Le Carré, Spillane, and the Truth About Who Really Saves the World > Likes and Comments
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What about Sir Fitzroy Maclean? Very real, fairly glamorous, and not all that secret.
If you want the truth about the Cold War, you do not start with the explosions.
You start with what it did to people.
Not the myth of it. Not the poster version. Not the tidy narrative we like to tell ourselves now, with clean borders between good and evil and a reassuring sense that history was handled by adults.
You start with attrition.
With pressure.
With ordinary men and women quietly being used up.
That is why, if I had to name two writers who captured the Cold War as it was actually lived, I would put John le Carré and Mickey Spillane in the same sentence, even though they appear to belong to different worlds.
Le Carré gives you the machine.
Spillane gives you the mood.
And somewhere between the two sits the truth that shaped my own writing and, ultimately, Cold Protocol.
Because the world has never been James Bond.
Not then.
Not now.
Le Carré understood the cost was the point
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold endures because it refuses to flatter you.
It does not offer comfort. It does not offer heroism. It does not even offer the small mercy of a clean moral conclusion.
It shows espionage for what it is: compromise, erosion, moral attrition.
Alec Leamas is not glamorous. He is not witty. He is not indestructible. He is tired, embittered, and painfully aware that loyalty is not a virtue in that world.
It is a currency.
And someone else always spends it.
Le Carré’s genius was that he made the Cold War feel like what it was in reality: not a chessboard, but a grind. Files, informers, small humiliations, small victories, small sacrifices. People who believed they were serving something bigger, only to realise the system would sacrifice them without blinking.
That rang true to anyone who has worked close enough to intelligence to understand the uncomfortable rule of it:
Institutions do not love you back.
They protect themselves.
They justify after the fact.
They persuade decent people to do indecent things because the alternative is to admit the world is unstable and the stakes are high.
Le Carré did not write spy fiction to entertain.
He wrote it to indict.
And the reason it still hits is because it forces the reader to confront the thing most thrillers avoid:
In intelligence work, idealism is usually the first casualty.
And here is the modern sting. We like to imagine that cynicism belongs to that era, that the world moved on, that we have transparency now. But the mechanisms le Carré wrote about never went away. They simply swapped cigarette smoke for encrypted messaging and paper files for data lakes.
Today, decisions with enormous consequences are still made in rooms without windows. The difference is that the room might be a crisis cell, a secure video call, or a private channel with a disappearing message function.
The moral arithmetic remains the same.
Spillane understood what fear does to men
If le Carré is the corridor and the committee room, Spillane is the street outside.
And people misunderstand Spillane because they want to.
They call him crude. Violent. Unsophisticated.
But that misses what he was really documenting: the emotional weather of the early Cold War. The pressure. The certainty. The paranoia that made ordinary people want simple answers and hard men to deliver them.
In One Lonely Night, Mike Hammer does not debate. He does not hesitate. He does not moralise.
He acts.
He is the blunt instrument of an era that believed weakness was treachery, that nuance was a luxury, and that the enemy was everywhere.
That absolutism makes modern readers uncomfortable, and it should. But it is historically honest. It captures the psychology of a society living under the permanent suggestion of threat.
And it has not vanished.
It has simply been updated.
Fear still wants certainty. It always has. The labels change, the targets change, the slogans change, but the emotional pattern is recognisable. In every era, there are people who cannot tolerate ambiguity. They want clean categories, simple villains, instant justice.
And they are always one crisis away from getting what they want.
Spillane’s Cold War is not morally complex because the period often was not, at least not in the minds of those trying to survive it. Fear sharpens beliefs. It hardens ideology into violence. It turns righteousness into permission.
From an intelligence perspective, that matters, because every service relies, at some level, on people who will do the unpleasant work without asking for a philosophical seminar first.
Spillane strips away the bureaucracy and shows the raw nerve beneath it:
A world where certainty becomes a weapon.
Le Carré tells you what the Cold War did to institutions.
Spillane tells you what it did to men.
And both are true.
Where Cold Protocol comes from
When I wrote Cold Protocol, I did not sit down thinking: how do I make this exciting?
I sat down thinking: how do I make it true?
Not true in the documentary sense, not a checklist of details for the enthusiast, but true in the way le Carré meant it. True in the moral sense. True in the pressure sense. True in the way a room feels when everyone is pretending the stakes are manageable and everyone knows they are not.
My time in the security world taught me that the real drama is rarely visible to outsiders.
It does not arrive with a soundtrack.
It arrives in silence, in small decisions, in conversations that appear harmless until you understand what is being signalled underneath the words.
It arrives when you are tired.
When you cut a corner.
When you assume yesterday’s rules still apply.
It arrives when a detail is wrong.
That is the world Cold Protocol lives in. Berlin, Christmas 1979, a city split into sectors, watched by everyone, with containment balanced at the edge of failure. A place where a single miscalculation can become an incident, and an incident can become something far worse.
And the point, always, is that the danger is not theatrical.
It is procedural.
That is why Berlin works so well as a setting. Because Berlin was not just a city. It was a pressure system. A frontline disguised as normal life. A place where the abstract became personal and the personal became political.
In that environment, heroism is not what saves you.
Judgement does.
And if you want the contemporary version of Berlin, you do not need concrete walls and watchtowers. You need a world where borders are both physical and digital, where pressure is applied through finance, energy, disinformation, and cyber intrusion.
A world where the frontline can be a cable under the sea, a server farm, a mobile phone, a supply chain, or a false narrative that moves faster than truth.
The tactics have modernised.
The human problem has not.
Admiration, and the debt we owe
I admire le Carré because he wrote the truth without trying to make it palatable.
I admire Spillane because he captured the emotional brutality of the era, the way fear simplifies people, the way certainty can become a kind of violence.
But I also admire something else, something that neither of them could ever fully put on the page for reasons that go beyond literature.
I admire the real people.
The ones who never get the book deal.
The ones who never get the film adaptation.
The ones who do not get to explain themselves on podcasts.
The ones who sit in rooms and listen.
Who read what others miss.
Who make decisions with incomplete information and live with the consequences in private.
The world is not held together by the charismatic.
It is held together by the meticulous.
By people who do not need applause.
By people who understand that being seen is often the last thing you want.
There is a fantasy we indulge now, because we live in an era of performance. We are trained to believe the loudest person is the most powerful. The most visible is the most important. The most followed is the most credible.
It is not true.
Real security, real protection, real prevention is almost always invisible by design.
If you ever see it properly, something has already gone wrong.
And the uncomfortable truth: it still hasn’t changed
We still want James Bond.
We still want to believe there is a man in a suit somewhere who can solve it cleanly, quickly, with a gadget and a grin.
But the world has never been like that.
The world is not saved by a quip.
It is saved by restraint.
It is saved by someone not sending the message they want to send.
By someone choosing not to escalate.
By someone taking the long way round because the short way feels wrong.
By someone spotting the small detail that no one else noticed.
Real security work is not glamorous.
It is repetition.
It is judgement.
It is the discipline of doing the right thing quietly and doing it again tomorrow.
And in the modern world, that discipline is under constant strain. Because everything is faster now. Information moves at speed. Panic spreads faster than facts. Pressure is amplified by screens. Outrage becomes currency. People are rewarded for certainty, not accuracy.
Which means the people doing the quiet work are carrying more than ever.
Not because they are superheroes.
Because they are professionals.
Because they keep going.
That is why Cold War fiction still matters. Not because we want to return to it, but because it reminds us what human beings are capable of under pressure.
Le Carré reminds us that systems can be ruthless and still call themselves necessary.
Spillane reminds us that fear can turn people into weapons.
And Cold Protocol sits in the space between them, trying to honour the reality behind the mythology: the tradecraft, the compromises, the silences, the people who carry the weight without ever being thanked for it.
Because the world, even now, is not Bond.
It is real people.
Quietly doing the work.
Quietly saving the world.