Last August, I posted an entry at
the Page 69 Test for Charles Cumming's A Spy By Nature.
Ali Karim recently caught up with the author and asked him a few questions, including:
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.
Read
the full conversation at The Rap Sheet.
Read
an excerpt from A Spy By Nature.
Charles Cumming's other books include
The Hidden Man and
The Spanish Game.
The film rights to
A Spy By Nature have been bought by Kudos, producers of the acclaimed BBC series
Spooks (
MI-5 in the U.S.).
The Page 69 Test: A Spy By Nature.
--Marshal Zeringue
