I SPY at Left Coast Crime, Phoenix

At the Left Coast Crime conference in Phoenix last week, I was assigned to appear on the “I Spy” panel with authors Art Kerns, Jeff Layton, Ryan Quinn, and moderator Annette Rogers. I’m a devout reader of espionage novels and have written a few…which got me thinking about the genre and what it’s really about. Spy fiction fascinates us because it deals with timeless themes of love, power, revenge, greed, ego, sacrifice, both the idealistic and dark sides of our nature. It’s about our world, the secrets and lies, conspiracies and plots that take place behind the scenes and impact us all.

As practiced by Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Graham Green, John Le Carré, and Alan Furst, the genre was traditionally about great power rivalry. The end of the Cold War cracked open the former spy v spy plot line with the emergence of rogue states, international criminal organizations, global terrorist networks—as in The Riviera Contract, by panel-mate Art Kerns—and technological sabotage and espionage, a theme of Ryan Quinn’s End of Secrets, about a rogue domestic spying program. Even former ideological enemies may find themselves on the same side as in Jeff Layton’s The Good Spy.

 My novel, Stinger, is an end of the Cold War spy thriller set during the Soviet-Afghan War in the mid 1980s. The action opens with the disappearance of six U.S. Stinger missiles that have secretly found their way to Peshawar.

How did I become interested in this genre? I started traveling at a young age, and the places I had read about or even truthfully never thought about became real. Their peoples became real. I will never forget Mohammed the waiter in Gilgit, in Pakistan’s far north, who took us to his home where he introduced us to his wife and daughters and served us tea under a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, and yet he was not our enemy. We are all humans after all. I think about him as a minority Shiite in Pakistan. What has happened to him under Taliban control?

So I started reading the newspaper differently. And stories started to emerge, conflicts, characters. An article about a collegial meeting of former spies in SF led directly to Stinger.

I’m interested in the cusps of history and how the intrigue and conflicts affect my characters, e.g., a Hollywood actress and Cambridge-educated Maharaja at the end of the British Raj in India (my not yet published novel, The Star of India); an American businesswoman and Russian music conductor during the desperate last days of the Cold War in Russia (another new novel, A Conspiracy of Lies). And in Stinger, the last battleground of the Cold War, the conflict of a rogue CIA officer and SF journalist, each with secret agendas.

I’m interested in borderlands and often there’s a place on a map that calls to me. For Stinger, it was the Khyber Pass and cross-border tribal lands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Mekong region of SE Asia was the focus of Into the Fire, my latest book. After her adopted Chinese daughter is kidnapped, a woman reunites with her former case officer to mount a desperate search that takes them up the Mekong into southern China. 

At the conference, I met author Chris Holm. His tattoo has become my motto.

Queen of International Espionage

Way back when, an editor read one of my early efforts at international intrigue, and called me a young Helen MacInnes. By young, I now realize he was being kind for I resembled her only in an aspirational way. Over the years, I remained curious, but never got around to her work.

When MWA-NorCal President Susan Spann requested author profiles for the newsletter, I decided this was the perfect kick in the butt to investigate MacInnes, dubbed by the New York Times, “the queen of international espionage fiction.” Her work spanned a tumultuous chunk of the twentieth century from WW2 through the Cold War, creating suspense novels set against the major political events of her day.

A formidable woman, she was born in 1907 and as a translator, she and her Oxford professor husband, Gilbert Highet, traveled widely in Europe in the early thirties, viewing firsthand the rise of Nazism. At some point in those years he joined MI6, and served as a intelligence agent. The couple moved to New York in 1937 where he was part of a joint MI5, MI6, and SIS operation based in Rockefeller Center, to enlist America’s support in the war.

 MacInnes used her proximity to the clandestine world to create an insider’s view of how it is. A great traveler and brilliant researcher, she had a sharp eye for the telling detail. Her ability to paint a scene and use setting to convey emotion is peerless.

The playwright in North from Rome is hiding outside a Tuscan villa, preparing to rescue his lover from a conspiracy of Communist-linked smugglers. “Around him, the cicadas had become a permanent background of sound, no longer heard. The violence of brilliant light and black shadow, the contrast of scarlet flowers against blue sky, the heavy scent of sun-warmed fruit, the jagged rhythm of the yellow butterflies were no longer seen or felt. Nothing existed, nothing, except the silent house and the moving hand of his watch. Nine minutes now…”

Her characters are often ordinary people who become entangled in larger geopolitical forces. In another Cold War novel, Ride a Pale Horse, a journalist at a Prague peace conference ends up carrying top-secret documents from a potential defector to Washington. However, she soon learns there is a mole in the CIA.

Over her career, MacInnes wrote twenty-one espionage novels, of which four became movies. In one of them, Assignment in Brittany, a British man impersonates a French resistance fighter hospitalized in England in order to collect intelligence in a German-occupied Breton village. Just as the author was losing me that even the man’s mother is fooled, Madame confronts the hero in a sly twist—he is generous and brave, her son is not!

MacInnes has her flaws. Her work often feels overwritten with much annoying head-hopping, but her descriptions of the landscape are gorgeous and she uses the terrain to great effect in well-developed action scenes. Transporting a wireless transmitter,  the British hero and his young guide pass through a hidden passage in the ramparts of Mont St. Michel…“And then the narrow slab of rock moved slowly aside. The cool clean breeze from the sea ended the feeling of suffocation. In front of them was a panel of night sky, and the gentle movement of small trees swaying like black-shawled women at a funeral.” They are outside the great wall and will soon reach the north shore of the island. But the tide is rising and Nazis are everywhere.

The world is a dangerous place and Helen MacInnes takes full advantage of it.