I walk through Bryant Park to the restaurant grafted onto the back side of the New York Public library, where Joe Kanon and I have arranged to meet for an interview. I picked Bryant Park Grill to make it easy for Kanon to slip away from his writing, which he does every day in a semi-private library carrel. We are there to talk about The Accomplice, his ninth book in 22 years, a sprinter’s pace for a writer who became a debut author at the age of 51, and a book I had told him I admired greatly.
“It’s a book I wish I had written,” were my words.
“Thank God,” he’d said. “You never know how you will be received.”
I arrived early to make certain we have a quiet table, but the balmy September weather had brought out a boisterous crowd, so when I give the maitre d’ my name, I ask to be seated in a quiet spot. I scan the menu for an entrée that I can eat while making notes.
Kanon is dressed in a pale blue cotton dress shirt, and later, when he picks up the menu, he takes out black reading glasses. He is gracious and smiles. We shake hands and I ask if he’d just come from his morning writing. I mention Graham Greene, whom he greatly admires. We both know that Greene famously claimed to write 500 words a day and when he reached his goal he stopped, but Joe has a different regime. “I work until 4 PM and you really can’t go on after that.”
Kanon established his work routine when he was a publishing executive, and when he turned to writing full time in his fifties, he found comfort in his longstanding daily routine. He left his home in the morning, went to an office, and wrote. He made the New York Public Library’s main branch at Forty-Second Street his office, finishing his first five novels in the main Reading Room with its ambient noise of scrapping chairs and clattering book delivery bins, and the rest in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, which he shares with several others writers.
He has written eloquently about where writers write: “Hemingway wrote at a standup desk. Virginia Woolf had a room of her own and Edith Wharton was said to write in bed. Few things are as treasured by writers as privacy, that place where you can tune out the world and live in the alternate one on your page.”
“Where do you find a private space in a public library?” I ask.
“I enter the space and the world around me disappears,” he says. “I just love it. It’s a godsend. The trick is to make your own privacy—a pen, a yellow legal pad, and your own cone of personal space and you’re there.”
I have read most of Kanon’s books and have come to appreciate him as a worthy successor to Graham Greene. Kanon’s novels, which are filled with complex characters who struggle with moral questions, have achieved publishing’s trifecta—commercially successful, critically well-received, and admired by other writers. They are spy novels, but only in in the sense that one or more of the characters is a current or former spy, and they deal with identity, duplicity, and betrayal. Plot doesn’t drive his novels, characters do. They adhere to a basic principle of storytelling: character is plot; plot is character. And this is true of Kanon’s new book, The Accomplice, which is one of his most accomplished.
Kanon’s writing has a unique style, but he’s not a self-conscious stylist. The prose is lean, spare, elegant and readable—nothing deflects Kanon from the main business of holding the reader’s attention.
I turn to the ten questions I’ve sent in advance.
“Your novels feature spies: Los Alamos, The Prodigal Spy, Defectors, and now The Accomplice. What draws you to spies?”
“I discovered that spies are ideal subjects. These are people who are not themselves. They lie for a living.”“It started with my first novel, Los Alamos. I wanted to write about scientists working on the Manhattan Project and I needed a way into that world. I came up with a murder, and I became fascinated with the idea of how you investigate a crime in a location so secret that it isn’t supposed to exist. Into that remote, dusty location come brilliant, foreign-born scientists, some suspected of espionage that threatens the secrecy of the work. No story about the Manhattan Project can ignore the espionage that went on, and that became my interest. As a writer who thinks fiction is about exploring character, I discovered that spies are ideal subjects. These are people who are not themselves. They lie for a living. We all lie a little in our lives, but the spy’s life is all about deception and betrayal and usually it’s done for idealistic reasons.”
Defectors, Kanon’s previous novel about an American agent who defects to the Soviet Union, portrays a spy stuck with his ideological choice long after his cause has failed.
“Your novels return to the post-WWII era and its aftermath. What interests you about that period?”
“I was fascinated by Oppenheimer and what happened to him. I then wrote about the McCarthy period. I kept going back to that period and at one point I asked myself, ‘What am I looking for? Why am I drawn back to that material?’ I came to recognize that World War II was the hinge of the last century. We all like to think that we’re living in historic times, and of course we are, but there are some periods in which the world truly shifts on its axis. From the moment the atom bomb was exploded at Alamogordo we were living in a different world. We now lived in a world with the very real prospect of total annihilation. The use of the atom bomb and the revelation of the concentration camp horrors changed things forever. The war forced ordinary people to make decisions that affected how we lived for years to come.
“Obsessions and influences?” I ask. “What are yours?”
“The Holocaust is one. It was unbelievably barbaric. It raised profound questions: What is justice? How do you measure guilt? Who gets to write history? No book can answer these questions, you can only ask the questions. Where does the hunt for justice end and acts of revenge begin?”
The Accomplice takes place in Buenos Aires in 1962, a place where former Nazi officers went to escape justice after the defeat of the Third Reich. Justice—or revenge—arrives in the form of Aaron Wiley, an American CIA officer who has vowed to find the camp doctor who sent his family to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Nazi human experimentation inflicted under the guise of medical research is a among the moral questions that the new book raises subtly but forcefully.
“How did you come to set the novel in Argentina?” I ask.
“I knew this would be a manhunt in South America. That is where most of the Nazi war criminals ended up. As it happens, most of them fled to Argentina. There were escaped Nazis in Brazil and Claus Barbie was famously in Bolivia, but Argentine had a systematic pipeline to rescue these people.”
“The ratline?”
“Yes. There wasn’t an Odessa group in the sense of the famous novel, but there was a chain of people who aided and abetted. It is estimated that thousands of Nazis entered Argentina, mostly with the help of the Catholic Church. It was made possible by the chaos of 1945, with people scurrying, hiding, and trying to evade Allied prosecutors, and then in February 1946 Juan Peron was elected president of Argentina. All of a sudden it become much easier to enter the country.”
Kanon explains that Peron had been sympathetic to Germany during the war and after the war the Vatican saw Peron as a moral leader in the fight against Communism. The two cooperated to bring Nazi fugitives to Argentina. Argentine landing permits, which were needed to enter the country, were obtained under false identities with the help of the Vatican, and distributed to fugitives in Rome. Landing permits were used to obtain Red Cross passports. With a landing permit and a passport, the holder could obtain an Argentine visa and upon arrival in Buenos Aires, the fugitive received a national identity card.
“So, once you landed,” Kanon says, “you were really safe and you were somebody else. Eichmann, for example, used the fake name Ricardo Klement.”
“Did you visit Buenos Aires?” I ask.
“Yes. I do a year of research on a book and a year of writing. I try to read everything I can. When I finally went to Buenos Aires it was as if I was doing location scouting. I wanted to see where things actually happened. Where they might have happened. I like to know where my characters live, where they can afford to live, and whether they can walk to work or have to take a bus. All these day-to-day details are important to a book. But they have to be transparent.
“My theory is that if the reader notices the detail, the writer has failed. One of the mistakes writers make is to insert brand names to recall past times. The example is ‘he stood against the wall and smoked a Chesterfield.’ Well, the character would not think of it that way. He would think he’s smoked a cigarette. There is a tendency in historical fiction to show off with period detail, but I think it’s damaging. The same is true with dialogue. I believe dialogue should be kept neutral, free of slang and period expressions.
“For me, dialogue is everything,” he says. “It reveals character and drives plot. Writers sometimes use Somerset Maugham’s technique of sumptuously describing a person’s aquiline nose, grey eyes, knitted brow, and so on, and by the time you’ve finished with the paragraph the reader still doesn’t have the faintest idea what the person is like. But if the character opens his mouth and says something, you reveal him in two or three lines.”
I had read Kanon’s third book, The Good German, written about eighteen years before The Accomplice, and while the books have common themes, the writing in the new book is leaner and more efficient, and the dialogue is as sharp as cut glass. I mention Graham Greene’s reflection late in his life that his writing had become simpler with his later books, like The Quiet American.
“I don’t know if it’s a general rule, but it might be true, that you get cleaner as you write more books. I don’t think it’s true of Tolstoy or le Carré, but it’s true of me. If The Accomplice had been written in the style of The Good German, it would be twice as long.
“You don’t use adverbs. There is no “she answered tenderly,” or “he answered sharply.”
“Elmore Leonard’s rule. No adverbs.”
“Graham Greene’s rule too.”
“If done well, dialogue is all that is needed to reveal a character. My books have been compared to movies,” he says, adding, “sometimes not favorably.”
The promotional material for The Accomplice, written by Peter Borland, Editor in Chief, Atria Books, Kanon’s publisher, says reading a Joseph Kanon book “is like sinking into a comfortable seat in a hushed movie theater and have just-discovered a Hitchcock or Orson Welles classic unspool before your eyes.”
Kanon’s books do have a cinematic atmosphere. They are filled with dialogue, scene driven, rich in atmosphere, and not overly wordy. We discuss movies at some length. He is a huge fan of Notorious, the films of Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, Carrol Reed, including The Third Man, scripted by Graham Greene.
“We have been talking about movies,” he says. “I believe that movies can be a metaphor for the period we’ve been talking about. World War II began with Casablanca, which was shot in 1942. It’s crystal clear, a black and white world, where we know where loyalties lie. There is a gloss to it. It’s romantic. But the war ended with The Third Man (1949) where everything is murky and morally compromised. We didn’t inherit the world of Casablanca, we inherited the world of The Third Man. That is the world we’ve got now.”
I reflect on the noir Vienna of The Third Man with its betrayals and loss of innocence, and I see how right he is.
I move to my last question. Two years earlier Kanon and I participated in a panel at the Center For Fiction on the literary spy novel, and I had observed that England had a long tradition of spy novels going back to Conrad and Kipling, and followed by the classic works of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John le Carré, but in America the spy novel first emerged after World War II, largely with the pulp fiction of writers like E Howard Hunt, who wrote under his own name and pseudonyms. Later, Hunt joined the CIA, and became famous as one of the Watergate burglars. But he started his career in espionage by writing about it. It was the commercial success of Robert Ludlum’ The Bourne Identity in 1980 that arguably established the genre for American authors. “Why is that?”
“America had no spy organization until the OSS in World War II,” he says. “Before the war, America was removed from the world and hadn’t tried to project itself globally, whereas throughout the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth the English were trapezing all over Africa, Asia and Europe. Writers reflect the world they live in and work from the material they know. I can’t think of any America intelligence presence in World War I, but there was plenty of British activity. We didn’t have a CIA until 1947. When it became an effective agency there was material to work with.
Kanon reflects for a moment. “Writing about the world of espionage has become self-referential. As I writer I get information about espionage from books, often memoirs by people who had worked in the CIA or the KGB. After a while it becomes a game of mirrors. The agencies begin to resemble the novels that are written about them.”
He laughs. “Somebody once asked me: ‘Were you ever part of the Agency?’ I said, ‘No! I have never been approached.’”
