Interview: Charles Cumming on ‘A Foreign Country’

I wonder about that pause, whether he was weighing up what he could tell me. If he didn’t know any spies, he’d blow his credibility as a spy novelist; if he said he knew too many, he’d blow his credibility as a spy. For one of the intriguing facts about Cumming is that his career as a novelist started as because his career as a spy never got off the ground. He was approached about being one back in 1995, when he was 24, he knows people who are, but decided against it himself. Or so he says.

This is the way it always is with those who have any kind of involvement – no matter how brief – with the security services: once suspicion is raised in people’s minds, it doesn’t go away. Maybe, they think, that involvement with SIS never went away either, and that he still lives in a world of officially sanctioned lies. And Charles Cumming, who is very bright (First in English at Edinburgh) and personable (Ayrshire childhood until boarding school aged eight, plus lashings of Old Etonian charm) and just the kind of person who might well make a very good spy, has worked out long ago that people actually want to think that he is lying to them when he tells them that no, he’s not a spy and he never was.

“I always tell the truth,” he tells me when we meet in the foyer of St Pancras Hotel, “which is that my experience of the world of spying is very brief and never led to anything. But people want to believe that it’s not. They might point out that Le Carré went on pretending that he’d only ever been a Foreign Office employee and not any more than that until his sixties. But me? No, I never was. Really.”

Cumming fictionalised the true story of being tapped up by the security services in the first half of his debut novel, A Spy By Nature in 2001. The family friend who approached his mother as she was doing her supermarket shopping and suggested her son consider trying the diplomatic service. The double interviews within a week in a smart building off The Mall. The exam he sat with three other candidates, two of whom seemed shy and reticent and not at all the kind of people he had imagined applying to be spies. In the novel, the would-be spy is turned down and then goes on to be an industrial spy; in real-life, Cumming says, the decision not to take his application any further was mutual. What if they had offered him the job outright? “I would have done it. Definitely”.

I’m in London to interview him about his latest novel, A Foreign Country, which is out in paperback next week and which last year won him not only the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger but the inaugural Scottish Crime Book of the Year award at the Bloody Scotland festival. It’s easy to see why: the book may lack le Carré’s moral murk and complexity, but works splendidly as a fast-paced thriller. In it, disgraced former agent Thomas Kell is brought in from the cold to find the first female head of MI6, who has gone AWOL two weeks before she is due to take up her new job. The technological assistance Kell can call on to help him find her is a reminder of how much the world of spying has moved on since le Carré; the very fact that I just now (following A Foreign Country’s back cover) referred to Kell as being “brought in from the cold” shows what a long shadow le Carré still casts.

And not just in print. “Look,” says Cumming, “George Smiley’s just walked into the hotel.” I turn my head and follow the direction of his eyes. Coming up the the steps to the hotel foyer there is indeed a bespectacled, slightly mole-ish, middle-aged man who looks uncannily like Alec Guinness in his role as MI5’s cuckolded, Karla-hunting boss.

All of which does, I must admit, get me thinking. The hotel, once next to an under-used London station, now next to the Eurostar terminus, may indeed these days be the kind of place where today’s spies meet their contacts. If it is, in what ways would their tradecraft be different from that of Smiley and his ilk?

Suppose I was staying in the St Pancras hotel and MI5 wanted to break into my room, Cumming tells me, they would tend to do it twice, the first time to work out where all the locks and hazards are, the second to get what they actually want. But suppose instead that I was an agent having a meeting with an Uzbekistani arms dealer right here in the hotel’s cathedral-like foyer, they would have prepared assiduously. “There would probably already be someone working at the hotel for a week, and there would be about four people in here looking out after you. The whole thing would be set up to prevent any danger of anything going wrong. They’ve never lost a serving officer since the Second World War and they don’t intend to start. If anything, they’re rather too risk-averse.”

Ah yes, I nod. Health and safety. So do spies, when they get together, hark back to a golden age?

“Everyone believes in golden ages. The older guard – say those in SIS aged between 40 and 60 – will lament the fact that it’s not as much fun now. The places where spying is done nowadays – Kabul or Tehran, for example – are miserable; in the old days, you had Berlin and Vienna, which was a lot more enjoyable. Then again, these days there’s not just the existential threat to agents of people strapping on suicide vests, but there’s so much more public accountability, and there’s a greater public awareness of what spies do – so they are being squeezed on both sides. You hear it a lot these days: there are too many lawyers, there is too much red tape.”

What, I ask, do spies themselves think about the way in which they are always portrayed? If they really are the faceless, reticent civil servants Cumming depicted in A Spy By Nature, doesn’t it strike them as absurd that they are so often shown as hard-drinking, hard-hitting mavericks?

“There are all sorts of different spies – the classic MI6 stereotype will be for someone who is rather alpha male and larger than life, but generally this is a slightly faceless business. Admittedly, Kell has a troubled private life and this is one of the cliches of the genre, but that at least allows the novelist to get into stuff away from the spying – family, friends, relationships, loneliness. The writer can get more out of that if your protagonist is conflicted in some way.”

In A Foreign Country, Cumming has Kell reminisce about his early days as a spy when, coming back to Heathrow and Gatwick, he would feel “like a superior being, gliding among a rabble of lesser mortals”. That sense of aloofness from the herd sounds credible – but is it? “I think so. If you can’t talk about what you do to friends and people you meet at parties, there must be some process of self-aggrandisement, some feeling of being special, or chosen, or doing unimaginably important work in the service of the state.”

It’s not a short step to talk about the secret service’s fascination with Eton, where Le Carré taught and Guy Burgess studied before becoming spies. “The Foreign Office just loves Old Etonians,” laughs Commings. “The place makes them drool. There’s some sense of continuity, of brand definition. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons they asked me to join.

“The Cambridge spies [which Cumming wrote about in his previous novel, Trinity Six], however, showed up the nonsensical belief that just because you’d gone to a school like mine or a university like Cambridge you were necessarily that much smarter. It’s complete nonsense – some of the most stupid people I know went to Eton. So in some ways the Cambridge spies did the country a favour – showing that just because you might have had an expensive education it did not mean that you were entitled to a level of power that outstrips your abilities.”

Yet of all the genres of fiction, there’s none that Britain dominates as completely as the spy novel. Nobody does it better, and yes, it makes you feel sad for the rest – the French, with their trashy Gerard de Villiers novels, the Americans with their clunky Ludlums. Why?

“We’re blessed with good spy novelists: Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, John Le Carré, while even terrifically gifted writers like Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and Ian McEwan have turned their hand to spy novels. But at a deeper level something is going on with secrecy in our culture, with emotional blockage, with double lives. This may be a public school thing, but we have a way of dissembling ourselves. It may be no truer of us than others, but it feels that way, and spy novels key into that.

“The other reason is that Brits consider themselves good at spying. There’s an imperial throwback there – something that reminds us when we were great – and there can still be a certain kind of political play in which we punch above our weight.” Cumming’s Thomas Kell effortlessly joins that grand tradition. He isn’t as dark, brooding and paranoid as Alec Milius, protagonist of A Spy By Nature and The Spanish Game, but the plot is faster-paced, the story-telling more engrossing. And now that he is off to such a successful start, Cumming is bringing him back in September with his next book A Colder War – “a contemporary spin on Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor set mainly in Turkey.”

With that, and a friendly farewell, he heads back to his world of double dealing and meetings with untrustworthy contacts. And I head back into that more ordinary world, the one we all live in, where people are who they say they are and you can believe most of the things that you’re told.

• A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming is in paperback this week from HarperCollins, price £7.99