The best books on how people become spies

The Night of Wenceslas was the first thriller I read. I was in my teens, and into reading poetry at the time. My parents knew the author—we had even spent Boxing Day together—so Lionel Davidson was the first real novelist I met in person and I remember being excited to read this book.

The protagonist, Nicholas Whistler is young, half English and half Czechoslovakian. He hates working in his father’s business and is in debt because of his dissolute lifestyle. As a way out of his problems, he is lured into carrying out a mission in Prague and finds he has been duped into becoming an unwitting spy.

This book did not stop me from reading poetry—but spurred me to read much more widely.

I read Eric Amber when I was young, and again when I was invited to take part in Andrew Marr’s BBC4 documentary Sleuths, Spies and Sorcerers.

Ambler’s books have no heroes or jingoism. He revolutionized spy fiction by injecting realism. He portrays the chaos of Europe in the 1930s, with people trying to survive without papers. In Epitaph for a Spy, Josef Vadassy, a Hungarian refugee, has become stateless after the Treaty of Trianon. In France, he is arrested for spying because of a mix-up with camera film. He is told to find the real spy or be deported, which could mean death. He is left with no choice but to become a spy.

Ambler said that he wanted to write “credible and literate spy fiction.” He amply succeeded in this.

Lawton and I both write novels about the post-WWII period and have had great conversations on author panels. The protagonist of Then We Take Berlin, Joe Wilderness, is something of a picaresque anti-hero. His mother died in a bomb attack, his abusive father basically abandoned him, so Joe survives as a petty thief, works the black market, and reads everything in his local library. Called up for National Service, his total lack of respect for rules lands him in military prison—and MI6 offers him a way out. So begins his career as a spy. Set in two timeframes, I particularly enjoyed Lawton’s portrayal of Wilderness’s chameleon-like powers of adaptation and his struggle to reconcile his private life, married to his boss’s daughter, and his undercover persona as a spy.

BOX 88 is a thoroughly modern-day spy story set in two timeframes. Lachlan (‘Lockie’) Kite, the protagonist, is poles apart from Lawton’s Joe Wilderness. An apparently chance meeting at the funeral of an old school friend leads him to be abducted. Flashback 30 years, and we see how he was recruited to a secret cell of intelligence operatives (Box 88) when barely out of his upper-class boarding school. He is trained and asked to undergo a mission while spending the summer at the house of a school friend in France. While there, he falls heavily in love, and somehow manages to carry out his mission—albeit with devastating consequences. This portrayal of an intelligent young man growing up feels real and is beautifully handled. The start of a great series.

Javier Marías, who died recently, is a mesmerising writer. I lived in Spain for many years and have read most of his books. I recommend reading A Heart So White to start, but here, Berta Isla is perfect. This book introduces Tomás Nevinson, who is Anglo-Spanish. While studying at Oxford, he declines an offer to join MI6. He is then accused of murder—a ruse to oblige him to become an infiltrator. Now married to Berta in Madrid, he officially works for the embassy, but travels frequently on undercover missions, while Berta and their children find it difficult to accept his long, unexplained absences.

The book is an exploration of deception, betrayal, loyalty, identity, how a person becomes a spy, and how this impacts personal life.

I shall miss him.