There is a tantalizing dash of mystery and intrigue surrounding the life of Charles Cumming.

The spy writer from Ayr, Scotland, is known for his novels including Box 88, A Spy By Nature, The Trinity Six, The Hidden Man, and A Colder War. His books have been translated into 14 languages and yet there is much we still don’t know about the author. 

Cumming, who counts John le Carré and Graham Greene among his literary heroes, began writing in the 1990s after a brush with MI6.

Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service MI6 came calling in 1995. Cumming said: “I was at a dinner with my mum and my stepfather and an old family friend turned up. He and I got talking and he thought I would be the sort of fit they were looking for.

“But I really didn’t go very far. I had a couple of interviews, some civil service exams, and psychological tests. I don’t think they wanted me.” Cumming wouldn’t be the first spy to deny being part of The Great Game, however. Does he protest too much? 

“I should clear it up - I never worked for them at all,” he later added. “I did sign the Official Secrets Act, but you do that before you even have a cup of tea.”

Cumming maintains that his first book, A Spy by Nature, is a fairly accurate account of what happened with MI6. The rest, he describes as fiction.

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Honeytraps and spies

Of course there’s more to the story. Isn’t there always when one starts wandering around the hall of mirrors? Cumming’s experience with MI6 was actually pure spy drama.

He was summoned by letter and invited to an ornate Regency building near Buckingham Palace. One of the documents he was shown said: “Officers are certainly not licensed to kill.” (In fact, MI6 are, it would appear, licensed to kill.) “I don’t remember feeling particularly nervous, but I didn’t think I was cut out for that kind of work. My dream was to be a novelist.”

In another interview, he also revealed that during the MI6 process he fell into a honeytrap. After two days of tests and exams (so much for that quick cup of tea), Cumming met an attractive and mysterious woman who told him she worked for Britain’s Foreign Office.

“She and I had lunch the day after the tests finished. She said, at this lunch, ‘You don’t really want to do this, do you?’ And I said, ‘Not really, but I’m not busy.’” I just wasn’t very enthusiastic about it.

“Within three hours of that lunch ending, I got a call saying: ‘We’ve enjoyed meeting you, Charles, but we’re not going to take this any further.’”

“Then I rang her, thinking we were going to go on a date, and she dropped me like a stone. I think - and I was subsequently told - that they plant people in the civil service groups to keep an eye on you when the examiners are not there. So I fell at the first hurdle. It was a very obvious honeytrap.”
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A spy by nature

Unlike some writers of spy fiction, Cumming appears to have enjoyed a stable childhood and education.

He was born in Scotland in 1971 and educated at Eton College public school where le Carré once taught German and French. Cumming graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a First Class Honors degree in English Literature.

Whatever the true nature of Cumming’s MI6 experience in the 1990s, he spun it into his first novel, A Spy By Nature (2001). The hero, Alec Milius, is recruited into MI5 to sell doctored research data on oil exploration to the CIA.

Cumming followed his early work with The Spanish Game, Typhoon, and A Foreign Country and followed up with A Divided Spy, The Man Between, and The Moroccan Girl.

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What makes a good spy? 

Cumming has spoken at length about what makes a good spy - not that he would know firsthand, of course. “Spying is making relationships with someone who the spy wants - information - or with someone who is in a position to be an informant, a terrorist cell, for example.

“A good spy must be able to identify who that person is and must be able to cultivate a good relationship with them. There’s something cold and manipulative about that but there’s also something human about it.”

Cumming said he doesn’t regret his dalliance with MI6 or his choice to focus on writing. 
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“The fact that you are an intelligence officer, that you’re a spy, that you have been chosen and you have chosen that profession suggests that something inside you is not quite right, and going into this world amplifies that, makes it worse. So there’s a terrible toll on one’s sense of oneself, so I don’t regret that.

“To choose a life in which you cannot be yourself, or in which you cannot tell people what you do or, at some level, you are pretending all the time, is not healthy. At the same time, they are often quite well-intentioned, noble people.”