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.
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.
