Why Former Spies Swap Gadgets for Pens: A former agent explains the lure of spy fiction

When you hear the name James Wolff you might picture a shadowy figure slipping through Berlin’s abandoned subway tunnels. In fact, Wolff isn’t his real name – it’s a cover he adopted after leaving the British intelligence service and picking up a very different kind of trade: paperback publishing.

His debut, Spies and Other Gods, bursts onto the shelf with the feel of a classified briefing wrapped in a thriller’s pace. The seed, he says, grew from a dry parliamentary report that accused spy chiefs of stifling whistle‑blowers. "Someone had to ask what the very first complaint would look like," he told us, and the answer spiralled into an Iranian assassin, a multinational manhunt and a host of secrets that refuse to stay buried.

So why do people who once lived behind a curtain of secrecy suddenly decide to shout their stories from the rooftops? Wolff admits he can’t hand you a textbook answer, but he points to a common thread: espionage is, at its heart, a study of character, motive and the weird little details that make a person tick. Those are the same ingredients that keep a novelist awake at night.

“Spies are natural observers,” he chuckles. “We collect crumbs of information and stitch them into profiles. Writing lets us do that on a grander scale, without the risk of blowing a mole’s cover.” He declines to confirm the rumors of clandestine writer‑meetings in a back‑alley tavern, but the smile in his voice suggests a wink more than a denial.

One line from his interview raised eyebrows: “Anyone who chooses writing spy novels over spying can’t have been much good in the first place.” He quickly clarifies that it’s self‑deprecating humour, a way of poking fun at the mythic image of the super‑spy. The truth, he says, is that the genre is riddled with clichés, and he wants readers to enjoy the book for its humour, its characters and its fresh angles – not for any badge on the back cover.

The most experimental part of the novel, Wolff explains, is its narrator. Rather than a single protagonist, the narrative voice is the intelligence agency itself – a collective personality that hovers over its operatives like a capricious deity. “It’s spiky, defensive, cynical, and occasionally‑funny,” he says, a nod to the way decisions in MI5 or MI6 are rarely the product of one mind.

When he’s not cracking a plot, Wolff is buried in a very different world: Cormac McCarthy’s bleak westerns. He’s currently slogging through Lonesome Dove, finding solace in its raw, expansive landscapes – a welcome contrast to the cramped, fluorescent rooms of a centre‑point office.

Ironically, he rarely reads contemporary spy novels. After fifteen years of field work, the genre’s outlandish scenarios start to feel like bad television. Still, he concedes a few favourites – John le Carre’s Harlot’s Ghost, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American – and credits an English teacher from his early teens for showing him that a single, perfectly‑crafted sentence can be worth an entire essay. That lesson, he says, still guides his own writing: “One beautiful sentence after another.”