Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Chapman Pincher is about 95, still alive, and has been a thorn in the side of the Establishment throughout his long career as a journalist. In the early 1980s, he published Their Trade is Treachery, in which he alleged that Sir Roger Hollis, who had been the head of MI5, was a Soviet agent. The book caused a great scandal when it was published.
The Chapman Pincher book, Their Trade is Treachery, is another nonfiction recommendation.
Chapman Pincher is about 95, still alive, and has been a thorn in the side of the Establishment throughout his long career as a journalist. In the early 1980s, he published Their Trade is Treachery in which he alleged that Sir Roger Hollis, who had been the head of MI5, was a Soviet agent. The book caused a great scandal when it was published. Most of Pincher’s information came from a man called Peter Wright, who wrote Spycatcher. Wright now has something of a reputation as a paranoid fantasist.
The recent official history of MI5, compiled by Professor Christopher Andrew, categorically states that Hollis was not in the pay of the Russians, but I think we’re never likely to know the truth, one way or another. The great problem about writing about spying – and this applies as much to fiction as it does to nonfiction – is that nobody has access to ‘the truth’. It’s a wilderness of mirrors, to use a well-worn phrase.
Why do you think people are so fascinated by spies?
For the same reason that they are interested in TV series about doctors and cops. These are perceived as glamorous, mysterious professions in which dramatic things happen all the time. Most people live pretty mundane lives, work in fairly mundane jobs: they don’t save lives, chase bad guys down the street, run agents behind enemy lines.
The fascination with spying also has something to do with James Bond. People grew up with the James Bond movies, so they think all spies carry gadgets and sleep with beautiful women, fly first class everywhere and eat anchovies on toast for breakfast.
I also believe that people have different masks, different faces that they put on, and there’s something in spy fiction that accesses that private, secret part of ourselves. The world of espionage fiction, with its lies and manipulations, is not so far removed from the lies and manipulations we are all guilty of, to a greater or lesser extent, in our own lives.
You’ve said that spying is not a glamorous career option. Presumably it has plenty of downsides – feelings of paranoia feature heavily in your books.
Did I say that? Somebody who was working for one of the intelligence agencies was helping me with the detail for one of my books and we happened to go to a football game. I tell this story only because it helps to illustrate how a professional intelligence officer thinks. I have a bad back – I’m 6ft 6in. About halfway through the game, I stood up and tilted backwards, to free the tension in my spine. My friend turned to me and said: ‘Are you sending a signal?’ Obviously she was joking, but that’s what jumped into her mind – there is no such thing a normal, ordinary behaviour in the mind of a spy. Everything has a double meaning.
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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.
