Secret agents and spy thrillers: great literature, but boring in real life?

Alas, but true. I can state without fear of contradiction that there has, in reality, never been a secret agent like James Bond. First of all, he uses his real name nearly wherever he goes ("Bond--James Bond"), and when he does occasionally use an alias, it's rather unconvincing. He gets involved with all sorts of women--every book, every time!--and then proceeds to dispatch a "super-villain" with aplomb, ending up in the arms of a dubiously-named woman like "Pussy Galore" who, I should mention in support of my argument, was a confirmed lesbian before sampling Bond's charms.

That's how good a spy Bond was: he can even charm the pants off lesbians!

But not realistic. In reality, spies mainly do but a few things: watch, wait, arrange and have meetings, and take photographs. Occasionally an assassin might kill someone in quiet, but that's about as wild as it gets. It was pretty rare in my research that I ever ran across spies engaging in bloody confrontations, shoot-outs, or car-chases. Most of what they did was gather and assimilate information and pass it on to their superiors or handlers, always remaining as much in the silent, blending-in background as possible.

Boy, what a great book that would make! Can you imagine it?

"Today I did a dead-drop. I woke up and sat around the apartment for seven hours until the time of the drop. I took the package as instructed to the site, ensured no one was observing me, and then I left it as instructed. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the apartment doing paperwork and research. That night I made a small, unsatisfying supper of Spaghetti-O's after making a secure phone-call to my supervisor. Then I went to sleep. It was a full day."

Or this:

"I am a spy. My handler gave me dead-drop instructions. After working a normal day in the Defense Department I went to the drop-site and picked up the package. I went home again after insuring I was not followed. The next day, I carefully used the camera I had been given to take some pictures of classified documents. I then hid the pictures in the false ceiling of my bedroom closet until I could dead-drop them back to my handler. I then went to sleep. It was a full day."

Man, imagine 300+ pages of this kind of stuff!

Not to say that, occasionally, one might not be involved in a kidnapping (occurred in post-war Berlin and Vienna), or a covert assasination (the famous Markov case in London), or a Central American coup (see Guatemala, 1953), or the digging of a secret spy tunnel (Berlin, 1954-55), so there is some grist for the spy thriller mill if one looks hard enough for it.

It's just a matter of how real but dry you want to make your spy-book-martini. Bond is fun and cartooney and that's great--that's how we all like Bond (the Bond of the books is my favorite one, though: harder-edged, more realistic, fewer quips). And Ian Fleming knew something about the spy biz--he was in MI6 for a time--so some of what he writes has a basic foundation in truth. Le Carre also worked for the British Secret Services, and his works come even closer to what really goes on in the espionage world. But to have a spy series based solely on the real-life work of a spy would be like drinking a cup of sand: all grit, but parching and hard to finish.

With John Apparite, I tried to strike some kind of balance between, say, Le Carre or Ludlum's characters and Ian Fleming's Bond. Sure, Apparite engages in more gun- and knife-play than any spy likely ever did in an eight week span, but I've tried to keep it reasonably realistic in most other aspects, often basing what occurs on some real event from the past (see the website for more specifics in Cold War Tales Relating to UCOD).

I also tried to correct some problems I've seen in other works: for example, Apparite rarely uses his "real" name; he tends to lay low while on duty; he does have a lot of down time where he doesn't do any real spying; and he's not out trolling for chicks all the time, to name a few. Lastly, I wanted what he did to affect him. I looked at his secret agent experience as being akin to that of a man in war-time: he can be fired-up one minute but burned-out the next; he has nightmares and panic attacks; he becomes ambivalent about whether he can continue to do his duty. I've basically given Apparite "Post-traumatic Stress Disorder" because I think that would be a natural result of doing what men like Apparite must do. It's unrealistic to think that he could kill all those people--some in very cold blood--and not be affected by it.

Anyway, that's the reason why even the most accurate and exacting spy novelist has to take some liberties with reality. And why Apparite can kill nine men in a butcher shop and survive. And why the climactic scene occurs in the Reading Room of the British Museum and not a warehouse in the East End.

But it's also why, I hope, the book motors along without too many slow patches, and remains reasonably entertaining throughout. It's a tough balance, and time will tell whether I succeeded in maintaining it to the reader's satisfaction.