Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Bower’s book is a biography of Sir Dick White, who was the head of MI5 between 1953 and 1956 and of SIS [MI6] between 1956 and 1968. In other words, right the way through the trauma of the Cambridge spies: Old Etonians, gentlemen, hoodwinking the Establishment.
When you started out as an author, you weren’t initially planning to write about espionage. So why spies?
When I was 25 I was approached for a job by MI6. The experience that I had – which was brief but extremely interesting – was crying out to be dramatised. I had always wanted to write a novel, but up to that point I didn’t have a subject, I didn’t have a story.
Suddenly I had this thing fall into my lap. The first third of that first book [A Spy By Nature] is more or less an autobiographical account of what happened to me; the last two thirds, which is about industrial espionage in the oil business, is completely fictitious.
You must have had to do a lot of research. The first book you’ve chosen, The Perfect English Spy by Tom Bower, is a rather detailed biography. Was this a starting point?
That was a key part of the research for A Spy by Nature. Bower’s book is a biography of Sir Dick White, who was the head of MI5 between 1953 and 1956 and of SIS [MI6] between 1956 and 1968. In other words, right the way through the trauma of the Cambridge spies: Old Etonians, gentlemen, hoodwinking the Establishment.
What I was really interested in when I was starting A Spy by Nature was this notion of treachery. Do people in my generation still have that sense of loyalty to Queen and Country? Is there still a state to betray, a sense of patriotism in our blood?
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In the summer of 1995, Charles Cumming was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). A year later he moved to Montreal where he began working on a novel based on his experiences with MI6. His first book, A Spy By Nature, was published in the UK in 2001. His novel Typhoon, centred on the Uighur struggle for independence, was chosen by The New York Times as one of the Top 100 books of 2009. His latest book is The Trinity Six, a thriller about the Cambridge spies.
