He ate my toast and drank my beer. But that seemed sufficient to put him at his ease and get him talking (good cop routine). And it was a lot of fun. Charles Cumming has managed to craft a very successful career as a spy novelist out of the failure to enter SIS/MI6 after their initial approach.
He has garnered all kinds of plaudits and prizes: for example, the Observer has said he is “the best of the new generation of British spy writers who are taking over where John le Carré and Len Deighton left off”.
The Trinity Six (reviewed here) was named by The Washington Post as “one of the notable books of 2011”, while for the most recent, A Foreign Country (reviewed here) won the first Scottish Crime Book of the Year at the inaugural Bloody Scotland Festival in Stirling in September 2012, and the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for the best thriller of 2012. So he’s not going unnoticed.
Having not seen him for years, we linked up through the wonders of social media, only to find myself drawn in by the relentless power of his tractor-beam-like publicity machine and thus interview him. Well that’s a little unfair – I simply asked him round for a chat while I kept a microphone on (and yes, he did know it was on).
So here it is: the next Q Conversation with Charles Cumming is now live.
For what it’s worth, if you’re not sure where to start on his books, then my favourite is definitely Trinity Six, followed closely by A Foreign Country.
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So far I have only read A Foreign Country, and as soon as I finished it I started reading it again. Really enjoyed it. I will make a note of the others and look out for them now.
What a privilege to hear this interview. Thank you SO much