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Readers of Alan Judd's spy stories first met Charles Thoroughgood | :00:00. | :00:09. | |
when he was in the army, then when he was a trainee | :00:10. | :00:12. | |
in the Secret Service, but now a few years on, | :00:13. | :00:15. | |
He's top dog, but Whitehall doesn't work quite like that. | :00:16. | :00:19. | |
In Deep Blue, Thoroughgood spends almost as much time fighting | :00:20. | :00:22. | |
the bureaucracy around him and his rivals as the people | :00:23. | :00:26. | |
who are trying to steal something important and dangerous. | :00:27. | :00:29. | |
It might be thought by some people that when you reach the top | :00:30. | :00:49. | |
of the tree in the secret world, you know everything, | :00:50. | :00:51. | |
But in this book, Charles, your hero, discovers that | :00:52. | :01:00. | |
many of the battles he's fighting aren't with the other side or some | :01:01. | :01:03. | |
terrorist group or something, but with people around him. | :01:04. | :01:05. | |
I think that's not peculiar to the secret world either. | :01:06. | :01:10. | |
I think most organisations, maybe even the BBC, you might find | :01:11. | :01:14. | |
you devote a lot of your energies to internecine warfare, | :01:15. | :01:17. | |
or to problems within the organisation which stop | :01:18. | :01:19. | |
So that is part of Charles' dilemma and I think it's in a way easier | :01:20. | :01:26. | |
to write a spy novel if you have things going on on the home front | :01:27. | :01:30. | |
than if you're just fighting, as it were, the war abroad. | :01:31. | :01:33. | |
And that's life particularly in that kind of world because there's | :01:34. | :01:37. | |
so much you can't say, even to fairly close colleagues. | :01:38. | :01:42. | |
I mean that might also be true in the BBC, who knows? | :01:43. | :01:45. | |
I couldn't possibly comment, but that is the way | :01:46. | :01:47. | |
Yes, there's a necessary compartmentalisation. | :01:48. | :01:52. | |
of people in secret organisations tend not to talk about their secrets | :01:53. | :01:57. | |
People in secret organisations tend not to talk about their secrets | :01:58. | :01:59. | |
to other people in the organisation who have different secrets. | :02:00. | :02:02. | |
One of the things about Deep Blue, and I'm not going to go | :02:03. | :02:05. | |
into the plot because it would ruin it for anyone who | :02:06. | :02:08. | |
One of the things about it is that there's a kind of old-fashioned | :02:09. | :02:12. | |
quality to it in a sense that the crises, the threats, | :02:13. | :02:14. | |
the panic doesn't really change with the ages. | :02:15. | :02:16. | |
I mean, there might be different technology. | :02:17. | :02:18. | |
You might be intercepting phone calls in a contemporary way that | :02:19. | :02:21. | |
you couldn't have done before, but the fundamentals | :02:22. | :02:28. | |
No, I think the fundamentals of spying don't change. | :02:29. | :02:38. | |
It's often said to the second oldest profession and essentially, | :02:39. | :02:40. | |
you're dealing with intelligence, with people telling other | :02:41. | :02:42. | |
people secrets, or not telling them secrets, | :02:43. | :02:44. | |
And there are various ways in which the telling can happen. | :02:45. | :02:47. | |
It can be technical, it can be person to person, | :02:48. | :02:50. | |
or it could be whatever you like, but essentially, you're dealing | :02:51. | :02:52. | |
And, of course, what is not said is often as important as what is said. | :02:53. | :02:57. | |
What makes Charles Thoroughgood, your central character, | :02:58. | :03:04. | |
whom we met originally in Legacy when he was training | :03:05. | :03:08. | |
to be an officer in MI6, what makes him good at his job? | :03:09. | :03:12. | |
Well, I think he, erm, well I'm not always sure he is good | :03:13. | :03:17. | |
at his job and it's a bit of an accident, he's | :03:18. | :03:20. | |
He never expected to and it was only because of treachery | :03:21. | :03:29. | |
within the higher circles that he did. | :03:30. | :03:30. | |
I think he's good at his job because he's determined to get | :03:31. | :03:33. | |
I think that's what marks him out and he's not too committed to it. | :03:34. | :03:38. | |
That's a very interesting observation. | :03:39. | :03:42. | |
Do you mean that the people who are sometimes best at that | :03:43. | :03:46. | |
kind of thing are people who despite perhaps moments | :03:47. | :03:49. | |
of excitement, moments of, you know, important action, | :03:50. | :03:54. | |
nonetheless keep it in perspective and make it only | :03:55. | :03:56. | |
I think the best people do because after all, | :03:57. | :04:00. | |
you're dealing with human beings and if you're not much | :04:01. | :04:02. | |
of a human being yourself, you don't understand other human | :04:03. | :04:05. | |
So you need that kind of perspective, or ought | :04:06. | :04:08. | |
I suspect that anyone reading this book or its predecessors who doesn't | :04:09. | :04:13. | |
know anything about you and perhaps reads a biography that says, | :04:14. | :04:16. | |
a biographical note that says, former soldier and diplomat, | :04:17. | :04:19. | |
might suspect that you have some experience of labouring | :04:20. | :04:22. | |
in the secret vineyards, and you have, haven't you? | :04:23. | :04:30. | |
People have said that about me in print and to my face. | :04:31. | :04:35. | |
It's quite interesting that you should raise it. | :04:36. | :04:37. | |
In that case, let's talk about the people that you may have | :04:38. | :04:42. | |
reason to know something about and how they behave | :04:43. | :04:44. | |
because you've talked about Thoroughgood not letting this | :04:45. | :04:46. | |
Well, I think you've got to have a life outside what you do, | :04:47. | :04:55. | |
If your life is wholly in what you do, you become confined | :04:56. | :05:00. | |
within it and especially if you're working in the secret world, | :05:01. | :05:03. | |
which is, you know, cut off from most other parts of humanity, | :05:04. | :05:06. | |
it's a good idea to have an idea of what the rest of humanity's doing | :05:07. | :05:10. | |
and to see that you are actually only part of a bigger picture. | :05:11. | :05:13. | |
You say cut off from the rest of humanity, which of course | :05:14. | :05:19. | |
is an interesting observation because it is inevitable, | :05:20. | :05:21. | |
and we see this in your novel to the person of Thoroughgood | :05:22. | :05:25. | |
and his friends, that you are engaged inevitably in deceit. | :05:26. | :05:30. | |
Perhaps benign deceit of family and friends as well as, | :05:31. | :05:33. | |
you know, the other side, whatever it may be at | :05:34. | :05:36. | |
The question of deceit is really very interesting because in a way, | :05:37. | :05:41. | |
I think for many people in the intelligence professions, | :05:42. | :05:46. | |
honesty is the most important quality and they need to be | :05:47. | :05:49. | |
You deceive the people you should deceive for the right reasons. | :05:50. | :05:55. | |
You don't deceive just promiscuously or for the wrong reasons, | :05:56. | :06:00. | |
and you have to be very honest with yourself about who you're | :06:01. | :06:03. | |
Promiscuous deceit must be a hazard of the trade though? | :06:04. | :06:09. | |
I mean, people learn techniques of deceit that could carry over | :06:10. | :06:15. | |
And perhaps enjoy it a little bit too much. | :06:16. | :06:21. | |
I think we all enjoy knowing a secret and it's a form of power | :06:22. | :06:28. | |
Somebody once said to me, I think who's got reason | :06:29. | :06:36. | |
to know about these things, that dealing in the secret world | :06:37. | :06:39. | |
as Thoroughgood does, having reached the top particularly, | :06:40. | :06:41. | |
what you're dealing with in the end is the riddle of power. | :06:42. | :06:44. | |
What you're dealing with is trying to work out why someone is doing | :06:45. | :06:49. | |
something, how they're using the power they have | :06:50. | :06:54. | |
If you apply it to the British system, the British intelligence | :06:55. | :07:05. | |
agencies, for example, do not have a great deal of power | :07:06. | :07:08. | |
in the British state, unlike many other countries | :07:09. | :07:09. | |
The British intelligence agencies essentially advise. | :07:10. | :07:14. | |
They provide information and governments make the decision. | :07:15. | :07:17. | |
So real power lies with Whitehall governance, but of course within any | :07:18. | :07:23. | |
organisation there are power structures and of course there's | :07:24. | :07:25. | |
Why do you enjoy writing about this world? | :07:26. | :07:30. | |
You've been celebrated for a series of remarkable short novels, | :07:31. | :07:37. | |
some of them almost novellas, and yet you return to this theme. | :07:38. | :07:40. | |
What does it allow you to do as a writer that you enjoy? | :07:41. | :07:43. | |
I think it allows for an element of humour, | :07:44. | :07:48. | |
I mean, not to make them very funny books, so you could do entirely | :07:49. | :07:55. | |
humorous books about the secret world, but whenever | :07:56. | :07:57. | |
people are trying to be secret, things go wrong. | :07:58. | :07:59. | |
I mean if you arrange to a man with red hair, | :08:00. | :08:09. | |
I mean if you arrange to meet a man with red hair, | :08:10. | :08:11. | |
six foot seven in the nearest bar to the BBC here tonight at six | :08:12. | :08:16. | |
o'clock, you'd go into that bar and there'd be four them. | :08:17. | :08:18. | |
All carrying the Daily Telegraph under their left arm. | :08:19. | :08:25. | |
Well, I haven't decided because each of the Thoroughgood spy novels | :08:26. | :08:35. | |
was never written with a successor in mind, so I've always had | :08:36. | :08:38. | |
I would never have made him chief early on if I thought | :08:39. | :08:43. | |
And that, of course, is power by another name. | :08:44. | :08:47. | |
Alan Judd, author of Deep Blue out in paperback, thank you very much. | :08:48. | :08:58. | |
Good evening. We really have seen lots of showers today, some | :08:59. | :09:11. | |
thunderstorms for good measure, this was the scene at Edgbaston earlier | :09:12. | :09:15. | |
today. I'm surprised we got as much play as we did. We look at what has | :09:16. | :09:17. | |
been happening and | :09:18. | :09:18. |