

Very much so, but it cost me a lot of hard work. I’d become so familiar with Alec Milius, the hero of A Spy By Nature, that I began to think that I wouldn’t be able to write any other kind of story, in any other kind of style. The first person allows you into a character’s thoughts and can create an extraordinary sense of intimacy with the reader. At the same time, I found descriptive prose much easier to write when looked at from Alec’s point-of-view. So it was a challenge that I set myself, as much as anything else, to write a book in what you describe as the more “traditional style”; that is to say, from several different points of view, with many different characters, each carrying equal weight in the story. The third person also makes it easier to create suspense, through the use of dramatic irony and so on. But the project started badly. I couldn’t find my voice and had to scrap about 20,000 words of the first draft. The Hidden Man also became extremely complicated in plot terms. Trying to tie it all up was like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube with a blindfold on.

Read the entire interview.

Learn more about A Spy By Nature.

--Marshal Zeringue