Once in a while, as a writer, an idea comes along so compelling you burn to head to your laptop and start working on it straightaway. Secret Service, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and is now an ITV drama, was one of those moments.
This changing geopolitical environment was occupying my every working moment, as it was most journalists. It seemed to me that several things were obviously true: we were in a new Cold War, which was more complex and more dangerous than the old one, and one in which our enemies’ goals – undermining democratic norms and ultimately democracy itself – were considerably easier to achieve.
One sunny afternoon, I was walking past the Secret Intelligence Service’s HQ in Vauxhall, London, when I started to wonder what it would be like for a real-life SIS officer to be wrestling with some of these issues. What if you were running an operation to bug some Moscow Centre bigwigs on vacation, which yielded the nuclear weapons-grade intelligence that the British Prime Minister had cancer and was about to resign – and that one of the candidates to replace him was some kind of Russian asset or spy? How would your superiors react? What if the Foreign Secretary, technically the boss of SIS, was one of the leading suspects?
Earlier on in my career for ITV News, I had been a foreign correspondent based in Asia. I had periodically been deployed to dangerous places, so I know what it’s like to have a young family and feel incredibly conflicted and uncertain about getting on a plane to a war zone. I also know what it feels like to be shot (Jakarta, 1999, in a riot). I wanted to bring all of that to the way I painted Kate. Courage in her world must inevitably come at a cost, both physical and emotional.
That afternoon in Vauxhall, I originally conceived the story as a TV drama. Ever since I turned my first novel, Shadow Dancer, into a film (directed by Oscar-winner James Marsh and starring Andrea Riseborough, Clive Owen and Gillian Anderson), I had done a lot of screenwriting for various producers. I pitched the idea of Secret Service to a few of them, who were enthusiastic. But in the very act of pitching, I realised the idea was so clear in my head that I couldn’t wait around for the TV development process to unfold in order to write it.
The novel did gratifyingly well, climbing to near the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list in paperback. And as soon as it was done, I started work on the television drama I had always conceived. I decided by then that I wanted to turn each of my novels into a film or TV drama myself in partnership with Gail Egan (The Constant Gardener, A Most Wanted Man – among many other films), a brilliant producer I particularly rated and liked. She found me a great co-writer called Jemma
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