Spycraft & Literature
Writing a Spy Novel in an Age of Geopolitical Chaos
November 19, 2024
Back in 2022, when I sat down to write my first spy thriller, The Collaborators, I knew two mutually exclusive things: that I wanted it to be as modern and realistic as possible; and that I wouldn’t be able to set it in the present. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I reckoned, had upended the world order to such an extent that any attempt to capture the global “now” would be outdated in a month.
Little did I know.
License to Thrill: The Real and the Unreal in Spy Fiction
November 19, 2024
Spy thrillers don’t get closer to real-world spycraft than the 1968 Soviet film Dead Season. Written under nearly literal dictation from the KGB, it’s based on true exploits — or at least the Lubyanka-approved version — of an intelligence officer named Konon Molody, who had spent years in the West posing as a Canadian businessman. Rather startlingly, the actual Rudolf Abel (the man Mark Rylance would later play to Oscar-winning perfection in Bridge of Spies) shows up before the titles roll, in his first public appearance ever, to vouch for the accuracy of what we’re about to see. Imagine Zero Dark Thirty opening with a sonorous testimonial from Leon Panetta. The Soviets were nothing if not serious.
Review: Michael Idov on John le Carré
February 7, 2023
The name “John le Carré” evokes, alongside some very specific imagery (smoke, fog, cobblestone, codebook, desperate men in crumpled suits), a tedious argument that has flared up with some regularity over sixty-odd years now: is he the most major of genre writers, in his case, the spy thriller, or the most minor of the all-time titans?
How No Time To Die Ended James Bond’s Long Love Affair With Russia
October 20, 2021
This article contains No Time to Die spoilers.
The most lasting, complicated, and fraught relationship in James Bond’s life is not with his boss M, M’s secretary Moneypenny, or lovers like Sylvia Trench, Vesper Lynd and Madeleine Swann. It’s with Russia, which for Ian Fleming was the largely unseen and unknowable colossus that makes Bond both possible and necessary. So a fascinating aspect of No Time to Die is that Lyutsifer Safin, the series’ de facto Final Boss played by Rami Malek, is the only big Russian character in the whole rebooted Daniel Craig pentalogy — whose previous villains were, respectively, Albanian, French, Portuguese and Austrian, while Bond’s paramours were British, Greek, Bolivian, and French.
Selected Stories
In Athens With Michael Shannon, the Night He (Sort of) Reunited R.E.M.
February 15, 2024
Every R.E.M. fan has a version of this story. Mine is set in Riga, Latvia, in early 1991. I am 14. There are barricades in the city center: A few weeks earlier, Moscow tried to bring my newly independent country to heel by force. There is also, not unrelatedly, CNN International on TV. Bobbi Batista breathlessly reports on events unfolding blocks away, making me feel slightly famous by proximity. At night, the same channel for some reason rebroadcasts MTV’s Top Ten.
“Language Is Never the Enemy”: Why I Will Not Write in Russian as Long as Putin Is in Power
February 28, 2022
There are maybe two or three screenwriters in Hollywood who can switch between English and Russian at will, and I am one of them. This is not a self-aggrandizing statement—no evidence suggests I’m a genius in either. Still, I have been writing for a living for 30 years, since the age of 15, when a daily newspaper rather bewilderingly printed a sci-fi short story of mine. And these are the hardest words I have ever had to write in all these years, because they feel like lopping off half of my brain in public:
As long as Vladimir Putin remains in power, I will not write in Russian anymore.
My Accidental Career as a Russian Screenwriter
January 7, 2016
On the monitor, a turquoise 1958 Cadillac Sedan DeVille rolls past a Lenin statue and comes to a stop next to a rat-gray 1960 Series 2 Volga. We are at Gorki Leninskie, a modest manor south of Moscow where the leader of the revolution spent his last days, now a museum complex frequented, judging by the Mandarin signage, mostly by Chinese tour groups. The two cars would look serendipitously symbolic if I hadn’t put them there myself. I am an American writer who writes Russian films.
This Is Not a Barbie Doll. This Is an Actual Human Being.
July 12, 2017
Per Barbie's instructions, I enter Kamasutra, a brightly lit Ukrainian version of an Indian restaurant. Imagine a blind date, with all the attendant "Does she look like her picture?" jitters, multiplied by the queasy fear that she does look like her picture. If you saw the pictures I saw, you would understand. You would know that meeting Valeria Lukyanova is the closest you will come to an alien encounter.
The Movie Set That Ate Itself
October 27, 2011
The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country's east, making...something. A movie, sure, but not just that. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted.
Bitter Brew: I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life.
December 29, 2005
You know that charming little cafe on New York’s Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business—where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.