I'm Tom Bradby and I'm here in Waterstone's to talk about some of the
books that have inspired me over the years and I have to begin here,
Gerald Seymour, Harry's Game. I mean it's a great, obviously, but I think Gerald in
general and this book in particular, is what convinced me that you could be a
journalist and a thriller writer. It has such incredible texture, such incredible
research, you feel like you're on the streets of Belfast. That is of course
where I began my reporting career, much as Gerald did, so he's truly been an
inspiration to me. And I would say one thing if you're ever thinking of writing
a thriller, it's always good to start with a book that you think works perfectly,
break it down, see how it works; that's what I did with Harry's game and that's
how I got started. So all right I had the ambition, I had the wish to want to write
a book, but where do you start? How do you get any good? I was very, very fortunate
to end up with a brilliant agent called Mark Lucas but he got somewhat irascible
shall we say, politely, at my ability to deliver a... he loved the idea, you know,
an mi5 agent running a woman informer in the IRA and the intensity of that
relationship. But the quality fell far short of what he wanted in many, many
drafts. And my god did I write a lot of them. So he kept on asking me to come
back and read this book which I must have done at least six times in the
course of writing that novel and I've done so much more since.
Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs. If you ever want to know about
writing thrillers, it's all in here. Perfectly structured, particularly
in the way the political context puts pressure on the lead character Clarice
Starling to really move on and solve the case. It's just the most beautifully, most
brilliantly constructed thriller I've ever read. And when it comes to thrillers
if you don't get your mechanism right, your engine right, you can write an awful
lot of drafts without any decent conclusion. And I know because I have!
So when Mark my agent was done making me read Silence of the Lambs about 400 times he
needed further things with which to instruct me. This led to Presumed Innocent.
Now along with Silence of the Lambs I think this really is one of the
best thrillers ever written. Partly again because the political
context and the way the thriller engine, if you like, is woven into it is
so brilliantly, so subtly done; quite apart from the fact that Scott Turow
just in terms of his prose is the most wonderful writer. The other point is it
has a brilliant ending. He conceals it in an amazingly clever way and you get to the
end and you think I really should have seen that coming but I didn't. It's something I've
thought about a lot. Quite often you start writing a novel, you have a great
idea, but you haven't quite sorted the ending. I think a lot of thriller writers,
(no names, no pack drill) fall victim to that, so it's really important to have an
end that works and this just does brilliantly. And finally, as we still
weirdly like to say in television, I come to Berlin Game. Now this pre-dates
really my instruction from my agent Mark. It was just a book I absolutely loved
growing up that so perfectly captures the atmosphere of the old Cold War for
me. The grayness of it, the sense of not knowing what is truth and what is
falsehood. Something really that I've drawn on a lot in my writing over the
last year or two. This to me is a classic and I draw a direct line between that
and the inspiration for this, Secret Service which is my new book, just out,
which I guess really tries to capture the atmosphere of the new Cold War. The
Russians trying to undermine democracies all over the West, quite successfully it
has to be said. Obviously the idea here is simple: if you were the mi6 agent who
happened to know that the next British prime minister is probably a Russian spy,
what on earth would you do? A tiny bit complicated, so I've really tried to draw on
all of those things that I just mentioned: the political context, the
ending, the thriller structure, the characterization. Those are the writers
I've really drawn on, I hope you enjoy the result.