Merle Nygate on Why Spy Fiction

The first realistic espionage stories I ever read was Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden short stories. The narrator, a writer, trails around the Italian lakes during inclement weather and visits agents who are supposed to be gathering information or intel as we like to call it now. The agents are feckless; they lie and they cheat and the work itself is tiring and often dull. To me, it felt real. It was real, Maugham was recruited to run agents during World War I.

Later, much later, I read Graham Greene’s The Human Factor and in the author’s notes Greene described how he wanted to write about spies with pensions. Again, that felt real. 

But although I have written multiple genres and mediums, everything from fantasy to factual comedy to drama. I felt unable to peruse ideas o ideas about espionage and betrayal with any semblance of confidence for a long little. I recognise that as a writer you ned to know where you're ready to realise a particular idea, believe that you have the experience and the skills to make what you have in your mind the best it can be. I was determined that if I was going to attempt to write a spy novel it would have to feel and as realistic as the espionage that I admired.

For many years that particular goal seemed a long way off until the ambition was reignited when I read. Tom Rob Smith's Child 44. Child 44 is set in Stalinist Russia and is written from the point of view of a NKVD agent who is morally compromised.

It's a brilliant book. The setting is the miserable post-war deprivation of 1950s Soviet Union. The characters are terrified of who will betray them and they are all desperately trying to survive. When I reached the end of the book, I read the author's biography and was astonished that the author had achieved this level of authenticity solely on the basis of research.

Child 44 was inspirational. 

I now needed a story. 

I decided to write about the Mossad, the Israeli version of MI6 for several reasons. Among them was that while I think The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is an almost perfect book and I’m a great admirer of the rest of the Smiley series, I felt that le Carré, in The Little Drummer Girl hadn’t written either Jews or women particularly well and it bothered me. I found the needy and neurotic Charlie irritating and the dour, brooding case officer hard to believe

Another reason for choosing Mossad was cowardice and expediency; I don’t think I could attempt to better what le Carré and Deighton wrote about Cold War British intelligence. Nor what Charles Beaumont does now for MI6 and what David McCloskey and I. S. Berry do for the CIA. There also aren’t many authors writing about the Mossad despite all the mystique about this particular intelligence service.

But I still didn’t have a story.

I read and re-read le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl. Then I moved to The Honourable Schoolboy, Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Then Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson series and as I was reading I was trying to identify what it was that I liked about the narratives, why they worked and why they didn’t. I also watched Homeland episodes back-to-back and The Americans. 

It was while I was noodling around on the CIA website looking for reviews of spy fiction books that I saw a mention of a non-fiction book called Gideon’s Spies by Gordon Thomas. 

I have since been told by those who apparently know that there are inaccuracies in the book but there are also plenty of facts. It was my lodestar. I went through the book in forensic detail; marked it up, made detailed notes and I extrapolated the information I needed for a second document. From that document I brainstormed and identified the different types of true stories in espionage. All the facts suggested story ideas. There were disinformation and recruitment operations that had rich story possibilities and, of course, the ubiquitous, ‘find the mole’ story. 

From the list I brainstormed 13 different scenarios ranging from moles, recruitment, assassination and disinformation 

That was the beginning of the Amiram series. After that, of course, it wrote itself!

Merle Nygate’s latest novel, The Protocols of Spying, is out now as a £10.99 paperback from No Exit Press, part of Bedford Square Publishers.

In the aftermath of Hamas's October 7th attack on Israel, Mossad's London station chief Eli Amiram is fighting battles on all fronts. When his ambitious rival plans an assassination on British soil - supposedly authorized by Trump supporters - Eli suspects a deeper conspiracy. Meanwhile, British intelligence asset Petra is hunting for redemption. Tasked with recruiting Wasim Al-Arikhi - whose sister she failed to save from becoming a suicide bomber - Petra's drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse. Can Wasim be trusted or has she become a target? As Eli and Petra's paths converge, they discover that in the shadow world of international espionage, the greatest threats often come from within. They must confront not just their enemies, but their own moral choices. A sophisticated spy thriller that weaves together tradecraft, betrayal and the human cost of intelligence work.

More information about the author and her work can be found on her website. You can find her on Facebook @merle.nygate and on X @merlenygate and on Instagram @mnygate