Licence to Spill is a Spybrary's Q&A series in which spy authors are grilled by spy thriller book fans.
Licence to Spill with Michael Frost Beckner
Welcome to Licence to Spill, Spybrary’s spy author Q&A series, where we put spy writers under the spotlight and ask them the questions spy thriller readers really want answered. This time it's Michael Frost Beckner, the screenwriter behind the movie Spy Game and the Spy Game books .
Michael Frost Beckner answers his interrogator, Spybrary's Shane Whaley – July 2026
1. Take us back to the beginning — what was the book or author that made you think, “I want to write spy fiction“?
1a For those new to your work, where do you recommend Spybrary readers start?
In my parents’ home, my younger sister’s room, there’s a walk-in closet. Large enough to sit on the floor with the door ajar. Overhead bulb burning. Large enough for a set of bookcases where my father kept his paperbacks that didn’t really “look nice” (according to my mother) on our living room shelves.
Lots of paperbacks—I have no recollection of what most of them were (I must have been six or seven years old)—but the James Bond, Signet P-series books were all there and I’d go in and sit there, enthralled by the Barye Phillips covers, and I would lay them all out, like comic book panels, and make up stories in my head; I’d rearrange them and make up another. And I would gaze at Ian Fleming in the author photograph: elbows on desk, pistol and the lazy cigarette, and I’d imagine being him one day.
As a teenager, I read those paperbacks till they crumbled. Crumbling still, they remain shelved in my own library.
Robert Ludlum in the late seventies upped the volume of the calling. John Le Carré in the eighties and nineties made writing spy fiction worthy and immediate.
But writing well is about finding one’s own and distinctive voice. And that, I suppose, is what those disparate titans taught me.
People who know me well laugh at my films because they say (or mock, in the case of my children) that every character sounds like me. But that’s only the outward expression of my “voice”; to get the outward and the inner dialogue (I don’t know about everyone else, but mine doesn’t shut up), I’d say Muir’s Gambit,which is a prequel to my motion picture Spy Game, is a great place to begin.
2. Walk us through your research process. Are you an “immerse yourself for months before writing” person? Do you visit and scope out locations?
Research, for me, begins with scraps. Margins. With random stacks of filled yellow legal pads devoted to nothing specific but everything pertinent all at once. I have whiteboards stacked two/three deep with fading dry-erase ink; there are folders—or, more truthfully, more of those legal pads, whose “middles-of” I use as folders—where I stuff random clippings of information or events, phrases, or minor biographical details of people I’d never heard of before and no longer remember why I clipped them. These used to come from newspapers, and still some newsprint flotsam and jetsam, as yet unused, falls from between yellow pages. From this garden of chaos, a character emerges. An inciting or deciding event. A geographical location or time period. And then, suddenly, a moral/ethical/psychological theme hits me in full bloom across the face.
Then I travel.
Then I read.
And then I write.
My novel Berlin Mesa is a good example of my approach. Back to my boyhood, I played with plastic army men. The WWII set—American GIs vs Wehrmacht soldiers. But I didn’t like the poses for the Americans—kinda wooden, kinda lame; I much preferred my cowboys to go up against the Nazis. That stuck with me. Years later, I stumbled upon an article in Smithsonian about a successful escape by German POWs tunneling from a camp in Colorado and making it to freedom in Mexico—tore that one out of someone else’s magazine—stuffed it between the pages of a yellow pad.
Loved the GREAT ESCAPE. Always. Collected everything there was to read about that and adapted HOGAN’S HEROES for John Hughes at Warner Brothers, so immersed myself more deeply in the history of WWII POW escapes.
Years later, earmarked (then ripped out the page) a couple paragraphs in a history about something else: a protocol between the US and Great Britain under which, once America joined the war, we would take on the bulk of German POWs. How that protocol detailed where prisoners would go based on the theater in which they’d been captured, and what branch of the German armed forces they served under…and how that was intelligence the Abwehr somehow got hold of.
Hmm.
Took my horse once. Couple years after that. New Mexico. A ride in the Sangre de Cristos Mountains. Fishing/camping. And—seemed like I just turned around from that trip—my grandmother’s cousin died in Santa Fe and I had to go back. Discovered her late husband had served in the OSS, and got some papers of his I stuffed away, and that trip, well, it also gave me the opportunity to tour Los Alamos.
Grabbed a lot of brochures. Maps. Park Service reprints of Army Corps of Engineers schematics—purposeless ephemera but I like old diagrams and engineering drawings; I bought Richard Rhodes’s Dark Sun. A couple books on Klaus Fuchs. And—in one of those by-chance moments my subconscious radar seems to steer me toward, exactly as my books are born in me—I found myself talking to a National Park Service ranger and he mentioned that Los Alamos was so secret that the Army couldn’t be told not to construct a German POW camp for 4,500 Afrika Korps prisoners about a three-hour drive away.
All those seeds detonated.
What about a reverse Great Escape?
I went home and wrote the first draft of Berlin Mesa in less than a month.
3. Which era of espionage is your absolute favourite era to write in, and what makes it so irresistible?
I’m most comfortable writing the “present” of my books in a time period I’ve lived. My professional life intersected with the intelligence community from the late nineties through 2006 (although the personal friendships remain), so I can write with the most authority about that world: from what I knew and saw, what I remember, and what I was given to understand—suggested, told, briefed, encouraged. Instructed. Insisted.
Today/tomorrow technology throws me. To put my comfort level in context—they got the no-cell-phone rule at CIA headquarters; when I was first led around there they didn’t need the rule because you couldn’t take the whole damn thing out of your car.
My best era: the Cold War to the advent of Cold War 2.0—that whole time period across which my Spy Game novels and, most recently, my CIA family saga, Kaleidoscope, sweep and burn.
4. Which spy fiction book do you wish you had written yourself — and why?
Boy, the ones I love are far beyond the reach of my abilities; I love them most because I marvel at them. Truthfully, I don’t wish I’d written any of them. Writing one would ruin what I love about it. I’d rather come to it as a reader and be astonished. As a Hollywood writer for over thirty years, however, I’ve had splendid opportunities to adapt two great novels beloved by Spybrary (and the whole world along with us). The Night Manager for Sydney Pollack. Spent years across the desk or down the hall from Sydney on that one with David Cornwell a telephone call within Sydney’s reach if we got stuck (or Sydney thought I wasn’t making any sense). The other I remember quite fondly was adapting Ice Station Zebra as a four-hour miniseries for Turner Network Television. If it had been a two-hour movie, we’d have gotten it made…but halfway through the second draft, TNT dropped the four-hour format. Drats.
/lasso
Oh, another great author whose Key to Rebecca was also hugely influential on Berlin Mesa: Ken Follett. Night Over Water. The reason I remember it just now: it was a two-hour for TNT. Halfway through the last polish on the shooting script, they cancelled the movie format altogether. Double drats.
5. What are you reading right now — and what's the one book in your TBR pile you keep meaning to get to but haven't yet?
Very fortunate to have cajoled fellow Spybrarian James Stejskal for a peek at his forthcoming Escape Hatch. Sworn to secrecy…but it won’t be a secret much longer that this is his most original and, I’m guessing, autobiographical novel yet. I’m also into Simon Conway’s exceptional The British Agent. I’ve got the new Ellroy going, always a Faulkner on replay—The Hamlet right now—and Hermann Hesse’s collected works and Macbeth because they’re exerting influence on Drought, Book One of my new Spy Game Muir trilogy.
The book I intend to read, but haven’t yet, is Clown Town. But here’s the reason: the last two seasons of the Apple series disappointed me. The former: slightly, the latter: very much so, and in case this next season provokes the same reaction, having the Herron right there—immediate reach—I figure that’ll make it all right.
6. Great spy fiction lives or dies on its antagonists. What makes a truly great spy fiction villain — and how do you approach writing yours?
I don’t tend to write antagonists who embrace evil and recognize their actions as such. I can’t begin writing until I’ve found what makes every character the hero of their own life and cause. If they choose to act in a way they know others will see as wrong or evil, they must have a legitimate inner story that persuades them that others’ conceptions of right and wrong, of good and evil, are flawed and dispensable. Until those characters can argue (in my imagination—and loudly) that their actions are justifiable, I can’t write them. For example, in my Spy Game Aiken Trilogy, Silas Kingston is definitely a major antagonist to Muir, Bishop, and Aiken. In Kaleidoscope, he’s the main protagonist.
My protagonist/antagonist conflicts arise primarily from competing agendas and moral perspectives; for me, the best characters in espionage fiction inhabit a dubious landscape of gray.
7. What's the one detail — a location, a piece of tradecraft, a historical fact — you uncovered during research that was so good you had to put it in the book?
The staggeringly stupid Vietnam-era operation unearthed in Bishop’s Endgame. A former Dutch spy first told me about it, General John Singlaub later confirmed it, and, without giving away the book’s McGuffin, I’ll say only that it was an approved operation intended to end the Vietnam War swiftly and, thankfully, abandoned almost as quickly.
8. What is the strangest or most unexpected place/situation/person/story you have ever taken inspiration for a plot or character from?
Easy. The FSB interrogation Russell Aiken undergoes in Vladivostok in Bishop’s Endgame is exactly how it happened to me. From the CIA warning that I never hand over my passport to a stranger, to me handing it faster than a finger snap to the catch-your-breath/stop-your-heart “airline employee” femme fatale who held out a hand that made the entire world become perfectly symmetrical to her manicure once she opened her fingers, to the Star Trek argument I used to talk my way out of a bleak room with two very bleak cheap-suit thugs.
9. Which of your own characters would you most want running an operation you were part of — and which one would you absolutely not trust with your life?
I’d trust my life to Spy Game’s Nathan Muir, who learned, the hardest way possible, that a man (or woman)—better: the human soul—is more important than the mission. At the other end would be Silas Kingston, who may know the soul better than Muir, but whose instinct is to drive it to sacrifice.
10. Is there a spy fiction author working today who you think deserves far more attention than they're getting? And what's the one book of theirs you'd start with.
Lachlan Page, whom I discovered through Spybrary, deserves far more attention. Start with Magical Disinformation, a wholly original spy novel that somehow straddles Graham Greene and García Márquez, with satire that sneaks up on you and a Colombia you don’t merely visit but feel you’ve lived in. His Oliver Jardine books combine political intelligence, suspense, absurdity, and real affection for the countries and people caught beneath geopolitics. He hasn’t published in a few years; I very much hope that means he’s writing.
11. You're hosting the ultimate spy fiction dinner party — three guests, real or fictional, living or dead. Who's at the table?
Mata Hari, because she seems to have been a far more interesting woman than she ever was a spy. I have a weakness for people who invent themselves, then discover the invention has ideas of its own.
Len Deighton, because he made the Cold War feel shabby, dangerous, and real, and understood the importance of getting an egg right. Of course, he’d have to agree to come early and take charge of the kitchen.
And James Jesus Angleton, who borrowed his “wilderness of mirrors” from Eliot, then spent a career making it real. The damage done by a brilliant man who ceased believing certainty was possible became one of the deep structures of my novel Kaleidoscope. And I’d put him smack dab between the other two.
Oh. Not as a guest, but I’d have J. Edgar Hoover parking cars out front. Stranded outside without a wire into the dining room.
12. What's next for you — and is there anything about your current project you can tease us with?
Drought will be Book One of a new Spy Game trilogy told from Nathan Muir’s point of view. The ten-year gap I put between Muir’s Gambit and Bishop’s Endgame allows me to pick up that spymaster’s story the minute he races that Porsche of his down the GW Parkway. As with all my tales in that universe, it’s a converging story of dual timelines—Muir in Los Angeles and Saigon in 1991, and in Laos and Los Angeles in 1967. My main influence on Nathan Muir was involved in Operation Popeye, which, strangely, had some devastating repercussions in Los Angeles. There’s Air America, and the smuggling of worse than drugs. Drought is about Destiny as the meeting point of fate, choice, promise, and manipulation. Through Muir and Danny Aiken (ol’ Rusty’s father and Muir’s secret sharer), it examines the terrible possibility that Destiny may not belong to us alone, and that one life can be fulfilled, corrupted, or left unfinished by another’s refusal to act.
For more – check out Michael Frost Beckner Official Website.
More Spy Author Interviews – Licence to Spill
Paul Vidich on Writing Spy Fiction
James Stejskal on Writing Spy Fiction
I.S. Berry on Writing Spy Fiction
Dan Fesperman on Writing Spy Fiction
Alex Gerlis on Writing Spy Fiction
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.
