David McCloskey on The Persian

I’d originally envisioned my new novel, The Persian, to be about a joint CIA-Mossad operation in Iran, but as I tinkered with that it became clear that the more daring and, importantly, kinetic the operation became, the less likely it was that CIA would be involved. For example, when Mossad ran a targeted killing program aimed at Iranian nuclear scientists, the CIA stayed out of the fray. Most often CIA did not even know these operations were underway.

So this just wasn’t a CIA story. In fact, I was beginning to feel the CIA might not have a role in it at all. This was a novel about the secret shadow war playing out between the intelligence services of Israel and Iran. Why complicate it by injecting an inauthentic American presence? So the CIA went by the wayside for this novel, and what emerged was a rich tapestry of Israelis and Iranians, all of whom are in desperate conflict, all of whom think they are doing what’s best for their families and their countries. 

My starting point is always to get the setting right, and then let the characters and plotlines grow from there. When I began writing The Persian, I tried to nail the current dynamics of the Israel-Iran relationship and how their intelligence services fight in secret. Where might the plot take me from there? I hope this approach gives the book a dose of authenticity and the ability to speak to something true in the present, wherever the headlines may go. 

My principal characters in The Persian – as in my other novels – are intelligence officers and agents, so to depict them authentically I need to deal authentically with their craft, which means getting the tradecraft right, whatever the geopolitical or technological environment. This involves a lot of research. It means drawing on my experience working for the CIA, certainly, including in Stations around the Middle East. It means extensive time spent interviewing former case officers and CIA Chiefs of Station. Discussions with former Mossad officers. A lot of time spent with Iranians. Sessions with former Delta Force operators about special operations and asymmetric warfare. Studying technical drawings and specs for next generation UAVs. Even sitting for a week-long course on what we call the ‘Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance’ environment – how tradecraft can be adapted to operate in a world of phones, cameras, sensors, biometrics, cheap data storage, and AI-powered analytic tools. It’s fun, it’s a lot of work, and it’s all in service of the characters. 

In some ways you might think a dentist, Kamran Esfahani, a Persian Jew living out a dreary existence in Stockholm is an unlikely main character for a spy novel. He’s not an intelligence officer, and he’s certainly not a character in the mould of the Hollywood Superhero Spy. But he’s exactly the sort of person who might get a look from an intelligence service such as the Mossad, because he can move in and out of Iran, fly under the radar (he’s a dentist, after all), and, at a deeper level, he’s got cracks in his heart and soul that make him a viable recruitment target. He’s a dentist, but he’s the perfect dentist to turn into a productive support asset. He’s exactly the sort of nondescript but fascinating player who’s rolling the dice in the spy game. Spies can have a loose relationship with the truth, and Kam’s confession is written in the first person for exactly this reason: he’s been keeping a secret. Throughout the novel we wonder if he is being truthful, or if he’s lying, or if he is plying the borderlands between.

I’m often asked how research for my novels and for The Rest is Classified podcast, which I do with Gordon Corera, inform one another? Because I am attempting to write authentic espionage novels, and because the podcast deals with true spy stories, the two streams are complementary. In particular, I’ve found that the podcast provides a great deal of grist for the novels, everything from ideas for characters, to tradecraft, to the spytech. Turns out the real world of espionage contains a host of wild stories a spy novelist might draw from. 

And I draw inspiration from other writers. I’m a longtime reader of the espionage genre, so the list is long. Le Carré of course. Charles McCarry (who I consider the American answer to le Carré). Graham Greene. David Ignatius, Jason Matthews, Daniel Silva, Tom Clancy, Martin Cruz Smith (though he’s perhaps more of a mystery / crime writer). Dozens of others. Outside the genre the list is even longer, but one of the writers is Quentin Tarantino. I like stories that accelerate madly toward the end, and that usually go out with a bang.

And finally, for those of you worried about Artemis Aphrodite Procter, CIA case officer, five foot ball of ruthless spy craft and inspired profanity, and feature of my first three novels, do not fear. She will return. Her adventures are far from over though, though she may need to dial down her drinking if she wants to stay healthy enough to keep having them…

The Persian by David McCloskey.(Swift Press)

What happens when a spy is forced to reckon with the consequences of his deception? Kamran Esfahani, a Persian Jewish dentist from Stockholm, dreams of starting afresh in California. To finance his new life, he agrees to spy for Mossad in Iran, working with a clandestine unit tasked with sowing chaos and sabotage inside the country. When he’s captured by Iranian security forces, Kamran is compelled to confess his experiences as a spy, in a testimonial dealing not only with the security of nations, but also with revenge, deceit, and the power of love and forgiveness in a world of lies. Mixing suspense with strikingly cinematic action, David McCloskey takes readers deep into the shadow war between Iran and Israel, delivering propulsive storytelling and riveting tradecraft.

David McCloskey's new novel The Persian is published as a £20 hardback on 29 January by Swift Press.

More information about David McCloskey and his books can be found on his website. He can also be found on Facebook, on X, Instagram and Tik Tok @mccloskeybooks, 

David is also co-hosts The Rest is Classified Podcast.

 

Forthcoming books from Swift Press

The Persian by David McCloskey Kamran Esfahani, a Persian Jewish dentist from Stockholm, dreams of starting afresh in California. To finance his new life, he agrees to spy for Mossad in Iran, working with a clandestine unit tasked with sowing chaos and sabotage inside the country. When he's captured by Iranian security forces, Kamran is compelled to confess his experiences as a spy, in a testimonial dealing not only with the security of nations, but also with revenge, deceit, and the power of love and forgiveness in a world of lies. Mixing suspense with strikingly cinematic action, David McCloskey takes readers deep into the shadow war between Iran and Israel, delivering propulsive storytelling and riveting tradecraft.

In post-war Oxford, secrets lie behind every door. In 1947, with rationing still biting and the black market thriving, university don C.S. ‘Jack’ Lewis finds himself pulled into a mystery straight from one of his friend Dorothy Sayers’ novels. Susan Temple, his brightest student, has hidden herself away at Rake Hall — a hostel for unmarried, outcast mothers – and hasn’t been heard from since. With no experience beyond catching the occasional student plagiarist, Lewis is hardly a detective. But when Susan’s absence continues to haunt him, he teams up with her concerned friend Lucy and together they delve into the disturbing rumours of a nasty racket at Rake Hall. Can Lewis’s nose for the truth separate fact from fiction? The Mystery at Rake Hall is by Maureen Paton.

Presumed Guilty is by Scott Turow. In a sequel to Presumed Innocent, the book that redefined the legal thriller, judge and lawyer Rusty Sabich returns to the courtroom to defend his step-son against a racially-charged murder indictment as the boy’s life – and perhaps Rusty’s last chance at happiness – hang in the balance. Rusty is a retired judge attempting a third act in life with a loving soon-to-be wife, Bea, with whom he shares both a restful home on an idyllic lake in the rural Midwest and a plaintive hope that this marriage will be his best, and his last. But the peace that’s taken Rusty so long to find evaporates when Bea’s young adult son, Aaron, living under their supervision while on probation for drug possession, disappears. If Aaron doesn’t return soon, he will be sent back to jail. Aaron eventually turns up with a vague story about a camping trip with his troubled girlfriend, Mae, that ended in a fight and a long hitchhike home. Days later, when she still hasn’t returned, suspicion falls on Aaron, and when Mae is subsequently discovered dead, Aaron is arrested and set for trial on charges of first degree murder. Faced with few choices and even fewer hopes, Bea begs Rusty to return to court one last time, to defend her son and to save their last best hope for happiness. For Rusty, the question is not whether to defend Aaron, or whether the boy is in fact innocent – it’s whether the system to which he has devoted his life can ever provide true justice for those who are presumed guilty.

Write What you ...by Sofia Slater

The conventional advice to writers is Write what you know. That doesn’t always work with crime. I’m glad to say I couldn’t follow it for my book, Auld Acquaintance, because I’ve never been trapped on an island with a murderer. But the next best piece of advice I know is Write the kind of book you want to read. And that’s what I did with Auld Acquaintance. 

It's good advice for one reason above all: motivation. Even a short novel is a long project, so it takes some sticking to. It’s hard to keep working on something you don’t like. Like it and, just maybe, you’ll want to be at your desk every day slogging it out against the empty page.

There’s another reason this advice comes up so often. Sometimes you have to write what you want to read because you can’t find it out there by someone else. I was after that too. Crime comes in so many flavours, and there are masterly examples of each sub-genre. But certain strains tend to dominate at any one time, and before I started writing, I’d found myself longing for a kind of book that had dropped out of fashion. Not cosy crime exactly, but what you might call hygge crime: the kind of comfort you can only get in a properly dark winter.

On the one hand, there’s crime so cosy it could keep your tea warm. You know how it goes: an elderly but mentally undimmed protagonist (I love Miss Marple, but she has too many heirs), characters with faintly silly names, a Home Counties village, perhaps a celebrity author, often the presence of cats. Crime with the aesthetic of a chocolate box, only there’s a corpse behind the cottage door.

Then there’s the hard stuff, inspired-by-if-not-actually-Scandi-noir. Every detective an alcoholic estranged from their children, every criminal a child molester or human trafficker, every corpse missing a limb or gouged somewhere. And every relationship proved to be hollow: a lie, a sinister fabrication that ultimately only highlights the terrible and universal isolation of humanity. Particularly our detective, whose only friend is a half-empty glass of aquavit. 

Although I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of these books, I’ve often put them down with a feeling that something was missing. For me, the peak of crime as a genre is still to be found with the Golden Age novelists writing in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century: Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and their brethren.

What these writers manage beautifully is a balance of elements which have since been separated and concentrated by the workings of the market. The Golden Age writers knew that while true evil does lurk under the sun, when we’re not fighting it we want to drink, dance, eat well and enjoy each other’s company. Their novels manage to communicate both the dark heart of existence, and the trust and affection that still flourish around it – without slipping into either tweeness or bleakness. 

Christie is, of course, the reference point for so many cosy crime practitioners, but what inspired me while writing Auld Acquaintance was the way she creates a reassuring rhythm of cocktail parties, country houses, and dressing for dinner only in order to disrupt it. It’s a trick that shows civilisation up not as a lie but a defence mechanism. Her books are simultaneously completely reassuring and genuinely chilling. Think of the sudden swerve into darkness caused by the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl in the apple-bobbing tub at the beginning of Hallowe’en Party – not even one of Christie’s best. She never forgets the price to be paid for the cosiness we like to enjoy.

It is Tey, though, who remains my favourite crime novelist. She is the mistress of the slowly building sense that something’s wrong. Her detective, Alan Grant, has quite a nice life, really: full of friendships and genial colleagues, even if he struggles with the occasional bout of claustrophobia or a broken back. Yet, time and time again, he finds himself preoccupied by a flaw in his surroundings, something that seems minor at first, then shifts and grows, a kink in the mirror reflecting life which soon becomes all he can see. This approach – subtle disquiet developing into obsession – reaches an almost experimental acme in The Daughter of Time, a book in which nothing happens at all. An injured and bed-bound Grant, left with nothing else to do, lies in hospital thinking through the story of Richard III and the murdered Princes in the Tower, and decides that history has enacted a miscarriage of justice. It's gripping and brilliant, without the central character even leaving his bed.

In the end, the best crime novels are good for the same reason Shakespeare is. Even if we see it as entertainment rather than high art, all the best tragedies have comedy mixed into them. Life is not cosy, but nor is it unrelenting in the suffering it causes. Crime is, like life, an ironic genre. That’s what I tried to keep in mind when writing Auld Acquaintance: somewhere there’s a fireside and a jumper worth getting back to, on the other side of all these bodies. If there wasn’t, I for one, wouldn’t want to read it. 

Sofia Slater is the debut author of Auld Acquaintance (£12.99, Swift Press)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot. And never brought to mind? Millie Partridge desperately needs a party. So, when her (handsome and charming) ex-colleague Nick invites her to a Hebridean Island for New Year’s Eve, she books her ticket North. But things go wrong the moment the ferry drops her off. The stately home is more down at heel than Downton Abbey. Nick hasn’t arrived yet. And the other revellers? Politely, they aren’t exactly who she would have pictured Nick would be friends with. Worse still, an old acquaintance from Millie’s past has been invited, too. Penny Maybury. Millie and Nick’s old colleague. Somebody Millie would rather have forgotten about. Somebody, in fact, that Millie has been trying very hard to forget. Waking up on New Year’s Eve, Penny is missing. A tragic accident? Or something more sinister? With a storm washing in from the Atlantic, nobody will be able reach the group before they find out. One thing is for sure – they’re going to see in the new year with a bang.

Anne Mette Hancock interviewed about The Corpse Flower…

 

When and how did the idea for "The Corpse Flower" originate?

The idea originated a few years ago in a small town in the South of France, the same town that I lived in as a child and where I have spent every summer since. One day, I was at the market square, and I was watching this brisk-looking guy feeding a kid goat with a feeding bottle while my children were standing around and petting the animal. As I was standing there, I suddenly noticed this woman sitting at a café across the street. She stared at me, and I could see in her eyes that she recognized me from somewhere without being able to put her finger on it. It turned out to be an acquaintance from my childhood, but for some reason, the look on her face made me think of the opening scene of a crime novel: A woman on the run is recognized in a small town in France and immediately flees the scene. That evening I wrote the opening scene for "The Corpse Flower". The plot then marinated in my thoughts for a long time before I wrote the rest of the book, and by then the two main characters, journalist Heloise Kaldan and homicide detective Erik Schäfer, were born.

How did you come up with the title "The Corpse Flower"?

A few months into the writing process, I saw a documentary about corpse flowers on the National Geographic channel and was wildly fascinated by the phenomenon. A cunning plant that smells like death? How wonderfully disgusting and exciting at the same time. I knew that I had to incorporate this Frankenstein-like plant in the story and I thought that it would make for a good title, too.

Many crime novels tend to have the protagonists solving crimes on their own, without much input from the police, who are usually incompetent, corrupt or just hostile. And then there are often journalists as secondary characters in police procedurals. But towards the end of The Corpse Flower, Kalden and Schäfer are working as a team, which is quite unusual. Will they be doing so in future novels?

Well, I suppose it is a rather unusual set-up, but like my main character, Heloise, I am a journalist, so it was natural for me to write about someone in that line of work. And in a crime novel you naturally have to include the police to some degree. But to me, the most unusual thing about this particular duo, is Schäfer’s character. In most of the crime novels I’ve read, the homicide detectives always have some kind of darkness or a deep struggle within, like a substance abuse problem, a failed marriage, strained relationships with their children, etc. I wanted to introduce a different type of detective; someone who is happily married, well functioning in life and good at his job, and I liked the idea of him and Heloise forming a friendship of sorts. It’s true that they sometimes work together and in some cases share information, and they’ll continue to do so throughout the series, but they are also very aware of the fact that he is a policeman, and she is a reporter. They certainly don’t always keep each other in the loop.

The Corpse Flower by Anne Mette Hancock is published by Swift Press, £12.99 hardback.

Danish journalist Heloise Kaldan is in the middle of a nightmare. One of her sources has been caught lying, and she could lose her job over it. And then she receives the first in a series of cryptic letters from an alleged killer. Anna Kiel is wanted for murder but hasn't been seen by anyone in three years. When the reporter who first wrote about the case is found murdered in his apartment, detective Erik Schafer comes up with the first lead. Has Anna Kiel struck again? If so, why does every clue point directly to Heloise Kaldan? As Heloise starts digging deeper she realises that to tell Anna's story she will have to revisit her darkest past, and confront the one person she swore she'd never see again...

Book Review: Blood in the Water by Silver Donald Cameron - Reviewed by Jon Morgan

Rural Nova Scotia – The Isle Madame. A community dependent for its livelihood on the lobsters from around its coast. A maverick individual, Philip Boudreau, who is into all sorts of petty crime, some inconsequential, some committed for gain, some out of malice.  

Opinions are divided on Boudreau whom, it appears, occasionally has a generous streak as well as being a massive pain in the posterior. Add to this a generally less than competent police service in the RCMP and there is the back story of mounting community tensions caused by one man’s attacks on the source of his neighbours’ income which leads inevitably to tragedy. 

The tragedy, then is the spine of the story. Boudreau’s death, supposedly murder and his missing body, supposedly dropped into the deep attached to an anchor, leads to the arrest and trial of those apparently responsible and in this book an absolutely minute (and often very tedious and confusing) examination of the daily lives of this community. 

The murder is sparked by Boudreau apparently cutting more lobster lines thus causing economic loss and the victims of his actions taking what may be deemed a long overdue revenge, ramming his boat, shooting at him and finally dragging him along behind their own boat, before consigning him to Davy Jones’ locker. 

It is the minutiae of the story that mainly causes me the problem in this book. It is an interesting story and one which does need the back-story elucidated, but not, perhaps in the way it has been done. It veers off into inconsequential details of for example and amongst others, Catholic priests and child abuse, which if they were germane to the narrative would be appropriate. They are not.  

The books lies somewhere between a simple narrative account of the crime committed (and the police investigation leading to changing stories from the accused and the subsequent trials of two of the three people), and an academic treatise on economic and societal pressures on the Nova Scotians via a critique of the local criminal justice system. It does not seem to know what it wants to be, and whilst I waded through it, at the end, I could not really tell either.

Published by Swift Press

Publication date 6/5/2021

Paperback. 244 Pages

ISBN: 9781800750241

Price: £12.99