'Is it spies or crime'? Why I'm trying to do both’ by Patrick Worrall

Talia in Waterstones Cambridge asked me an interesting question when I thrust a proof of my new book The Exile into her hands last week.

"Is it spies or crime?"

A bit of both, I replied. We need stories that can span both genres now. Because that's the world we live in, isn't it?

Look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I certainly did, when I was writing The Exile. It's the closest thing to a third world war that I've lived through.

If the Russian President was a fictional character, how would you write him? Sure, he's an ex-KGB officer. But we're a long way from the intellectual fencing match of the Cold War. 

Vladimir Putin likes "active measures", and he's not subtle about it. Recent aktivnye meropriyatiya include countless hacking operations, a bomb at an ammunition depot in the Czech Republic and a poison plot which left a civilian dead in Salisbury. 

He's also as keen on amassing personal wealth as he is on plotting intelligence exploits. So is Putin a politician, a spy chief or simply a thief and murderer?  Is it spies or crime?

What about Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man who almost unseated the boss? Oligarch? Military leader? Aspiring statesman? Perhaps - but Prigozhin was also a convicted gangster who swelled the ranks of his private army with recruits from the same kind of penal colonies he knew from the inside.

When the new Cold Warriors are ex-cons and their leaders are warlords who order bloody hits on their rivals, we've come a long way from cerebral MI6 men sniffing out Cambridge-educated moles. Intelligence work "rests on a kind of gentleness", said George Smiley. Not anymore.

The brazen, lawless quality of the Putin age was very much on my mind when I wrote The Exile. I mostly do historical novels, and my new book is largely set in France during the early 1950s - the closest analogue I could find to modern Russia.

The France of the Fourth Republic was a fading empire too, unsure of its place in a new world order and desperately trying to hang on to its rebellious colonies. Post-war France was hurting - and lashing out. Political violence is nothing new on the other side of the Channel, but the really astonishing thing was the level of collusion between various agencies of the state and organised crime, particularly the Corsican underworld.

I hadn't set out to write a crime thriller, but I couldn't do justice to the period without trying to get into the minds of the spivs, seductresses, con-artists, gunrunners and godfathers who got caught up in the secret war.

Espionage fiction is tough enough, with its geopolitics and tradecraft, its complex characters leading double lives. Crime writing has its own special demands too. To my mind, it's all about the dialogue. Is it authentic? Does it smell of the streets?

Why attempt to combine the two genres, if it's so hard to pull off? Because that's the world we have to deal with. The boundaries between state actors and criminal organisations are disappearing. High diplomacy and low lives are intertwined.

Writing fiction that reflects this reality is a worthy aim, I think, even if the books that emerge from the process end up being harder to categorize. 

It's certainly an idea that will keep me occupied for my next few novels. I hope you find them somewhere in good bookshops, although I'm not sure about the section.

 The Exile by Patrick Worrall is published by Bantam Press on 11th July at £16.99

It's 1951 and the servants of Stalin are closing in on the occupied nations of eastern Europe. As the Red Army tightens the net, Greta - best and bravest of freedom fighters - is told to escape to the West and undertake a dangerous mission. Greta's task is to find a missing girl: the precious daughter of a partisan general who was sent into exile in the final days of the war. But the so-called Free World is no place for vulnerable young refugees. Europe is in ruins, the old Empires are dying, and a spectacular cast of spivs, gangsters and rival intelligence agencies are fighting over the scraps. Crossing the Iron Curtain will require nerves of steel as Greta faces down the French mob, ex-Nazis, Soviet spies, all the glamour and temptation of Paris and ultimately, her own demons. The Exile is the stunning prequel to The Partisan, which introduced the world to the force of nature that is Greta. This is her white-knuckle ride into the black heart of post-war Europe - a terrifying world in which allies and enemies are impossible to tell apart.

Patrick Worrall can be found on “X” @paddyworrall