Jeff asked Olen Steinhauer:

Mr. Steinhauer, First, thanks for answering these questions. I loved Old Knives and I'd also really liked Song of Lunch when I first saw it. It was fun seeing a spy riff on that concept. You've mentioned le Carre influencing your spy novels, any other non-espionage influences that have served as an inspiration for your other spy novels? Thanks!

Olen Steinhauer It's my pleasure to answer these questions. Writers live in a bubble, only going out once a year or so when their books are published, and so it's nice to actually speak to readers now and then.

The non-espionage influences are probably more numerous than the espionage influences. As I've mentioned elsewhere it was James Joyce who convinced me that I could, and should, devote my life to writing fiction. For most of my 20s, he was my hero. I was also obsessed with his contemporaries--Ezra Pound, Eliot, Gertrude Stein.

Then I discovered Milan Kundera, and he blew my mind. I've reread "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Immortality" more times than I can count, always coming away with new insights.

Hemingway was a huge influence, showing how much I could tell with very little. Raymond Carver and Robert Coover, too. For a while I was heavy into the French writers Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras--very interesting writing there.

Essentially, I take what I can from whatever interests me, and like with the Song of Lunch I use whatever lessons I've learned to help me tell the story I want to tell. Just happens that for the last decade or so those stories have all been in the spy genre.

Why the spy genre? you might ask. It's because of the influence of writers like le Carre, Len Deighton, and Charles McCarry, who have taught me the infinite flexibility of the espionage genre and have encouraged me to stretch it to fit my own personal obsessions. So far, it's worked out all right...

flag