For the grand finale of
this series of posts on
spy novelist Jeremy Duns – whose third spy thriller starring British double-agent Paul Dark,
The Moscow Option, was published in the UK on Thursday (it'll be out in the States on 29 May in
an omnibus edition alongside the first two Paul Dark novels) – something rather special: an exclusive Q&A with Mr. Duns. The interview was conducted over email earlier this week, and those familiar with Existential Ennui will doubtless be unsurprised to learn that the questions are very much books-orientated – partly because books – reading, collecting, publishing – are indeed the focus of this blog – and Jeremy is, after all, an author – but also because I believe that what we read as a child and what we read as adults can offer insights into who we are as people. In that respect, then, I feel Jeremy's answers are quite revealing, as he discusses the books he read as a kid, his schooldays, and where and how he discovered spy fiction.
But we also examine the Paul Dark novels, along with where Jeremy writes, how he writes, the music he listens to whilst writing, and his research for his books – and not only that, but Jeremy kindly provided some specially photographed shots of his book collection, which you'll see dotted about the interview. So, without further ado – except to say thank you to Jeremy for being so forthcoming and generous with his time – on with the interview...
NICK JONES: What is your earliest reading memory? Either being read to, or reading for yourself?
JEREMY DUNS: My earliest reading memory is of my mother reading me
I See Sam
and Dr, Seuss books. She was an English teacher so she was keen to teach
me to read early. My earliest memory of reading for myself is
discovering a cupboard at home that had boxes of spare books from my
mother's class. One box was filled with pristine copies of a book called
Emil and the Detectives, and I took it out and sat on the carpet and
read through the whole thing,
entranced. I don't remember much about the book except for that feeling
of being swept away in a story, and wanting to read more as a result.
Can you recall the first book you bought yourself? Or at least the earliest one you can remember – what it was, where you bought it, why you bought it?
I feel I should remember this, but I don't. It might have been
Curtain
by Agatha Christie. When I was eleven or twelve I started reading Christie's
novels because my parents had a few, and I quickly became addicted to
them and began seeking them out. I've never been a book collector, but
at that age I was determined to read all of Christie's work, and she had
written dozens of books. I didn't read all of them, but I read all of
the Marples and Poirots, and
Curtain was the last Poirot to read. I loved Christie's twists, and
Curtain didn't disappoint.
I did a lot of my reading as a kid at the local public library. I know you grew up in Nigeria and Malaysia and so forth, but I believe you went to boarding school in England. Did you have access to a library? Were you an avid reader?
I was a total bookworm as a boy – I had enormous round glasses and
looked like Harry Potter. I went to prep school at eight, a place called
Horris Hill in Berkshire, and one of its alumni is
Richard Adams. I
remember being told that the seeds of
Watership Down had been
sown at the school when he told other boys stories about the rabbits on
the nearby down after lights out in his dormitory. I didn't tell stories
after lights out, but I did read long into the night with my torch
under my blanket, usually things like
Jennings and Darbishire and
Just William,
then Agatha Christie when I got a little older. At thirteen I went to
Winchester – after I'd talked at great length in my interview about
Hercule Poirot – and there was a library in the boarding house that
seemed to have stepped out of
Tom Brown's Schooldays. It had a
copy of that book, which I read, as well as P. G. Wodehouse,
John Buchan
and dozens of comic legal thrillers by Henry Cecil, which I chomped
through. It also had several paperbacks with distinctive yellow spines
and the name of the writer in thick black lettering:
Dennis Wheatley. I
was too young for his occult stuff, and have never really been
interested in horror anyway, but I loved his
Gregory Sallust spy
thrillers, despite their rather dubious politics. I reread them a few
years ago and it was like travelling back in time to my fifteeen-year-old
self.
Incidentally, I thought it was interesting that Song of Treason, your second Paul Dark thriller, hinges in part on a past, painful humiliation at boarding school. Was that informed by personal experience?
I don't have much in common with Paul Dark – I can't kill someone with
my bare hands, even if they're guilty of plagiarism. But I realized when
writing
Free Agent that his background would most likely mean
he went to a public school. As I went to one, I thought it made sense to
capitalize on that and use what I knew about its peculiar ways and
customs to bring him more to life. I enjoyed my schooldays, but I was
fascinated by aspects of it, such as the power prefects held – I
remember there was a rumour that under the previous housemaster the
prefects had occasionally run amok and destroyed people's possessions
overnight. I watched
Another Country at school, and felt that the
basic dynamics of life in such a place hadn't changed for decades. I
didn't realize until years later that
Julian Mitchell had gone to
Winchester, so there were probably reasons it seemed so familiar.
When
it came to
Song of Treason, I thought it wouldn't be too
difficult to insert some of my knowledge into an earlier era without it
seeming anachronistic – it had already seemed anachronistic when I
experienced it. My own Notions test was unremarkable, but it had quite a
build-up, which I suppose is vital with any initiation ceremony. You
heard, and imagined, all sorts of things. The parts about waiting in the
library in his dressing-gown and being disoriented as he is led around
the house are from my own memories. Much of the rest is imagined, and
some is from hearing others' experiences. There was an incident with
someone getting Deep Heat in his eyes, and although it wasn't damaging
in the long term, at the time it seemed monumental. I tried to take
these experiences and make them real for Paul Dark and the other
characters in an earlier time, in a
more dramatic way. The idea of someone carrying over humiliation at
school into adult life is not uncommon in thrillers (or perhaps life),
but I thought the 'local knowledge' I had would make it more vivid and
interesting. Although it might not get me invited back for Sports' Day.
While we're on the subject of Song of Treason: you also put Paul Dark through a torture sequence, in the grand tradition of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, Len Deighton's The Ipcress File, Adam Hall's (alias Elleston Trevor) The Berlin Memorandum and others. Bit of a weird question, but were you keen to have your own torture sequence in one of your novels? And how do you think your one stacks up?
There's a great
conversation between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming
that was broadcast by the BBC in 1958, in which a rather sozzled
Chandler asked Fleming why his novels always included a torture scene.
Fleming replied that he grew up reading Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu and
Sapper's Bulldog Drummond, and that in those stories it was traditional
for the villain to capture the hero and drug him or make him suffer in
one way or another. My first exposure to this sort of scene was in
Dennis Wheatley's Sallust novels, where there's a recurring villain, a
senior Gestapo officer called Grauber, and the torture scenes were often
horrific. I had written an interrogation of sorts towards the end of
Free Agent,
but I thought it was time I had a proper spy thriller torture scene. It
fitted into some of my research about the political situation in Italy
at the time, but I
also felt that a torture sequence that played with public school
initiation ceremonies would make sense for the novel. I'm proud of the
scene, but I don't think it compares to the ones in those three books,
of course – they're classics of the genre.
Back to books and reading. What were you reading as you entered your teens? For me, books took a bit of a back seat for a while as I got more into music. Was it a similar thing for you? I know we like some of the same bands...
I did get into music a lot more, but I carried on reading. As well as
Agatha Christie and Henry Cecil, I remember reading
John Christopher's
Sword of the Spirits
trilogy, which I loved. This was in the library, I suppose because it
was set around Winchester, which made it more interesting, of course.
But it also had a fantastic twist, which I'll spoil now so be warned: it
seems like it's set in the past, in some Arthurian England, but partway
through you discover that it is in fact set in a post-apocalyptic
future, where the priests are secretly controlling technology. I guess I
like twists. As well as Dennis Wheatley, I read a lot of Alistair
MacLean, Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins. Jeffrey
Archer, of course: copies of
Kane and Abel were handed round like
samizdat
(and always seemed to open on the same page). There were a lot of
thrillers from the Sixties and Seventies floating around: Hammond
Innes, Geoffrey Jenkins, Duncan Kyle, that sort of thing. In my late
teens, I read a lot of Julian Barnes and Iain Banks, and became more
interested in literary fiction.
I read in an interview that you didn't really discover spy fiction until you were in your twenties, when you chanced upon some spy novels in an Antwerp bookshop on a journalistic assignment. Were they paperbacks? Can you remember what they were?
I did read spy novels when I was younger – my parents had a rather obscure novel,
The Left-Handed Sleeper
by
Ted Willis, which I enjoyed, and after that I discovered
Len Deighton and
John le Carré. But I did a degree in English literature and
read very few thrillers at university. So when I walked into that
bookshop in Antwerp I hadn't read any spy novels for a few years, and
wasn't especially interested in them. But there was a whole bookcase
of second-hand thrillers in English, and a lot of them were spy novels. I
picked up
The Quiller Memorandum by Adam Hall. The title
was vaguely familiar and I saw it had been made into a film. It cost
next to nothing. I picked out three or four other books – I don't
remember what they were – bought them, and went to do an interview with a
fashion designer. I was impressed by
The Quiller
Memorandum, but it didn't blow me away. But I found another
secondhand bookshop in Brussels that had several more books in the
series, and
The Tango Briefing had me hooked. I'd never read
anything like it. I'd never imagined a spy novel could be so exciting
but so beautifully written. So then I started reading a lot of spy
fiction.
I can usually recall where I bought the books that are most important to me. Is it the same for you? Where are some of the places you've bought books?
I lived in Brussels for several years, and there's a wonderful
second-hand bookshop there called
Pêle-Mêle – anyone who knows me has
heard me rhapsodize about it. It used to have an extraordinary
collection of secondhand thrillers in English, but I suspect it doesn't
anymore as several hundred of them are now in my bookshelves: sorry! I
just cleaned the place out over the course of a few years. I mainly buy
from
second-hand bookshops. I always visit the
Charing Cross Road area when
I'm in London, although the pickings are a lot slimmer now. I'll stop at
any flea market, in any country, and check their selection. There are a
few good places in Stockholm, where I live now, but these days I do
most of my book shopping online, which is less interesting but means I
get what I'm looking for. Physical bookshops are for the discoveries.
I've got a silly amount of guidebooks I've bought 'just in case': if I
ever want to write a thriller set in Mauritius in 1976, I'm prepared.
There are a couple of fantastic second-hand bookshops in Rome, which I
mention in the author's note for
Song of Treason: I remember being in the back room of one over a decade ago and finding a copy of
Encounter
from 1965. It had an article in it by John le Carré in which he wrote
about James Bond being a capitalist hyena and ended by suggesting that
the Russian Bond was on his
way. That was an important find for me, and I still read the article
every now and again to remember the effect it had on me.
I'm reading Adam Hall's The Ninth Directive at the moment, which I believe is your favourite Quiller. Why is that, do you think? And when did you first read it?
The Ninth Directive probably ties with
The Tango Briefing for my favourite spy novel full stop. I read both in 2000, I think, one after the other. I love
The Ninth Directive
because it's both very pulpy in terms of plot – assassinate the
assassin – but simultaneously seems extremely authentic. While reading
the novel, you really believe that this is how a secret agent would
think and act. It predates
The Day of the Jackal by five years,
but has much of that feeling of peeking inside a hidden world. I loved
the way the target is never named, making it almost an elemental
struggle to survive. Beyond that, I don't know... Sometimes you just
connect with a book, or the voice of an author. I've connected with
many, but with Adam Hall it was like a jolt of lightning through me.
One thing that occurs to me as a possible reason for why you like The Ninth Directive is the setting: Thailand. You grew up partly in Asia – do you think that might be why the novel had such an impact on you? I've never been to Thailand but Hall's vivid description of the place strikes me as authentic.
I guess part of my love of
The Ninth Directive is due to the
location, although I've never visited Thailand. Then again, I don't
think Hall/Trevor had, either! I was surprised to read
an interview with him in which he revealed that he very rarely wrote about locations he
had visited, because he found he lost the magic when he did that. Quite
an astonishing thing to do, really. For the most part I think it's
impossible to tell, and he makes locations come alive. Hall was an
expatriate for much of his life, so even in the Seventies some of his
characters are from an England he had long left behind – as I've
spent most of my life as an expatriate, perhaps I identified with that
feeling in his writing as well.
Which of the books you own are you most fond of? I'm guessing there might be a battered paperback or two you prize, so do please tell me about those. But are there any first editions you;re pleased to own? Am I right in thinking you own perhaps the scarcest Adam Hall book, the final Quiller, Quiller Balalaika?
I own two copies of
Quiller Balalaika, but they're less rare
than when I bought them. I have a couple of first edition Quillers which
are dear to me because they were gifts, but although I love books, and
often love the designs of them and the feel of them, I'm not usually
that sentimental about them as physical objects. I cherish books that
have been given to me, and am lucky enough to have a few from other
writers:
The Bright Adventure by
Geoffrey Rose,
Lights in The Sky by
Philip Purser,
Silver by my friend
Steven Savile... I sometimes pinch myself that I own these.
All the books I got in that Antwerp shop were paperbacks, incidentally, as are both my editions of
Balalaika
(the same one, with the jacket art featuring Quiller holding, clanger
of clangers, a gun). Most of my books are paperbacks, in fact. Something
I just remembered is that I managed to persuade the editor of the
magazine I worked for in Belgium to let me do a feature article on
Pêle-Mêle, so I toddled off to interview the owner. And after we had
chatted away for a bit he led me through locked doors down to the
basement, where there was a whole room stacked floor to ceiling
with second-hand English paperback thrillers – their overflow room. It
was like Ali Baba's cave. So I didn't just clear out the shop of every
last
Household, Hall,
Hone and so on, I also raided their secret stash. It was
geektastic.
Where do you usually write? Do you have a study at home in Stockholm?
Yes, I have a small study that is basically a computer, a leather chair,
a sofa-bed and several bookshelves. I have a few small objects about.
Adam Hall's son sent me a Soviet militia badge a couple of years ago,
and I quite often pick that up and
fiddle with it. It's my executive toy!
I'm assuming you write on a computer. Have you always done so? I
actually wrote on a typewriter when I started out as a music journalist
twenty years ago, and when I switched to a computer I found it changed
the way I wrote – instead of writing from beginning to end, I'd write
bits of an article and then sort of stitch it together. I guess what I'm
asking here is, how do you write your novels? Plot them out? Write from
start to finish and make it up as you go along? Or write bits from
across the novel and put them together?
I mainly write on a computer, and always have done, although I also
carry a notebook with me to jot ideas down. I don't have a set method,
but I do tend to write a short synopsis and that gives me a basic
structure. I try to figure out what sort of mood I want the book to
have, what kind of book I want it to be. With
The Moscow Option,
I knew going in that I wanted it to be set in the Soviet Union and the
Åland archipelago, that it would take place in winter, and that it would
involve the threat of nuclear war. I wanted the mood to be bleak, but
frantic. I also had some ideas of set scenes, so I started writing them
in basic form first and then worked from there – I wrote part of the
ending first. My structure tends to change as I go along, as I discover
that ideas I liked don't work or think of something better. I find if
I've worked everything out too much in advance it starts to feel stale. I
like to surprise myself, and that involves some tricks to keep myself
on my toes. So it's a mix between planning in advance and improvising.
Do you listen to music whilst writing? What, if so?
Yes, I almost always write to music, as I find silence too imposing. I
put a lot of thought and time into what music I write to, in fact. Some
writers obsess about Moleskine notebooks or where they place their pencil
sharpener, and I guess this is my little obsession. I find it difficult
to write to music with lyrics, so I mainly listen to instrumental
music, or music in which the lyrics are fairly minimal and so are less
likely to distract me from my work. I love Leonard Cohen, for instance,
but I wouldn't try to write while listening to him. I've got several
playlists that are 200-400 songs long so I don't feel like I'm listening
to a loop and I also refresh them quite frequently for that
reason. The basis for most of them is electronica, often taken from
compilation albums with 'Ibiza' or 'Chill' in the title. Particular
favourites are
Waiwan,
The Flashbulb,
Bliss,
Snooze, and two collections
called
The Jazz House Sessions and
Chill House Sensation,
both of which sound absurd but which work very well for me. I find I'm
enjoying the music, but can also stay sharply focussed. I also throw in
some oddities, especially stuff from the Sixties that will help me feel
like I've stumbled into the score of the book I'm writing: a few
Emotions songs, some Persuaders, that sort of thing. Then I have some
jazz –
Grant Green and J
ohn Scofield – and this all helps make what, in
my fevered mind, is an endless soundtrack. I'm imagining I'm the spy
novel equivalent of
David Holmes.
I started this approach with my first novel, but have varied it since, trying out new music
and adding quirks depending on the book. With
Free Agent,
I listened to a lot of afrobeat, some of which goes on for a long time
and is quite meditative. In particular,
Fela Kuti's early band Koola
Lobitos helped me get into the mood of Nigeria in the late Sixties.
I wore out a haunting Marvin Gaye song,
Dark Side of the World, which was recorded at around the time the book is set but not released until fairly recently. Alice Russell's song
Hurry On Now
was an important song for me: it sounded like it was from the Sixties
but gave a fresh twist to it, and I was trying to do something similar. I
also listened to a lot of early Rolling Stones,
Gimme Shelter and
Play With Fire
in particular: I wanted the book to feel like those songs. I found it
interesting when I read an early draft of a screenplay for the BBC that
the script began with
Sympathy for the Devil
playing over a Lagos traffic scene. It's such a simple idea, but of
course that song is perfect for Paul Dark, and for the series as a whole
in fact.
For
Song of Treason, I downloaded several albums of soundtrack
music from Sixties Italian spy films, and mixed them in with my other
music – a lot of Ennio Morricone and his contemporaries. I also listened
to
Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire several hundred times –
that was the key song for the book, an alternative title for it, and
briefly features in it.
For
The Moscow Option, I listened to a lot of
Sibelius –
Finlandia
comes up in the first two books and this one's the pay-off for that,
as Dark is in Finland – as well as a lot of more recent spy scores. I
love John Barry's work but can't write to him as I start imagining Sean
Connery or Michael Caine or George Segal
instead of Paul Dark. Ditto John Powell's work on the Bourne films. I
realized that that sort of sound helped my writing, but I associated it
too much with Jason Bourne. So I spent a few hours on iTunes, using the
preview feature, buying individual songs from spy thriller scores. I
picked a lot of films I haven't seen, so I know I have stuff on my
playlists from
The International,
Shooter,
Spy Game (which
I've seen, but years ago) and several other films from the last couple
of decades. But I don't look at the stereo when they play, and I have
enough of them, on a long enough random-order playlist, that none of
them ever push themselves to the forefront enough to stand out. So
instead of being Track 4 from
The International, Track 6 from
Shooter and so on, they became part of the soundtrack to
The Moscow Option. Just the other day I found a great album to fit in to my playlists for
my current book:
Themes for an Imaginary Film by Symmetry. It fits my purposes perfectly, and I've written a lot to it already.
I realize that all makes me sound slightly mad, but when you want to
write a book I think it's worth making yourself comfortable to do it. I
spend some time setting up music so I don't have to think about what to
listen to on a daily basis.
Do you write on the move at all? Do you have a laptop?
I don't have a laptop, though I sometimes use my wife's if we're
travelling, and I also use a notebook. But most of my writing is done in
my study at home.
Do you have to stay away from the likes of Twitter and Facebook when you write, or are you able to dip into them as you write?
It varies. I've gone off Facebook in the last year or so and don't use
it all that much anymore, but I am an avid Tweeter. Sometimes I find
that when I'm writing a lot I also tweet a lot, because I become almost
hyperactive with ideas, and very flighty. But sometimes the opposite
happens, and I just hunker down without any need to go online at all. On
the other hand, I also find I can get overly distracted by the net, and
to get work done I have to switch it off with Freedom – sometimes
willpower isn't enough. It's something I wrestle with quite a bit, as I
imagine many writers do now. Radio silence can recharge your creative
energy, and can be vital. But interacting with people, reading articles
and so on can also reinvigorate and inspire you. It's a balancing
act. The most important thing is getting the work done. You do whatever
it takes.
All three of your Paul Dark novels draw on real historical events, but
in The Moscow Option, not only do Brezhnev and other well-known Soviet officials make cameos, but
Donald Maclean plays a fairly crucial role, too. Why did you choose to bring
Maclean in? Paul's reasoning for seeking out Maclean rather than, say,
Kim Philby, is logical, but from your point of view, it must have been
very tempting to have Philby play a part as well...
You're right – it was tempting, and Philby was my first idea. I wrote
several scenes featuring him, but abandoned them. The scene with
Brezhnev near the start of the novel originally had Dark and Philby
around the table. I also wrote a long scene with Dark in Philby's flat,
and did a lot of research for it. There were several reasons I decided
not to go with that idea. Some of them are to do with that logic – if I
were in Dark's shoes, knowing what I knew of Philby and his career in
Moscow, I wouldn't have risked appealing to him. I also found it very
hard to do because although I feel like I can imagine
Philby quite well, there are a lot of traps there. Philby has appeared
in a lot of spy thrillers, either under his own name or loosely
disguised. So now it's almost too obvious, and it kept ringing false to
me. If I had the stutter it was cliched and almost parodic, but without
it he didn't quite feel like Philby, and so on.
I thought about it for
several weeks, trying different things and doing some research, and
eventually decided that Maclean was not just more likely, but more
intriguing. I thought it was interesting that he had associated with
dissidents in the way he did, and the small incident that forms the
basis of Dark's appeal to him really happened. Most literature about the
Cambridge spies centres on Philby and Burgess, but I found
Maclean equally fascinating, partly because he's harder to read. He was a
handsome man – you can imagine Rupert Everett playing him, I think –
but towards the end of
his life he became rather ghoulish looking. He also had a very screwed
up relationship with his father, as of course Dark does. Philby did,
too, but I thought it would be interesting to encounter someone who had
done what Dark had done, a real historical figure who had lived with the
consequences but who would also
condemn Dark for his actions. I
thought this would confuse our feelings about Dark more, in that you'd
both see Maclean's point but also be on Dark's side – after all, we've
come to know him while Maclean is a stranger, and one seen through
Dark's eyes. But if we forgive Dark, why don't we forgive Maclean? Dark
has done more damage. My motives weren't quite as clear-cut as that,
perhaps, but this is the general area I was circling.
As with the two prior Paul Dark novels, the Author's Note at the back of
The Moscow Option is most illuminating as regards the research you do
for your novels and how
you weave real events into them. But I have to say, The Moscow Option
note is rather alarming, in particular what it reveals about President Nixon's "Madman Theory". And the
novel as a whole often sees Paul ruminating on the nuclear nightmare
he's trying to prevent. I vividly recall being terrified of nuclear war
in the 1980s; did you have similar fears growing up?
I'm glad you found that note alarming, because that's why I decided to
use it. I remember the idea of nuclear war scaring me as a teenager, and
of course that fear has faded with the end of the Cold War and the
emergence of new threats, although the risk is perhaps greater today
than it has ever been. Despite that, to most people nuclear war now
seems an abstract idea: in thriller terms, we know the secret agent will
defuse the warhead, but it means very little to us. But it meant
something to me when I was fifteen or sixteen. So I wanted to bring back a
thriller with those stakes, but I also wanted
to remind or perhaps introduce people to what they really meant, and
how fragile the situation was. I was lucky to come across a guy called
Mike Kenner, who is a campaigner for freedom of information, and he very
kindly shared with me thousands of documents he has managed to have
declassified from the National Archives. A lot of these are from the
British government's contingency plans for nuclear war during the
Sixties, and they're chilling. So I used some of that information and
the events of October 1969 to try to craft a thriller that recaptured
some of the feel of the books I read growing up, by Frederick Forsyth
and Desmond Bagley and others, but which I hoped would also hit home now
because of the reality behind it.
Last question: something you find with many writers of fiction is that they don't seem to read
much fiction – when asked what they're reading, it's usually
non-fiction. (This isn't always the
case, of course; Kingsley Amis read a lot of fiction, especially genre fiction.) I guess that's partly down to not wishing to be influenced by
other people's novels when writing your own, but I also suspect it's
that 'busman's holiday' thing: when your 'job' is to write novels,
reading them as well can seem a bit much. What do you think? I know you
read a fair bit of non-fiction, but do you still read much fiction
besides? What are you reading at the moment?
Unfortunately, I fall into this camp – I hardly read any fiction these days. I'm reading
Ordinary Thunderstorms
by William Boyd at the moment, but it's one of the very few novels I've
read recently. I'm always looking for new information to use in my
books, and I find that much as I enjoy fiction it mainly contains lots
of ideas I
can't use. At the moment I'm writing my first
non-fiction book, about Oleg Penkovsky and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
as a result I've read around a hundred non-fiction books for research
in the last year – if you think my music selection sounds obsessive it
doesn't even compare. I guess the busman's holiday comparison is right –
for some reason, I often find it very difficult to read fiction now,
and get antsy after a few pages. I happily listen to music and watch
films, but when I'm reading a novel I become very conscious that I'm
taking time away from creating my own
books.
For previous Existential Ennui interviews, click here for a Q&A with Christopher Nicole, alias Andrew York, author of the Jonas Wilde spy novels; here for short Q&A with Jeff Lindsay, author of the Dexter crime novels; and here and here for a two-part interview with Anthony Price, author of the David Audley spy novels.
