Cover Story by R.N.Morris
Spy Thriller Review by Jeremy Duns for Spybrary.com
‘It has a simple but brilliant premise: MI6 has an agent whose cover is as a novelist, and the agency urgently needs an author to write their next book to maintain that cover.‘
Comic spy thrillers are an unusual species, and good ones are particularly rare. They tend to either focus too much on the humour at the cost of the plot, or too much on the plot so that the jokes fizzle out or fall flat.
This is a novel as much about story-telling as it is about espionage. It strips the writer’s life of the glamorous misconceptions people often have of it, showing in vivid technicolour the envy, desperation, near-pathology but also strange passion that drives writers.
Jeremy Duns
They are also very difficult to market, as has been clear from Mick Herron’s career. His Slow Horses series is an enormous hit today, but on publication in the UK in 2010, his first novel found few readers and his then-publisher dropped the series. The jacket art for Herron’s books has usually looked like pretty much every other spy novel out there: a black and white silhouetted man or building, with a Gill Sans-style title in a bright colour. They look like they are intended to be at least broadly in the le Carré vein of Serious Spy Fiction, when they are closer to sharp British satires like the TV show The Thick of It. The mismatched packaging is down to several factors, including the leverage wielded by high-street bookshop chains in the UK, but there is also no readily identifiable visual language for this sort of thriller in place.
R.N. Morris’s new novel Cover Story is very much in the vein of Herron’s books, but like those, you wouldn’t necessarily guess what kind of story it is from the cover art and strapline.
It has a simple but brilliant premise: MI6 has an agent whose cover is as a novelist, and the agency urgently needs an author to write their next book to maintain that cover.
This sets the scene for a classic Eric Ambler-style set-up, with hapless and desperate middle-aged writer Col Newton thrown into the murky world of espionage. However, unlike Charles Cumming’s The Man Between or William Boyd’s two most recent novels featuring Gabriel Dax, the emphasis here is not on a writer embarking on an operation in some exotic clime, but sticks closely to that set-up: Newton’s mission is to write a book to order with his ‘editor’ a charming but slippery MI6 officer, Chris ‘Lazyboy’ Lazenby.
Much of the action takes place between his shared flat above Bounds Green Tube station, a local café, and a barely disguised Goldsboro Books. This is a novel as much about story-telling as it is about espionage. It strips the writer’s life of the glamorous misconceptions people often have of it, showing in vivid technicolour the envy, desperation, near-pathology but also strange passion that drives writers.
It's also very funny – I haven’t been so entertained by a novel in years. There are references to other staples of the genre, most notably Len Deighton, whose debut The Ipcress File informs part of the plot, and who even makes an appearance in Newton’s fevered sub-consciousness in one virtuoso scene. But apart from Herron’s work it reminded me most of two writers outside the spy arena: David Nicholls and Mhairi McFarlane. Both are broadly writers of ‘rom-coms’, so that might seem like an odd leap, but the similarity is the flow of the prose. Nicholls’ most famous novel, One Day, feels effortless, and I can’t be the only writer who read it thinking they must be able to pull off something like it. I went to university in the nineties, too! Throw in some nostalgia, lots of dialogue, a few excruciating set scenes, and Bob’s your uncle. In reality, of course, it’s an incredibly well-crafted book, and sustaining humour while deepening the plot into something genuinely poignant is something many writers have tried to do since its release, and very few indeed have managed.
One who has come close, I think, is McFarlane, whose 11th novel was published earlier this year and is also titled Cover Story. But perhaps it’s not so surprising that she came to my mind reading this, as she was also part of the writers’ room for the fifth season of the TV adaptation of Slow Horses. Like both these writers, and like Mick Herron, Morris seems to be telling a fairly simple tale that races by, intertwining deadpan and slapstick humour with twists and turns – but this is a lot harder than it looks. Within a few pages, you are pretty sure the novel will do a few things, but even in its slim 300-or-so pages, it does a lot you don’t see coming at all, and like the three writers I mention, Morris has a gift for depicting messy, human failure with both wit and pathos.
Morris is a well-established historical crime novelist, praised by Alan Furst for his ‘lush, and exceptionally compelling’ prose. This is not lush, but it is compelling, and I hope it isn’t a standalone foray into the spy thriller, or the world of MI6 as he has depicted it, with louche Deighton-loving spies working out of darkened podcast studios. It’s a slightly different world to Mick Herron’s, but very much of the same stamp – and I think on a par with it. I want more.
Read More Jeremy Duns Reviews and Insights on Spybrary
Follow Jeremy Duns
Buy The Book – Cover Story by R.N.Morris
Read more Spybrary Spy Book Reviews by spy fans for spy fans.
Spy Book Reviewers Wanted.
Spybrary is an online magazine and espionage with one mission. To help fans of the spy genre discover great spy reads, revisit forgotten classics, and share insights with like-minded readers from around the world. Want to help us accomplish this important mission by writing spy book reviews and/or espionage-related articles and features? Details here.
Please note that any purchases made with an Amazon link earn Spybrary a small commission, which helps us pay our reviewers. Thank you for supporting Spybrary. The views expressed in our spy book reviews are those of the reviewer alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Spybrary.
