So, I’m reading up on the obligatory scenes in spy novels, in preparation for a book I am thinking of writing, and I stumble on this gem: How to Write Spy Novels, by Charles McCarry. I’ve loved his books for many years, especially The Tears of Autumn. Here’s how the article starts:

ALTHOUGH I’VE WRITTEN six novels in which some of the characters are spies, I’m not sure that I know what a “spy novel” is, or exactly how it is different from any other kind of novel. This fact became clear to me in 1973 when I turned in the manuscript of my novel “The Tears of Autumn.” My editor seemed to like it well enough, but the publisher did not. He summoned me to New York and, in his office high above lower Park Avenue, banged the manuscript on his desk.

“This book is talky, it’s slow, and nobody is going to believe a goddamn word of the plot,” he said. “Where’s the car chase? Where’s the torture scene? Where’s the sex? Where’s the good Russian? Do you call this a thriller?”

“No,” I said. He didn’t hear me.

Right off the bat: there are the obligatory scenes, and sure enough, the implied advice by a writer I admire to just skip them. Instead, this:

A novel is a collaboration between the writer and the reader, a strip of exposed film that must be developed in the consciousness of the reader. A piece of writing does not become a novel until this process takes place in the minds of many, many readers, who compare the characters and the imaginary world in which they live to their own experience of life, and in talking about the book to their friends become a part of its atmosphere.

He complains / explains that in fact, he doesn’t write spy novels, he simply writes novels in which the characters are spies. E.g.:

The elements of tradecraft that thrill us in books — cover stories, clandestine meetings, dead drops, telephone codes and so on — are techniques familiar to anyone who has ever covered a big story for a newspaper, negotiated a big contract against serious competition or conducted a clandestine love affair. Men and women who betray their spouses, a homely enough situation, often tell themselves that they are acting in a higher cause: true love. All traitors are alike.

and

Yet if the writer sets out to write what he believes, rather than what he knows, he is likely to produce propaganda…The novelist must see things as they are because his purpose is to record and illuminate human experience. The goal of politics is to alter human nature.

I find another article, Between the Real and the Believable, which contains this beauty:

Soon after this work appeared, I found myself at a dinner party in Northampton, Mass., seated next to an agitated feminist, who, like my unhappy character, was young and beautiful and a recent bride. Throughout dinner, she told me how much she hated the girl in the book, whose behavior she had found to be utterly unrealistic and an insult to women — “male chauvinist propaganda,” she called it.

I was not surprised by the onslaught. For a writer in America, going out to dinner is like living as an American in Europe: Total strangers think they can say anything they like to you. Still, I had trouble grasping the point. Why did a 1950s fictional character have to conform to an ideological model that had not yet been invented at the period in which the novel took place?

I asked my critic to tell me in plain English why she disliked and distrusted my character so. After a moment of angry silence the woman threw half a glass of California burgundy on my best gray suit and replied, “Because I used to be just like her!”

and

For a decade at the height of the Cold War, I worked abroad under cover as an intelligence agent. After I resigned, intending to spend the rest of my life writing fiction and knowing what tricks the mind can play when the gates are thrown wide open, as they are by the act of writing, between the imagination and that part of the brain in which information is stored, I took the precaution of writing a closely remembered narrative of my clandestine experiences. After correcting the manuscript, I burned it.

WOW. Can you imagine writing a book, then just casually burning it? He says he did it to get the real world out of his head, so he could proceed with inventing things; he strangely found that readers found the invented more believable than the real.

What I kept for my own use was the atmosphere of secret life: How it worked on the five senses and what it did to the heart and mind. All the rest went up in flames, setting me free henceforth to make it all up. In all important matters, such as the creation of characters and the invention of plots, with rare and minor exceptions, that is what I have done. And, as might be expected, when I have been weak enough to use something that really happened as an episode in a novel, it is that piece of scrap, buried in a landfill of the imaginary, readers invariably refuse to believe.

Just as often, however, irony prevails. A novel I wrote as a parable on hubris, entirely out of thin air, about the Kennedy assassination, has been passed from hand to hand like some sort of samizdat containing the inner mystery of the event. [Me: this is ‘The Tears of Autumn,’ one of my favorite, dare I say it, spy novels.] Not long ago, an old Washington hand, whom I had asked to read the galley proofs of my forthcoming novel about Washington and the management of a wholly fictitious constitutional crisis, phoned me in a dudgeon: “You’ve written about the way this town really is, and after looking into this mirror I’m not sure I want to go down to the office anymore.”

There you have it: write what you know, not what you believe, and don’t write a spy novel. Can’t wait to try this out.

I had a bit of a strange reading year. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve started writing, and much of my reading was to support my writing. As a result, I read dozens of Kindle samples of interesting books, evaluating their first chapters like chess openings. And then, unless they were really interesting, dropping them. The internet has broken my attention span…

The golden age of piracy and colonial Boston

My first work of fiction was published this year, The Shanty Man. It’s set during the Golden Age of Piracy and features an intrepid young female heroine. I have thoughts of expanding it to a novel. Colonial Boston is a rich vein to mine, and I’ve been reading about the era, particularly relating to pirates and Cotton Mather, a fascinating, contradictory, conflicted figure of the era. He was perhaps best known for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, but he was very heavily involved in ministering to convicted pirates. Perhaps more on that someday in another post.

The Life and Times of Cotton Mather by Kenneth Silverman is the Pulitzer prize winning go-to biography, which I’m in the middle of. Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown is a fun modern take on piracy.
Two good historical books on pirates: The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodard, and Pirates of New England by Gail Selinger. I read a smattering of other books on pirates but not enough to take credit for them this year. Bone Rattler by Eliot Pattison, is one of very few works of historical fiction I found about Colonial America that were not about the Salem witch trials, at least that looked interesting. I chipped away at Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, which I have been reading portions of on and off for a few years, not least because it contains interesting mentions of early Kanaka (native Hawaiian) sailors, a topic of interest to me as I live in Hawaii. Velvet Undercover by Teri Brown is a so-so spy novel with a 17-year-old heroine, the same age as the hero of my story The Shanty Man, which I read to see how other authors treat that age.

The medieval era

I’m putting the finishing touches on my novel of Richard the Lionheart, and so have been reading a good deal of medieval history over the last few years. These books are at the tail end of my deep dive into the medieval era. The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer is an invaluable dive into what real life was like for normal people in the medieval era. Alle Thyng Hath Tyme by Gillian Adler is an interesting exploration of time as perceived by those same people.

I’ve been reading Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550 by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari. That’s right, the author of the super-famous Sapiens was actually a medievalist before becoming a best-selling author of broad-based works on human history. His chapter on Conrad of Tyre’s assassination is highly informative, even though I’ve read a great deal about the incident before now. More here.

Also, did you know that T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, wrote his Ph.D. thesis on crusader castles? Crusader Castles. Really fun book. More here on my Richard the Lionheart substack

Robin Hood by Sean McGlynn is a romp through the history of, well, Robin Hood. Lastly, there’s thread of Macbeth running through my Richard novel, and I read it again this year.

Travel: Japan and Iceland

We also did a short trip to Iceland to see the northern lights, with some success. Along the way, I read Eyrbyggja Saga and the quirky Museum of Hidden Beings by Arngrimur Sigurdsson.

Historical fiction

I read a smattering of historical fiction this year. I re-read Ironfire by David Ball, a novel set during the 16th-century battle between Christians and Muslims over the island of Malta, and Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger, a novel set in Borgia Italy. The Bones of Paris by Laurie R. King is a jazz-age Paris mystery novel and good fun. The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood, is the story of Odysseus’s return home from Penelope’s perspective.

Book club, literary stuff

I only intermittently attended my book club this year, but some good reads came out of it. Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare is a collection of short stories by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, who is from Kaneohe, the town next to where I live in Hawaii. Sea People by Christina Thompson is a new history of Polynesian migration, exploring how Hawaii and the greater Pacific region came to be settled. Raven Leilani’s Luster was almost a pick for the book club this year, but I read it anyway. It’s funny, it’s sexy, it’s about a young woman invited into an open marriage, it’s about…well, you can look it up. At the other end of the spectrum, if you want a sometimes-disturbing glimpse into the mind of an older man, read the brilliant Jim Harrison’s The Great Leader.

Comfort food

I call the mystery, thriller, and spy novel genre “comfort food,” though it’s often not comfortable. But it’s usually straightforward entertainment. I particularly liked The Secret Hours by Mick Herron, about which I will say nothing because almost anything is a spoiler. If you like the TV series Slow Horses, read this book. Damascus Station by David McCloskey is particularly topical given the fall of Syria & Assad. A Shadow Intelligence by Oliver Harris was surprisingly good. The Charlemagne Pursuit by Steve Berry is exactly what you expect from a Steve Berry novel. Big Bear, Little Bear by David Brierley is a very good Le Carré cold war spy novel. Prince of Fire is a canonical Daniel Silva thriller with a lot of pointed commentary, implicit and explicit, about the Arab/Israeli conflict. I even read a spy romance: It Had to Be You by Eliza Jane Brazier.

Fantasy & Sci-Fi

I read less of this than I usually do. One of my favorite books of the year was Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs – it sucked me in from the first paragraphs and did not let go. The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan is an epic fantasy with judges and lawyers – seriously. Much better than it sounds. There is violence and magic 🙂

Foundry by Eliot Peper was a really fun and short novel that has chip manufacturing and our rather alarming dependence on Taiwan at its foundation. I paired it with a re-read of Count Zero by William Gibson, which I seem to re-read almost yearly. Mickey7 by Edward Ashton was fun and in the zone of Artemis or The Martian by Andy Weir.

Well, there you have it. I read a lot, but honestly, there were few super-standouts this year. I guess my standouts are Ink Blood Sister Scribe, My Effin’ Life, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, The Secret Hours, and The Great Leader.

Oh: Rush is probably my favorite band, and I read last year’s Christmas present, Geddy Lee’s biography My Effin’ Life. If you have the faintest interest in Rush, get it.

41 books by my count, vs. 47 last year…