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I
first met Charles Cumming in New York at ThrillerFest
in 2007. His name had been brought to my attention by fellow spy novel
enthusiasts as one to definitely read. At that time, and much to my
shame, I
hadn’t read any of his titles.
Well, a
few drinks later I said I was going to rectify this. And I have
– you can read
my review of his new book, TYPHOON.
Charles
was born in Ayr, Scotland in 1971. He was educated at Eton and graduated from the University of Edinburgh with First Class Honours in English Literature
in 1994. He is a
contributing editor of The
Week magazine, and
occasionally writes book reviews for The Mail on Sunday.
In
the summer of 1995, Charles was
approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). A year later he moved to Montreal where he began
working on a novel based on his experiences with MI6. A
Spy By Nature was bought in a two-book deal by
Penguin in
1999.
In
2001, Charles moved to Madrid with his wife.
His second novel, The
Hidden Man, was published
in the summer of 2003. A sequel to A Spy By Nature, entitled The Spanish Game,
was published in 2006.
Meanwhile,
film rights to A
Spy By Nature have been bought by Kudos,
producers of the
acclaimed BBC series Spooks
– Mike
Stotter.
In the summer of
2005, shortly after I had finished working on my third novel, The Spanish Game, I was a guest at a
drinks party in Penguin’s headquarters on the Strand when I
found myself talking to a very
senior figure in the company.
“What are you
going to write next?” he asked.
I replied that I
had an idea for a kidnap drama set in Colombia. His face
took on a strange colour and he
began shaking his head.
“Colombia? Nobody is
interested in novels set in South America.”
We were in a conference room on the 8th
floor. He turned to the window and gestured towards the London skyline.
“These are heated political
times,” he said. “You’re one of only two
or three British spy novelists who
write about contemporary events. You should be doing a book about Iraq, about the
Hutton inquiry, about how MI6
and the CIA are dealing with the War on Terror.”
At first, I was frustrated.
My South American story was all set to go. I felt it would be a great
read. But
the big cheese was right. This wasn’t the time to be writing
a book about FARC
(Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia). However, I wasn’t
particularly
interested in spending two years of my life writing about Iraq, either.
There were practical reasons for
this, not least that my wife had recently given birth to our first
child and I
reckoned it would be unwise to head off into a war zone on a
life-threatening
research trip. The publishing world also seemed weighed down by books
about Iraq and
al-Qaeda. So what to do? How could I
come up with a story that would tackle the major issues of the day,
without
dealing directly and explicity with what was happening in Basra, Kabul and Baghdad?
The answer was China. At that
point, the British press seemed
to be running more and more articles about the Chinese economic
miracle. The
Middle Kingdom was clearly becoming The Next Big Thing and, of course,
the
Olympic Games were just around the corner. Slowly an idea began to form
in my
mind. What about a thriller which began in Hong Kong in 1997, on
the eve of the handover of power to Beijing?
Thematically this was promising: losing Hong Kong was the
final sunset of the British
Empire. But I also
wanted to write a book set in
either Beijing or Shanghai, cities
which I had longed to visit. With
that in mind, I applied for my visa and booked a flight. The trip would
take
two and a half weeks, beginning in the Chinese capital, taking in Shanghai and
Shenzhen, and winding up in Hong Kong. By the
time I returned home, I hoped
that I would have my story.
In Beijing, I was very
fortunate to be introduced to
Oliver August, who was then the Chinese correspondent for The Times. Beside a polluted municipal
lake in the heat of the
afternoon, I told him that I was struggling to find a way of making China interesting
and relevant to western
readers. China in the 21st
century is all
about money: the making of it, the spending of it, the corruption that
money
engenders. And money isn’t a particularly interesting subject
for a novel. Who
cares about a guy whose just trying to get rich? Besides, there were
any number
of wonderful books about American and European businessmen who had come
to China in search
of their fortune and ended up with
badly burned fingers. Why write another one?
It was Oliver who
pointed me towards Xinjiang. “Beijing’s
greatest fear,” he said, “is losing the
territorial integrity of China.
That’s why it’s so paranoid about Taiwan and Tibet. They will
do anything to keep China
together.” I discovered that roughly half
of the population of Xinjiang was Uighur-Muslim, which chimed with the
debate
about Islam raging in the West. From this flowed the idea of an
American-sponsored coup d’etat in the region. If Bush and
Cheney and Rumsfeld
were prepared to land-grab Iraq in order to
get their hands on Saddam’s
oil, it followed, at least in a metaphorical sense, that they might be
interested in getting their hands on Xinjiang. I had my story.
Two other factors
came into play. In November, a glossy magazine sent me to southern Africa to write a
travel piece about Namibia. In the
evenings I was reading John le
Carré’s The Constant
Gardener and,
inspired by this, set myself the task of writing a spy novel that was
also a
love story; a political thriller that was about a real and pressing
contemporary issue. Where le Carré had written about corrupt
pharmaceutical
companies, I would concentrate on the extreme human rights abuses
perpetrated
against Uighurs in China.
Now all I needed
were my central characters. In my Alec Milius novels, A
Spy by Nature and The
Spanish Game, the so-called Special Relationship between America and the United
Kingdom had played
a central thematic role. It would
be the same with Typhoon: I wanted
to
find a way of dramatising the relationship between the Blair government
and the
Bush administration. Thus Miles Coolidge was born. A brash,
charismatic,
reckless CIA officer, described as “the American of your
dreams and nightmares”,
Miles became the face of neo-conservative America in the age
of al-Qaeda. His antagonist
would be Joe Lennox, a more cerebral, contemplative British spy under
deep
cover in Hong Kong. Over the
course of the book, Joe and
Miles would become friends and fight over Joe’s girlfriend,
the mysterious Isabella
Aubert.
One other thing
to mention. Many people who had read The Spanish Game had commented on
how unsympathetic
they had found Alec Milius. He was too self-involved, too manipulative
and cold
for some tastes. With Joe, I wanted to set myself the challenge of
writing a
male character who was the deliberate opposite of Alec: noble,
patriotic,
selfless – and certainly more intelligent.
So now all I had
to do was find a way into the story. I had once had a conversation with
a
family friend, Peter, who had served as a commander of the Gurkhas in Hong Kong in the
1970s. He had told me the
extraordinary true story of a Chinese academic who had swum from
mainland China across
Starling Inlet in the dead of
night in an attempt to defect to British-controlled Hong Kong. Spotted by
a young soldier on the beach,
he had been brought to see Peter. Articulate, charismatic and charming,
the
academic had quickly captivated him, and Peter was sorely tempted to
set him
free. However, rules are rules, and he was sent back to China. To this
day, Peter has no idea what
became of him.
This story became
the opening chapter of Typhoon.
This
time, however, the academic makes it across to the New Territories and is
allowed to progress to Tsim Tsa
Shui, albeit in the custody of MI6. Sympathetic to the Uighur cause, he
becomes
a key figure in a secret American plan to foment a militant uprising in
Xinjiang. As Typhoon reaches its
climax, a small group of disenfranchised Uighur radicals plan to set
off a
series of bombs at the Beijing Olympics. Of course I had no idea that,
two
years later, the Chinese government would claim to have arrested or
killed more
than a dozen so-called ‘terrorists’ with that exact
plan.
People have asked
me whether Typhoon is the start of
a
series of novels about Joe Lennox. The honest answer is that I
haven’t yet
decided. If the reading public take to the book, I guess I would be
crazy not
to revisit Joe Lennox, but my next project is going to be a novel about
the
Cambridge Spies. See you in a couple of years when hopefully
I’ll be writing
for Shots about that.
Typhoon is
published by Michael Joseph on June 5th
(£18.99)
Visit Charles’
website: www.charlescumming.co.uk
Read SHOTS’
review
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