When I was writing my debut espionage thriller The Silver Fish (Mysterious Press, April 7), I set myself a challenge: could I tell a ripping spy story grounded in real-world foreign policy issues?
It’s harder than it sounds. When I worked at the Treasury Department on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), we spent our days in a secure facility, making sure other countries can’t use their investments in the U.S. to acquire the ability to harm Americans. Our work was high-stakes, and I found it riveting—but long hours pouring over corporate finance records and technical drawings do not make for blockbuster entertainment.
My solution in The Silver Fish was to move the real policy questions out of a windowless D.C. office and into the streets of Accra, the capital of Ghana in West Africa. What does the world look like as the U.S. and China desperately try to out-compete each other? Do new technologies make us safer or not? On a human level, what do people owe each other as the geopolitical ground shifts beneath our feet?
These are the questions animating the book’s American anti-hero Dani Moreau, her Ghanaian friend James Aidoo, and the shadowy American and Chinese spies who stalk them both.
Writing the book got me thinking about how certain consistent tropes about government and national security reappear in even the best crime and espionage TV, film, and fiction. Call them shortcuts, call them mistakes: they’re instantly recognizable, and they can leave the audience with an inaccurate sense of what the people inside their government are actually doing.
This isn’t a literary critique. I’m a massive fan of the crime and espionage genre; it’s why I became a thriller writer in the first place. But in these post-DOGE days, when every headline shows us where the misplaced use of government power can lead, art has a duty to inform as well as entertain. So let me correct the record about some of the tropes that recur in crime and espionage stories.
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The Lone Wolf Is Not a Hero
From Carrie Mathison in Homeland to Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne to Jack Bauer in 24, the archetypal protagonist of a spy story acts alone. She develops the theory, she runs the op, and in the end she saves the day – often while maintaining a direct line to senior officials, up to and including the President. The bureaucracy of which she is a part exists as backdrop, which our wrecking-ball hero needs to thwart, ignore, or betray.
The reality is almost the inverse. At CFIUS, reviewing a single transaction requires input from nine agencies plus the intelligence community, with formal written procedures and many-layered approval chains that can stretch all the way to the White House. These processes can be tedious, but they force careful consideration of all possible angles, with the result that when the government makes its final decision, everybody can be confident in the deliberations that led to it.
The lone wolf makes for a great character (and The Silver Fish features more than one), but they’re not people you want in your government.
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The government is not omnipotent
In 24, the headquarters of the fictional Counter-Terrorist Unit gives a Gods-eye view to government officials, allowing them to watch complex operations in real time while simultaneously hacking into closed systems at will. Similar concepts appear in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series, Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon novels, the Bourne series, and any number of other excellent thrillers.
As a literary device, the utility of this Gods-eye view is obvious: it allows the reader or viewer to keep the big-picture plot in mind while zooming in on key events as they unfold. But as a reflection of how government works in reality, it’s problematic. Audiences come away with unrealistic expectation: that somebody, somewhere, knows everything that is happening and can pull strings to manipulate events with precision.
The real world doesn’t work like that at all. Nobody, not even the government, gets to know everything with certainty or predict exactly how an event will unfold before it happens. There are too many variables at play, and random chance always gets a vote.
Instead, the U.S. intelligence community’s own published standards focus on the rigorous evaluation of credibility, probability, and uncertainty. Government officials must make consequential decisions from partial information—often reconciling competing analyses from different agencies, each with its own unique personnel, capabilities, and institutional memory.
Thriller audiences should enjoy a God’s-eye view of the world in their novels and shows, but they shouldn’t expect it from their government.
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What the Best Thrillers Get Right
The best thrillers in this space are grounded in realistic appreciation for the tempo and texture of government. They succeed because they place their characters inside a world of real power but also of real limitations.
Take le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl. Its first half is almost entirely preparation, with the spymaster stress-testing his asset’s cover story and peppering her with questions over and over. The operation, when it comes, takes up far less real estate on the page. That’s close to what government is actually like: months of analytical work before a brief moment of action or a yes-or-no from a decisionmaker.
Or take Jason Matthews’ Red Sparrow. Justly celebrated for its detailed spycraft, the book is also great on the institutional friction that is a daily fact of life in a sprawling bureaucracy. So is Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, with its acute sense of the hierarchies amongst different parts of the national security landscape and the way where you work can have almost as great an impact on your career as what you actually do.
Ultimately, all great spy fiction shares similar qualities—tight plotting, sharply-drawn conflict, exotic settings. But some examples of the genre present a more accurate picture than others of what being in government is actually like. Literary merit aside, this degree of realism impacts whether the audience comes away with an enhanced understanding of the world around them or a distorted one.
All stories need to entertain, but government is serious business, and the real world is not a movie. The more fiction and film that can walk that line successfully, the better-served the public will be.
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