In the English language, the high throne of espionage fiction has been occupied in the last half-century by a mere handful of names -- John le Carré, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.
Dozens of other distinguished writers have staked respectable claims -- Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, Robert Littell, Charles McCarry, Frederick Forsyth and Ted Allbeury come immediately to mind. But most practitioners lack either the subtle plotting or depth of characterization or literary flair (or all of the above) that marks, for example, Le Carré's classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or Green's Our Man in Havana or Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios.
Now comes Britain's Henry Porter, amateur painter turned art historian turned Fleet Street journalist turned spy novelist. In the past six years, Porter has produced four novels in the genre, including Remembrance Day, A Spy's Life and Empire State.
His latest, Brandenburg, which won the Ian Fleming Silver Dagger as the year's best spy novel, is a sprawling, multilayered thriller set against the epoch-ending events of 1989 -- the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the 72-year reign of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe.
His hero is Rosenharte, a former East German agent forced back into service in order to rescue his twin brother from the clutches of its dreaded secret service, the Stasi.
Indeed, apart from its intricate plotting -- Rosenharte, an art historian, ends up working simultaneously for the Americans, the British and the Soviets (cleverly represented here by one Vladimir Putin, who actually was working for the KGB in Berlin at the time) -- the novel draws a searing portrait of the brutal state-within-a-state culture created by the Stasi, worthy successors to the Nazis.
Porter, in Toronto earlier this month for a promotional visit, said he knew virtually nothing about the Stasi when he began, but read everything available and had "good contacts in British intelligence," including one spy who had been in Berlin during the sunset stages of the Cold War.
But Porter himself had been in Berlin the night the Wall came down -- Nov. 9, 1989 -- working as a correspondent for The Sunday Times. He had arrived by air, ignorant of the day's events, got into a cab, and went straight to the Wall.
From a novelist's perspective, he was drawn to Germany by two factors. First, the demise of the Soviet empire "is a major geopolitical hinge of my lifetime. You can't have anything bigger than that. And I was really surprised by how little fiction had been written about it. There are German books, but I actually couldn't find a proper fall-of-the-Wall novel in English."
He spent about 14 months writing Brandenburg, working from the home near London's Paddington Station that he shares with his wife (Liz Elliot, features editor of House & Garden) and two daughters (20 and 17), or at their country house in Gloucestershire.
Of his four books, this is certainly the most ambitious -- perhaps, he allows, too ambitious. "I often think one makes books too complicated. A simple book may be the best book. I just read Huckleberry Finn for the first time and I was so struck at its simplicity and its extraordinary power."
Raised in Germany and Worcestershire, the son and grandson of military men, Porter, 52, studied art history at the University of Manchester, and worked as an art historian until he discovered he "couldn't make a living at it." The army was never a consideration. "No good with authority," he quips.
So he turned to journalism. Starting as a gossip columnist, he made a successful transition to commentary and reportage, writing for The Guardian, Observer, Evening Standard and Sunday Telegraph.
"I was a productive, keen journalist. I really liked newspapers. I loved the churn every day, the tide coming in, the tide going out. I can remember walking down Fleet Street thinking: 'By God this is fun.' " In a recent Guardian profile, his friend and former colleague, Max Hastings, describes Porter the journalist as "impulsive, passionate, indiscreet, readable." In person, he projects himself as affable, gregarious, opinionated, a man comfortable in his skin, and the sort who'd be a fine drinking companion.
Later, Porter edited the ill-fortuned Illustrated London News, helped launch the ill-starred Sunday Correspondent, and worked for Vanity Fair, as its British editor.
But he's now trying to extricate himself from journalism, "because I can't do that and write books properly. If you put yourself in an imaginative world, which is horribly hard work -- the old brain tires quite a lot -- it's hard to be springing about and writing spirited political stuff."
His typical routine is to write all morning, lunch, take a nap, write again in the afternoon, exercise, bathe and return to the book for another couple of hours in the evening. "This is an unvarying routine," he told The Guardian. "The total focus is the only way I get a book written."
For most of his years on Fleet Street, he had no interest in writing novels -- in fact, disdained it. "I always thought my friends who wrote them were wasting their lives."
Nonetheless, in 1993, he decided to write a long children's book, The Master of the Fallen Chairs. Astonishingly, he then lost it -- both the entire manuscript and the computer in which it was stored.
Undeterred, he wrote the first chapter of a thriller, Remembrance Day, based on the then-novel notion of bombs detonated by telephone, and managed to land an agent, who sold it to a publisher.
Sales for the succeeding books have climbed steadily. His British publisher, Orion (distributed in Canada by MacArthur and Co.), projects British sales of 25,000 in hardcover, 100,000 in paperback, as well as translation into 13 languages. The BBC plans to dramatize his second book, A Spy's Life, about the Bosnian war. It features Robert Harland, Porter's recurring hero, a fortysomething British spy with a chronically bad back.
Harland also appears in Empire State, a novel that failed to find a U.S. publisher -- apparently because it portrayed CIA agents as engaging in the torture of prisoners.
Porter says his main literary interest is plot, which must be driven by character. "It's why I can't bear so much of modern literary fiction because they are pathetic on plot. You've gotta have a good story. I'm fed up with reading crap stories for Booker-nominated novels."
And while the demise of communism was briefly considered a bearish trend for Cold War thrillers, Porter thinks espionage is again "fantastically important, and actually much more complicated. If you're trying to penetrate Islamic groups, that is a very difficult thing to do, requiring long planning."
Porter says he occasionally misses the hurly-burly of journalism, but says "the world can certainly do without another column by me." Besides, he adds, "it's a young man's game. I wouldn't go to Iraq today."
Still, he writes the occasional newspaper column, excoriating the Bush-Blair alliance for what he regards as the folly of the Iraq enterprise, and the creeping fascistic erosion of civil liberties in the name of greater security.
"I can't believe that people can't see what's happening," he says, warming to the subject. "Blair wants to introduce a central database where everyone's details will be incorporated. The right to demonstrate outside Parliament will no longer be ours. Whose bloody Parliament is it? I met Blair and thought he was recognizably a member of our generation -- we can talk about the same rock groups. But, actually, what he is is a shallow little fascist. . . . The man should be impeached."
At the same time, he acknowledges the problems likely to ensue from Europe's growing Islamic population, because "Islam requires them not to integrate and they are opposed to many of the liberal values I hold dear. I'm opposed to separate schools and development because when that happens, you'll have two separate societies. I think the problem is [militant]Islam, and Christian fundamentalism too, in that they don't give a shit about the current world we live it. It's all about the afterlife. That's a disaster."
Porter says he is now rewriting the children's book he lost a decade ago, and then wants to turn to America for another spy novel.
"I think it's gone off the rails. People don't know or don't care what's happening. They've been served up a lot of crap as news, because the entertainment corporations own the news channels. And when you get a population with less information, the more you get bad politicians and bad political outcomes."
It's too soon to say where Henry Porter will finally reside in the spy-writing echelons. But he's definitely one to watch.