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I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.

I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.

I always liked spy stories.

I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.

My siblings and I had this theory that my parents were spies.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

I think I would have been a hopeless spy. I love telling stories and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret.

I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative - completely based on 'The Conversation,' the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like... Gene Hackman.

I've always loved spy stories. Who can resist?

I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.