Let me give you a quick glimpse into the glamorous world of crime writers. About three years ago, I went to a crime writers’ conference in Phoenix. It took place at a drab Hyatt Regency, and I spent almost all my time at the overbright lobby bar/restaurant, a place called Networks Bar & Grill, straight out of the GeoCities era, the O in the logo a globe looped with arrows. On the last night of the conference, about a dozen of us ended up on the Networks patio, drinking and staying up late. There are only a few things I remember about that night. One of them is that at some point, Matthew Quirk, who I hadn’t spent much time with at that point, brought out a pair of handcuffs. He gave us a spirited lock-picking demo, and it was probably the pinnacle of entertainment for a bunch of drunk mystery writers. We’ve been friends ever since.
Matt learned to pick locks for his Mike Ford books, his 2012 debut The 500 and its 2014 follow-up The Directive. A journalist by training, he seems to avoid just going in blind and making shit up, even as he tackles some seriously opaque, mysterious subject matter. His new novel, The Night Agent, published this month by William Morrow, takes us inside the White House, where FBI Agent Peter Sutherland spends his nights in the Situation Room, waiting for coded phone calls on a cryptic emergency line. When Rose Larkin, the niece of two hunted counterintelligence agents, calls the line, Peter learns that to save lives, he may have to break a few rules—especially as there might be a few traitors in the White House.
The Night Agent is a taut, compelling thriller with a whole lot of meat on its bones. I quizzed Matt over email about its origins, its politics, and its craft. I also swung and missed hard with a fan theory (I was so confident, too).
STEPH CHA: You dedicate this book to a mysterious Peter, who shares the name of your protagonist. You also mention a friend whose long nights inspired this book in your acknowledgments. I’m no DC intelligence op, but I’m guessing that “Peter” is this nocturnal friend, and that “Peter” is not his real name. How did I do? I don’t want to get anyone killed, but can you talk about the origins of The Night Agent?
MATTHEW QUIRK: I love fan theories! Those are actually two different people. I dedicated the novel to my wonderful brother Peter Quirk, who fronts the band The Cave Singers. The unnamed inspiration from the acknowledgments is an FBI friend of mine from when I was a young reporter in DC. He would disappear like clockwork every night to report to his mystery national security job. I picked up whispers about what he did, and the idea stuck with me for years: a young watch officer, waiting up all night every night for a crisis. Then one night the phone rings and he needs to make the call to wake the president. Whenever I would mention it to someone in publishing they would say, “write that!” So I went for it. I got to delve into the world of the White House Situation Room and the network of briefers and watch officers in the capital who work around the clock tracking emergencies, and I had a chance to talk to some knowledgeable people about how the Situation Room works in a crisis and the tick-tock on those fateful middle of the night wake ups.
Your lead character, Peter Sutherland, is the son of an infamous FBI chief suspected of treason. To compensate for his family history, Peter does everything by the book, refusing to cut corners, even when doing so seems innocuous. Of course, all this changes when he starts losing trust in his superiors, and in the ability of the institutions and laws he’s held sacred to protect people from losing their lives. He learns that doing the right thing and following the rules are not always compatible, but he fears for the loss of his integrity. What do you make of this push and pull? How do you maintain your integrity when the world you live in is governed by unjust or unreliable law? Where do you find a different governing principle? Do you think Peter and Rose come any closer to figuring all this out?
It made for a fascinating character study. You see a lot of loose cannon protagonists. They chug whiskey or whatever and disobey orders. You know Carrie Matheson is going to do something as soon as someone tells her not to. “Stay in the car, Carrie!” Not a chance. (I love Homeland, by the way.) I wanted to start with an authentic representation of real national security people—they tend to be a little square by design in order to get a clearance. Then I watched what happened as fate and that higher duty forced this straight-arrow guy to break all the rules and become a walking felony and face up to his worst fear: that maybe his whole life is an act of denial about his real nature. As for the moral question, I was lucky to have a lot of great classes that sketched out an answer through a very long and very moving tradition. You do what’s right in the face of an unjust law, but you do so publicly and must be willing to face the consequences and punishments and hope that your appeal will bring an end the injustice. You drink the hemlock as a lesson to all. I love that I get to think about that kind of thing in my day-to-day work.
This is a book about a Russian mole in the White House, and a large part of the plot centers around Russian meddling in U.S. politics. That said, it doesn’t feel ripped from the headlines at all. It exists in this bizarro world that shares a lot of anxieties with ours, but Trump doesn’t exist, Putin doesn’t exist; there’s an election that may have been compromised, but it’s pretty different from 2016. I’m curious––when did you start writing this book, and how much did you let current events inform its development?
I started in mid-2016, when the Russia story was comparatively under the radar. I spent a lot of time exploring the world of Russian intelligence and operations in DC. Former GRU thugs beat a guy to death in 2015 in a hotel down the street from my old apartment (allegedly, I guess I should say) so that all felt very real and I wanted to get across the menace and madness of it. I set a scene in that same hotel in The Night Agent. I didn’t, however, want to do a roman a clef about Trump. I had the odd problem of being a little too timely with the plot, and the bizarre experience of seeing that some of the over-the-top thriller conspiracies I had planned for the book were eerily close to the truth. You don’t want to simply project out the headlines or try to compete with the breakneck news cycle that is the Trump administration. That led me to rethink the plot a bit and play off of the headlines, like you would riff on a familiar genre trope, in order to keep readers guessing. It made for some tense moments while drafting, but ultimately led to a much better, twistier book.
How do you deal with politics when you write a contemporary novel about the White House? I thought about Trump almost every time President Travers was in a scene, even though you differentiated him from Trump quite a bit (he plays basketball and speaks in coherent sentences, for example). I also noticed that you never name the party he or anyone in the White House belongs to––pretty deft given the subject matter. Do you consider The Night Agent a political novel? Where did you draw your lines, and how did you walk them?
It is a political thriller, maybe more of an espionage thriller (there’s a wide overlap and “political” is a really broad category—I was surprised that it seems to include many of the badass spec ops books). But I purposely avoided any partisan messaging. Travers isn’t like Trump at all. You want to be timely but don’t want to date the story by making it too much of a reaction to the headlines. One thing I love about a well-told story is that it can go deep on an issue and be fairly universal, even if set in heart of DC and an ultra-polarized political arena. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to talk to so many readers who have totally different political views from mine who still love the books. It’s nice to think that you can spend six hours sharing a point of view with someone despite those differences that seem so total in most other media. I like that challenge. Good storytelling pushes you toward universal themes. It lets you raise a subject through appealing characters who make the right sacrifices for the right reasons, and get a message across—about corruption, or speaking truth to power, or defending the constitution, stuff that can sound a little obvious or corny but it’s important to stand up for it now—while avoiding many of the partisan flags that make people divide and retreat into their bubbles. Americans actually agree on a lot more than they disagree on, so if I can start from what we hold in common in the books, I’m happy.
There’s a major conspiracy at the heart of your novel. It’s wild yet just plausible enough (a real sweet spot for conspiracy theories, actually). It’s crazier than most real-world conspiracies, of course––more bodies, fewer boring details––but you sell it well. Do you have any rules for plotting a story like this? Did you delete anything for being too over the top?
Thanks! That’s a tough balance, and I often find myself going a little overboard in the initial brainstorming. I don’t have any hard-and-fast rules, but I usually talk through plots with my family. Saying things out loud is remarkably effective in flagging moves that are over-the-top. I realize it’s ridiculous as soon as I articulate it or people do this polite cringe face that’s a dead giveaway. That’s saved me countless times. The fact that real-life politics has become so insane—porn stars and mercenaries with secret island backchannels and Manchurian candidates and assassination squads in private jets—makes thriller-writing feel much more grounded and relevant today.
I know you’re a big researcher––I’ve seen your lock-picking skills, which you picked up while writing The 500. What kind of research did you do for this novel? Why do I have this weird feeling that you’re a master of surveillance now? (Also, can you really tell when people are lying?)
I talked to the friend who inspired the novel about his night watch job, which was very cool after so many years of not knowing exactly what he did—it ended up being a lot more hush-hush than I had imagined—as well as a few CIA and FBI people I’ve been fortunate to get to know. That included someone who was personally involved in the Robert Hanssen case, the notorious Russian mole at the FBI. And I had a chance to talk to people about the family dynamics of Agency life, having a cover, when you tell the kids, etc. I did do a couple of surveillance and counter-surveillance courses. They’re really fun once you get past the nerves. For one in LA, if our pursuers caught us, they would handcuff us to the nearest fixed object and leave us there! A lot of the research invariably gets left out but there’s something about talking to people who do these jobs that makes you approach the whole thing differently, much more seriously, and move away from recycling TV and movie tropes. As for lying, most people are really bad at it, and it makes them very uncomfortable, so they use weasel words, a sure tell: “I think…” or “It seemed like…” before the false statement. That way it feels like less of a lie. It takes a lot of training to get around that and simply state the lie. There are some techniques I mention the book that intelligence officers use, so I assume they work.
This is a propulsive book, packed with tight, riveting action sequences. I always have the hardest time writing action––like, how to vary the pacing or language when someone gets shot, for example, or how to block scenes where several people are moving around. How do you approach it?
Blocking scenes can be really tricky and there are definitely first-draft moments where someone picks up the same gun twice or is carrying things in three hands or otherwise defies space-time. I will actually act out the fight scenes with my wife Heather, which is a nice break from keyboard time. She’s wily! I find action to be some of the easier scenes to write because action is mostly physical and a question of A to B and the emotional equation is fairly straightforward: She’s got a gun! He’s dying! This is exciting! Whenever I write any kind of scene, I take a walk or stare into space and picture it happening, watching it unspool in my head like a movie. It develops slowly, filling in, and then once I can see the whole thing I run to the desk and write it down very quickly. I picked that up from a screenwriter and it’s been so helpful. With action, that often leads to a staccato, sentence-fragment style. I have the hardest time with scenes of nuanced emotional reactions to inconceivable moments like being fatally betrayed by someone you love, or having a missing child. I revise those endlessly. I’ve been very fortunate to not have lived through many of the ordeals I write about.
You have a background in journalism, and there’s a crispness and specificity to your writing that feels really journalistic to me. Can you talk about how those roots influence your fiction writing? Also: Can power trump truth? Will journalism save us?
Journalism is great because they really beat the literary preciousness out of you.Journalism is great because they really beat the literary preciousness out of you. Everyone’s first newspaper feature has three paragraphs of “dark and stormy night” at the beginning and the editor chops it and makes fun of you. You also (somewhat) get over the often paralyzing fear and pressure of writing for publication. The Atlantic editors rejected about 99 percent of what I, then a kid reporter, proposed. They just didn’t have the space, and would only assign me something if it was a really great idea. I found that experience to be incredibly helpful in coming up with book ideas and plot points and being fairly ruthless in cutting and rejecting ideas and only diving in when I’m really on to something.
Hoo boy. You really hid two landmines at the end here. I’m a generally optimistic guy. But the truth has no agency. It doesn’t “out” itself. Someone needs to learn it or speak it in spite of the consequences. I’m always shocked by how contingent something like Nixon’s downfall was. There were a few very lucky breaks, and a lot of hard-working people, that kept it from being covered up forever. Those breaks do seem to come when you need them, but people in power often escape the consequences they deserve. That’s why I love living in these books. I have to be true to the realities and frustrations of the world, of course, but in the end I decide the consequences.
