What draws readers to espionage fiction? It’s a question I’m asked again and again, at events, and in conversation, when I describe my novels—for want of a better descriptor—as part spy-thriller, part domestic noir.
Objectively speaking, the answer might be obvious: the world of international espionage with its seductively glamorous settings and endless scope for subterfuge, is as alluring for readers as it is for writers drawing audiences into their darkly alluring worlds, and then wrong-footing them at every turn. With double lives straddling—and sometimes blurring—the lines between good and evil, hero and antihero, the inner workings and often outlandish actions of the secret agent— extreme characters making extreme choices in far-flung destinations—is rich territory.
Add a healthy dash of politics and sex, and spy fiction offers both a window into a world that is at once arresting and dangerous, and a chance to live vicariously through those who do things we would never dare; characters who exist beyond the bounds of the everyday, their lives belonging to a world that whilst generally riffing on reality, exists so far removed from our private spheres that it might as well be fiction.
And yet, for me, the subject has always been personal. As the granddaughter of one of the most famous, and controversial, double agents in history—a man whose duplicity was so extraordinary and renowned that it inspired countless books and films, from Graham Greene’s The Third Man to Ian Fleming’s James Bond—my own indirect experience with espionage isn’t just real, it has been formative.
As a child, some of my earliest memories, from the 1980s, are of traveling to Moscow with my parents to visit my grandfather, who lived out the final twenty years of his life in an apartment given to him by the KGB, after he escaped behind the Iron Curtain. Kim Philby was the quintessentially English, Cambridge-educated Soviet mole who joined the British secret service after traveling to Vienna as a young man, and being won over by the Communist cause.
Working hard to shed his Socialist past in order to infiltrate the British establishment—including working as an editor for a pro-Hitler publication, and reporting on the Spanish civil war for The Times of London, from Franco’s side—he climbed so effectively through the ranks of the SIS that he at one point was head of the anti-Soviet section, whilst handing secrets back to his KGB masters.
My father—Kim’s eldest son, John Philby—was a 19-year-old art student in 1963 when he learnt of his father’s role via a newspaper billboard, after he was finally exposed as The Third Man.
I was just five years old when Kim died, in Russia, in 1988, but the memories of family holidays with Grandpa Kimsky—of being driven from the airport in an official car with sirens to the flat where I would watch him and my father play chess whilst my mum and Kim’s wife, Rufa’s extended family, laughed and chattering around us—are forever impressed on my memory. As are the comments and questions and assumptions that have been made throughout my life when people learn who my grandfather was. They say all history is fiction, and I have been told different versions of the story of my grandfather’s life (always with a degree of certainty and truth) by so many people, in so many different ways, throughout my life.
He was a traitor, he was a hero, he was a triple agent, he was a raging, demonic alcoholic, he was a sad pathetic old man, he was an idealist who never gave up.
Perhaps he was all, perhaps he was none. I will never know, and I’m afraid to say that neither will you. But these are not so much the questions that interest me. For me, the story of my grandfather isn’t the tale of a man who betrayed his country or his fellow men. He was a father-of-five who claimed he was two men: a private person and a political person, and if he had to choose ‘the political always comes first’.
For me, this is the experience from which my interest in the world of spies springs forth. I care above all about the private world these men, and women, inhabit, and the lives of those family members whose worlds are tarnished, if not obliterated, by the fallout of their actions.
As a newspaper reporter, in 2010, I returned for the first time as an adult to the country to which my grandfather dedicated much of his life. Retracing his steps through Moscow, and beyond, I sought to understand who Kim Philby really was, and to reconcile my memories of him, as a friendly grandfather in braces, with the public image. Of course, in returning to his flat, visiting his favourite bars and museums, returning to his apartment—where my photo still stood framed on the mantel-piece—and the PO Box in the post office on Tverskaya from where he would collect and send letters to my family back in London, more questions were opened up than were answered.
The truth is, we will never know who Kim Philby truly was. As the writer A. A. Milne put it: Everyone is a mystery and no-one knows the truth about anyone else. But nevertheless, the question of how a person deceives, and betrays, their family, continues to dog me. In the years following that trip, I have continued to read, in some nostalgic way, traditional spy thrillers such as the work of Le Carré, alongside works of non-fiction. One day, not long after giving birth to my third child, I had the idea of writing one of my own. Not a spy thriller as one might expect it—not in the slightest—but a contemporary novel that places family at the centre of the drama, addressing the human cost of spying, whilst exploring the question that has continue to grow louder in my mind as I’ve grown older and had my own family: what would Kim’s life have looked like if he was a woman—a mother, rather than a father—who chose to lead a double life, and how would we respond to him then?
In my first three quasi-spy thrillers as I can only describe them, I wanted to explore what happens when you look at the same crime from a number of perspectives, always with a woman at the centre of the story. Usually, when we think of women and criminality, we think of strong-armed accomplices or victims—and statistics around women in prison demonstrate that they often are. But not always. When a woman commits a crime that is typically thought of as ‘male’— and in doing so, demonstrates the characteristics associated with that crime, often at odds with notions of femininity and motherhood—then her actions are almost always perceived, at least in part, through the prism of her domestic setting. She was a mother, a sister, a daughter—and look what she did.
A Double Life is the second of three connected books, between Part of the Family and The Second Woman. Each is a stand-alone novel that is also one in a series—not so much a trilogy as a triptych—that can be read in any order, with each book honing in on a strand of a larger, more complex web. I wanted to explore the distinct duality of roles that women face in their everyday lives, and give each of my protagonists her own sense of agency, as well as her own cross to bear, and her own distinct flaws. So we have Anna, who must betray her family in order to protect them; we have Gabriela, who, in uncovering a double agent, finds herself living a double life; and we have Maria, bound and ultimately destroyed by loyalty.
As with some of the best tales, the idea began in a pub, when a journalist friend told me about a trial he was reporting on involving a shipping company accused of dumping deadly toxic waste near a playground in a developing country. In the days that followed, as I read through the court transcripts, I knew I had my crime.
But the truth is, in a way, these books—and the questions they pose—have been simmering for decades. Writing them in the way that I have, has partly been about taking ownership of a story that has haunted my life, and which belongs to so many people, in so many different ways. In creating my own secret world I suppose, in hindsight, I have allowed myself to emerge from the shadow of the notorious Third Man, whilst reclaiming my own family history.
And as I come to the end of writing my next novel, Edith and Kim, a fictionalized version of the life of my grandfather and the woman who recruited him to the Soviet cause—a woman who has been largely written out of history—I realize some stories have no clear end, just as they have no obvious beginning. And some questions will always generate more uncertainties than they do answers.
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