The lure of the spy novel

Anniversaries. Back in mid-December 1998, 26 years ago to the month, we wrapped my first (and probably only) feature film as a director, The Trench. I always think about the film on 11 November, because during the shoot we observed a uniquely different minute’s silence in the labyrinth of trenches we had constructed on a soundstage at Bray Studios in Berkshire. The film follows a squad of young soldiers as they wait, over two fraught days in 1916, for the Battle of the Somme to begin. We paused filming at 11 a.m. and fell silent. I was standing in the frontline trench with a dozen young actors who were all in their totally authentic first world war uniforms, Lee-Enfield rifles in their hands. Time travel. Among the then pretty-much-unknown cast gathered in that trench were Daniel Craig, Cillian Murphy, Ben Whishaw, Danny Dyer, James D’Arcy, Paul Nicholls and Julian Rhind-Tutt. It was a spooky, surreal and very moving experience: a lot of these actor/soldiers were going to ‘die’ at the end of the film when they went over the top. I auditioned more than 120 actors. I couldn’t have assembled this astonishingly prescient cast without the one-and-only Mary Selway, late doyenne of casting directors – who now, rightly, has a Bafta named after her. Mary found these young up-and-comers and we screen-tested each one of them. I still have all the videotapes, by the way, in my archive.

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My 18th novel has just been published – a Cold War espionage novel, my fourth espionage novel. What is it about this genre that attracts so many literary novelists? From Joseph Conrad to Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Ian McEwan, John Banville, Muriel Spark, Sebastian Faulks, Helen Dunmore – all have moonlighted in the world of spies and spying.