How To Write A 21st-century Spy Novel

As the world gets more COMPLEX, so must fiction.

- Lea Carpenter

A film student once asked Hitchcock how long you can hold the camera on a kiss. The director apparently answered, “Twenty to twenty-five minutes,” which shocked the student until Hitchcock added, “But first I would place a bomb under the bed.” A bomb under the bed during a love scene is the essence of suspense. When I initially imagined the outlines of my new novel, Red, White, Blue, I began by thinking that the spy genre, like a Hitchcock film, was defined by suspense. I thought that before I could tell a love story, I would have to place that bomb.

Early on, for my research, a journalist I admired arranged a visit to Langley. The person who gave us our tour had been the public face of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, was called before Congress to testify about it (had written a book, too), and later appeared on 60 Minutes to make the case for a choice— destroying videotapes of those interrogations—that became a sort of symbol for the moral calculations the agency has had to make in the post-9/11 era. He walked us to the Memorial Wall of stars, with each star representing an officer killed in action. He pointed to one and told us, “I was with him.” And then he said, “It was the same day my child was born.”