A few years ago, I became completely obsessed by the French spy drama The Bureau. The main character in The Bureau is Guillaume Debailly, an officer with the French intelligence service DGSE. Debailly has been undercover in Syria, posing as a French literature professor in Damascus. At one point in the story, it’s decided that Debailly’s professor persona will take a sabbatical to write a novel. The manuscript he’s working is duly supplied by the DGSE, so that if Syrian intelligence search his apartment, they’ll find the evidence to back up this cover story.
As a writer, I naturally had questions. Obviously, the fictional work of fiction had to pass muster as something that a highbrow professor of French literature would compose. This was pre-ChatGPT, but even so, it couldn’t just be a pile of AI-generated drivel.
It’s one detail that’s never explained. But it got my writerly brain going.
Producing a convincing manuscript would not be an easy task. You’d need a good writer to do it. Someone versatile, capable of turning their hand to whatever style of writing was needed. Also, a writer with the motivation to spend a significant amount of time working on a project for which they would never be credited.
I imagined it was the kind of task that could be outsourced, though it would have to be to someone you could trust. But why would any self-respecting writer take it on? Money is a great motivator. We all know most writers, are permanently broke.
An idea began to take shape.
In my novel, the writer in question is Col Newton. Ten years earlier, Col wrote a critically acclaimed commercial flop, a literary novel called Solstice. Out of the blue, Col is approached by an old university friend, Chris Lazenby, who it turns out is an MI6 officer. Lazenby recruits Col to write a novel to provide cover for an agent who’s posing as a writer.
Given that his literary career is in the doldrums, Col accepts the challenge, and the generous fee which Lazenby offers. Knowing that he will never be credited as the author of the book turns out to be strangely liberating. Col finds himself writing the best thing he’s ever produced. And he grows increasingly reluctant to let Lazenby have it.
The tension cranks up when Col suspects Lazenby of murder and begins to think his own life might be in danger.
Another huge inspiration was Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana.
The protagonist, Cuba-based vacuum cleaner salesman James Wormold, feeds his gullible MI6 handler increasingly preposterous fictions. These include plans for a secret weapon, which are in fact diagrams of vacuum cleaner parts.
The delightfully absurdist story gave me permission to have fun with the spy genre. All I needed to do was switch the setting from Havana to Bounds Green, where Col rents a room in a shared flat.
I certainly had a blast writing Cover Story. I hope you enjoy reading it just as much.
Cover Story is published by Sharpe Books
