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 Paul Vidich
The grim story, its empathetic characters, the clever plot, and the masterful writing changed my way of looking at spy novels
Paul Vidich
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 Paul Vidich, whose spy thriller books include The Poet's Game, The Mercenary and The Coldest Warrior.
Paul Vidich answers his interrogator, Spybrary's Shane Whaley – June 2026
- Take us back to the beginning — what was the book or author that made you think, “I want to write spy fiction”?
If I paused after the fourth word in the question you pose, I’d say Joseph Conrad, whose unfinished novel, Suspense, opens brilliantly during the end of the Napoleonic Wars and is a master class in suspense, but when I consider the next two words – spy fiction – the book that drew me to the genre was John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had a hypnotic effect on me when I read it in my twenties. Published in 1963, it captured the dark Cold War zeitgeist that followed the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. It was a world so real, so true, so compelling that it stayed with me long after I closed the book’s covers. The grim story, its empathetic characters, the clever plot, and the masterful writing changed my way of looking at spy novels. I have read and reread the book to figure out how he pulled it off. Graham Greene famously called it “the best spy novel I have ever read.”
1a For those new to your work, where do you recommend Spybrary readers start?
Tim Shipman says that he was blown away when he read The Mercenary, so I’d offer up that one, but, as you can imagine, I like them all.
- Walk us through your research process. Are you an “immerse yourself for months before writing” person? Do you visit and scope out locations?
I usually start a novel by picking a setting – and then find the story and characters. Setting is not just scenery, or nice descriptive passages, although an illustrator’s eye for a place is part of it. It’s about mood, it’s about the things that draw a character to a place, establishes the novel’s atmosphere, and evoke the story’s imaginary world. For me, those worlds have come to life in Beirut, Berlin, Moscow, Havana, and Washington.
I usually do six months of research before I put pen to paper (yes, I write all my novels’ several drafts by hand, and only at the end do I type the manuscript into a computer.) In the case of The Mercenary, the research involved reading autobiographies of high-ranking KGB officers who successfully defected to the West. Their real-life stories were gripping accounts and they painted a graphic picture of the paranoia, incompetence, intrigues and sheer nastiness of the KGB. I was able to understand the hopes and fears of men who were caught in the Soviet system, and once I inhabited their world, I created Alek Garin, a Soviet double agent, born in Russia and raised in America as the son an illegal who was pushed by his loyal KGB mother to work in the CIA as a Soviet mole.
I also created his counterpart, Viktor Petrov, a KGB Lieutenant Colonel who wanted out. He lived in a specific apartment block, drank too much, spoke with a provincial accent, and cared deeply for his son. I created him, as all writers create characters, by accessing my own emotions and psyche, combining them with the real-life accounts of the KGB officers, and then I scraped all this material into a mental space, breathed on the beating heart, and gave life to Petrov.
- Which era of espionage is your absolute favourite era to write in, and what makes it so irresistible?
Cold War spy novels explored the loneliness of men and women caught up in the great battle between ideologies, but the best of the novels from that era, like Graham Greene’s and Le Carre’s, used the political landscape as a canvas to explore the human condition. Their spy novels examined the moral drift and somber reality of the Cold War, but they also presented a new kind of spy who operated on the fringe of civilized behavior, suborning friends, lying for advantage, nourishing a healthy skepticism of social class. Unheroic heroes. Men who were not quite gentlemen. Outsiders on the inside.
So, to answer the question – the Cold War remains my favorite spy novel era, but we have entered a new geopolitical landscape the compares well to the Cold War, at least as a source of literary inspiration. Today, in my view, the most interesting stories are coming out of Putin’s Russia. Human stories that are told against the backdrop of the re-emergent Russia that is again in the grip of an authoritarian leader. The Cold War is over but the Russian bear is coming out of its hibernation, making mischief again.
The new weapons in Russia’s arsenal are kompromat, disinformation, and election interference, but what hasn’t changed, and is consistent with the Cold War era, is human nature. The human factor. Love, loyalty, fear, betrayal, loneliness, and alienation from one's country. These topics provide the emotional engine for the best spy novels in every era.
- Which spy fiction book do you wish you had written yourself — and why?
The Quiet American but A Spy Who Came in from the Cold comes in a close second. Graham Greene’s novel has all the elements that make it an outstanding thriller, but also a remarkable literary accomplishment. I’ve read it several times and I often return to scenes to see how Greene works the book’s unique structure. He gets right all the things that turn a good story into a great book: exotic setting, empathetic characters, sharp writing, clever plot, and timeless themes.
It's set in Saigon in 1954 during the final days of the French Indochina War. Greene’s Saigon has a palpable presence in the book: tropical heat that stays on into the evening, bombs that bring terror to the streets, cynical, drinking journalists reporting on the war. Greene creates an imaginary world that feels entirely real.
Greene’s characters come alive on the page. Fowler, the divorced English journalist, who is seeing a Vietnamese call girl, Phuong, with whom he occasionally shares an opium pipe. And there is Pyle, an American intelligence officer, whose idealistic politics Fowler finds distasteful. The novel is about war, about love, about jealously, but above all it is about betrayal, one of Greene’s favorite themes. Greene explores betrayal obsessively in the book: its source, nature, its prevalence in the world, it inherent part of every person.
The plot is ingenious. The novel opens with Fowler waiting for Pyle to arrive for a meeting, but Pyle never makes it. Pyle is found dead by the river, murdered. The novel explores Fowler and Pyle’s relationship, and Fowler’s discovery of Pyle’s covert activities. In the book’s final pages, the reader discovers that Fowler had invited Pyle to meet by the river knowing that Viet Minh agents would be there, and would kill Pyle. It’s a masterful story structure. Fowler is the first person narrator who tells the story of their relationship, and at the end confesses his role.
Green’s writing is smooth, smart, and pitch perfect. There isn’t one bad sentence in the novel. In an interview, he said there were a few principles to observe when writing: adjectives are to be avoided unless strictly necessary. Adverbs too. Dialogue should express tenderness or sharpness without the need for adverbs to underscore a point. This book is a master class in how to tell a moving story with understated prose.
Finally theme. Greene got the politics of the Cold War right, and this novel, now seventy-five years old, still resonates with its accurate depiction of how political language was used to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. Time Inc rated the novel as one of the top 100 mystery and thriller books of all time. The BBC includes it in their list of the 100 novels that shaped our times. There is nothing quiet about The Quiet American.
- 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?
I am between books. I just finished Erased by Miha Massini, an award-winning Slovene writer. Whan Yugoslavia dissolved in 1991, Yugoslav citizenship ceased to exist. If you were a Serb, for example, born in Belgrade but lived all your life in Slovenia, you weren’t entitled to Slovene citizenship and Yugoslav citizenship no longer existed. You were erased from health insurance, social security, bank records. You were stateless. Erased. It happened to 26,000 former Yugoslav citizens living in Slovenia. The book is the story of one woman who finds herself erased. A clever story. As for my TBR pile, it only gets larger. It has books by Stejskal, Seymour, Kerr, Herron, Judd, Furst, and others.
- Great spy fiction lives or dies on its antagonists. What makes a truly great spy fiction villain — and how do you approach writing yours?
For me, it’s a good man or woman whose job is to do bad things in pursuit of a noble cause. The protagonist’s dilemma is how to make terrible choices. Happy characters are uninteresting. Tormented characters become real.
- 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?
A retired CIA officer looks for a postal box in Moscow that he had used as a dead drop, only to discover the mail box is gone. He asks a tobacconist who tells him that it was removed. No one writes letters any more, he says.
- What is the strangest or most unexpected place/situation/person/story you have ever taken inspiration for a plot or character from?
Stasi head of counterintelligence, Markus Wolf’s Romeo network. East German spies married vulnerable West German women who worked in sensitive government jobs and when the Berlin Wall fell the women discovered who their husbands really were. Some committed suicide others overlooked the deception.
- 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?
Alex Matthews from The Poet’s Game is a stand-up sort of guy. He lives up to his promise to protect his network of Russian assets. James Linton, Matthews’s colleague and deputy head of counterintelligence, is untrustworthy.
- 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
James Wolff is a writer to watch. I read The Man in the Corduroy Suit and was impressed. Elegant writing, clever story, and a character that I grew to care about, and particularly because he is a sort of organization everyman. The humor is particularly British and reminded by of the brilliant Alec Guinness comedies from the 1950s – The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suite, and The Ladykillers.
- You're hosting the ultimate spy fiction dinner party — three guests, real or fictional, living or dead. Who's at the table?
Dame Stella Rimington—the first female head of MI5 and bestselling author—is said to be an excellent conversationalist, so I would invite her for her humor and sarcasm, letting her go on about the male world that she conquered with her empathy, warmth, and charm. To the dinner, I would add Kim Philby in the hopes that he’d succumb to Remington’s gentle coaxing and finally give an honest answer to what happened in Beirut when he defected to Moscow. Graham Greene would fill out the table. I’ve read that he was generally guarded in public but warm and brutally honest in intimate, familiar settings, so being with his old pal Philby, he might say something memorable.
- What's next for you — and is there anything about your current project you can tease us with?
My next novel, The Shepherd, follows The Poet’s Game and it’s the second in a trilogy featuring Alex Matthews, former Moscow station chief, who gets tapped for contract work by his old boss, the DCI.
Listen to this insightful conversation between two of the best spy writers working today – Paul Vidich and Joseph Kanon
More Spy Author Interviews – Licence to Spill
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.
