EDWARD WILSON

The author of spy thrillers reveals the five books that have underlined his method of operations

Edward Wilson immigrated to the UK from America after serving in the Vietnam War. After his teaching career ended, he became the author of eight highly acclaimed books, including the Catesby spy thrillers as well as standalones.

‘Portrait of the Spy as a Young Man is my seventh novel in the Catesby series. Even though it is a coming-of-age prequel, it is also a memoir that Catesby recounts to his history professor granddaughter. I had to go back to Catesby as a young man because I was running out of road. The previous book, South Atlantic Requiem, saw a bitter and disillusioned Catesby taking early retirement at the age of sixty. I also wanted to write about his experiences as an SOE officer parachuted into occupied France. I could, in part, relate it to my own experience as a Special Forces officer who was trained in the late 1960s to be dropped behind Soviet lines in Eastern Europe – but they sent us to Vietnam instead.

‘With the possible exceptions of psychopaths and serial killers, writers are the worst people to live with. At least, I am. I work every day and hate going on holiday – and, when I do, the laptop comes with me. A lot of my work involves research. I buy twenty or more books for each novel I write – and I have to buy them because I cover the pages with notes and underlining.

The most enjoyable and best research is talking to people who were personally involved in the events I fictionalise. If they are not alive, I love reading their memoirs or letters. When I actually get stuck into the book itself, I become absolutely unbearable. I only stop for exercise and food – and maybe a bit of fly-fishing.

‘The best piece of writing advice I ever had came from Phyllis (PD) James. Although her plots are wonderful, Phyllis insisted that characters should always come first and she was right. We all remember Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe – and even the socks he wears – but who remembers the plots?’

Wilson was published in October by Arcadia Books

A Portrait of the Spy as a Young Man

‘The best spy novel ever written. Le Carré’s masterpiece, in fact, created the modern spy genre. In earlier spy fiction, the lines between good and bad were, in general, clearly drawn. The

Spy Who Came in from the Cold blurs those lines – and, at times, tears them up completely. The intelligence services operate in a moral void where the good and the innocent can be exploited and sacrificed. In my latest novel, I pose the question that SOE agents may have been betrayed to trick the Germans into thinking that the allied invasion was scheduled for the Pas de Calais in 1943. A cynical ruse, but, if it shortened the war by keeping German divisions away from the Eastern Front, it was well worth a handful of lives.

‘Le Carré’s novel also introduces the idea of the fake defector – a device that can wreak paranoid havoc in a foreign intelligence service. I’m not convinced that every Soviet defector to the West was the real thing – and even the genuine ones may have passed on false or exaggerated information to big themselves up.

‘Although le Carré denies it, I think that three of the characters in his book are based on real people. The East German spy chiefs, Mundt and Fiedler, bear uncanny resemblances to Stasi bosses Erich Mielke and Markus Wolf. Could the novel have been a real life MI6 ploy to cast suspicion on them? There are also many resemblances between Alec Leamas and double agent George Blake – a real defector still alive in Moscow aged 98.’ ‘If WG ‘Max’ Sebald had not died in a car crash at the age of 57, he would have won the Nobel Prize for literature. I owe a lot to him personally. If Max hadn’t read a manuscript of my debut novel and given me a lovely quote I am not sure I would ever have found a publisher.

‘Max’s home, an architecturally perfect 18th rectory near Norwich, suggested an intense interest, rather than a reverence, for the past. Like his home, The Rings of Saturn is about historical reflection. During a walking tour through coastal Suffolk, Max finds the ghosts of fellow East Anglian migrants woven into the countryside: Joseph Conrad arriving in Lowestoft, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand fleeing the French Revolution, the Huguenot silk weavers forced into exile by the 1598 Edict of Nantes – and Major George Wyndham Le Strange who served in the tank unit that liberated the concentration camp at Belsen. Except that, unlike Conrad and Chateaubriand, the eccentric Major Le Strange never existed. Born in Germany in the last year of the war, Max may have been trying to deal with ghosts of his own. As a troubled Vietnam veteran, I was unable to settle until I found Suffolk – where I’ve now lived for 45 years. Threads of silk entangling memory and history is the main image of Max’s book. The magnetism of Suffolk certainly draws writers and artists, but it also drew nuclear scientists. The stark ruins of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Orford Ness show that the darkness of history is also entangled in Suffolk’s web.’ ‘I discovered this book while researching my fifth novel, The Whitehall Mandarin. Miranda Carter’s book is not just a fascinating biography of Blunt, but also a study of the refined and rarefied world in which the arthistorian spy lived and worked. Blunt’s world was a place where art, power, wealth and espionage formed a heady cocktail of privilege. The Cambridge spy ring were thoroughly upperclass – a sort of left-wing Bullingdon Club. The question of social class adds a complex layer to this spy story. Were Blunt and the others treated differently because they were part of the ruling class elite? Novelists who attempt to deal with these sensitive issues will soon find that they are writing literary fiction rather than spy thrillers. One is drawn to empathy as well as condemnation. To understand the Cambridge gang one must also understand the 1930s and the genuine idealism that prompted so many writers and intellectuals to fight fascism. The Spanish Civil War was a rallying cry for them to become men of action.

For some, that rallying cry would take other forms. Carter quotes from a

1937 article that Blunt wrote for the Spectator: “In the face of Fascism it is no use in just throwing up one’s hands and crying horror; the only hope is to organise defence against the enemy.” After his 1979 exposure, the press immediately pounced condemning Blunt as a “pansy aesthete” and a “treacherous Communist poof ”. I hope my readers are not so quick to judge.’