I've loved thrillers and spy stories since I was a kid. It's probably not a bad rule of thumb to write the kinds of stories you love to read.
It's a thrilling world, and people really like stories about secrets, which is the essence of a spy drama.
Spy plots are hard, really hard.
I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.
My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.
I am indeed a fan of John le Carre's novels.
I've always had a great affection for espionage stories. I like weaving them, and I like thrillers.
Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.
Now I basically just read spy stories because they're about solving a puzzle within the constraints of history. It's the tick tock, the clockwork that I'm interested in.
Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
Out of every 10 scripts I get sent, seven are fairly generic about an American guy who gets the girl and is involved in underground espionage activity.
I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest.
I always liked spy stories.
I've always loved spy stories. Who can resist?
When I think of a story, somehow it just always seems to come out involving spooks and spies and government skullduggery.
I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
Young people looking for adventure fiction now generally turn to fantasy, but for those of a certain age, the spy thriller has long been the escape reading of choice.
Look realistically at espionage thrillers again. They're not only alive, readers are excited about them.
War stories, westerns, spy stories are all accepted as respectable because they are read by men. It is only women's light reading which is derided.
