The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing by Michelle Spring

Author:Michelle Spring
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Gayle Lynds: Fascinate me

Gayle Lynds, the award-winning author of nine spy novels, has been called the Queen of International Espionage. The Book of Spies introduces museum curator Eva Blake and intelligence operative Judd Ryder.

Today we’re gifted with an abundance of mysteries and thrillers that are technically fine, even superior. The characters are finely drawn, the background is interesting, and the villain is strong and intelligent, a worthy foil against whom the hero/heroine (classically put: protagonist vs antagonist) can believably find unknown inner strength and bravery.

Still, many lack something. I call it fascination – the author’s.

Fascination can’t be taught, and it doesn’t have to be. It’s a natural human characteristic too often underrated. So fascinated was Mario Puzo by the workings of the mafia, how it affected individuals, the cost to them, the wars, courage and treachery, that like millions, I was completely captured in the universe he created in The Godfather. I felt the same about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré. How compelling it was to enter le Carré’s grey world of intelligence, and how I missed it when it ended.

Information, even knowledge, about the mafia or espionage was not enough to have made those novels great. No, it was that Puzo and le Carré were themselves fascinated, swept up by and in their subject material.

In 1989 I discovered an article in the Los Angeles Times about Ivan the Terrible’s long-vanished Library of Gold – a collection of illuminated manuscripts covered in gold and precious gems, dating all the way back to the Greeks and Romans. Many of the books are lost to the world today, a literary and historical tragedy. I was instantly fascinated, but I write spy thrillers that are contemporary. So I carried the clipping around, losing it, refinding it, researching the library, muttering about it, until I finally had an idea that I hoped would work. Twenty years is a long time to be fascinated, but that’s what can happen to a writer. The result was The Book of Spies, both a spy novel and an homage to libraries, published in 2010. It was recently nominated for the Nero Award for Literary Excellence in the Mystery Field.

Some authors seem to know that if they’re fascinated, they have a better chance of fascinating readers. They find what enthrals their imagination, then they figure out how to use it in a story. I suspect they feel inspired when they do. I know I, as a reader and a writer, feel inspired – and grateful.

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