On the surface, Paul Vidich’s novel The Poet’s Game (hardcover, Kindle) sounds like it’s a spy novel, just like his previous books.
But in the following email interview, Vidich says this is also, rather fittingly, “a love story that is disguised as a spy novel.”
Photo Credit: Bekka Palmer
To start, what is The Poet’s Game about, and when and where does it take place?
The premise is this: If you’re the director of the CIA and you receive credible evidence that Russia’s security forces have damning kompromat on the American president that makes him vulnerable to blackmail, what do you do? Call the White House? Bury the matter? Investigate without telling anyone?
The novel is set in Moscow and Washington DC during the fall of 2018, which if you remember, was a fraught time in American politics. There was substantial evidence that the Kremlin had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and there was substantial tension between America’s intelligence community and the White House about whether that interference altered the outcome of the election.
More broadly, the novel is about the spy’s world of seeming and being. What you think you know about someone — a spy or a spouse — may be shaped by what you’d like to believe about them.
Where did you get the idea for The Poet’s Game? And how different is the finished story from what you originally conceived?
I did about five months of research before I started to outline the novel. This process gave me a good sense of the novel’s arc before I started writing, but there were several serendipitous moments during writing when characters had their own view of what would happen, which reshaped the novel. A dissident Russian journalist, who I first saw as a minor character, assumed a major role in the story by force of her big personality. But generally speaking, the arc of the novel didn’t change much from the original outline.
Now, in the previous interview we did about your novel Beirut Station, we talked about how that story was rooted in real-life events. Is The Poet’s Game tied to actual events as well? Because it sure sounds like it is.
Real life events figure prominently in the background of the novel: John McCain’s funeral in the National Cathedral, for example, and tension between the White House and the CIA. But the characters and underlying story are inventions of my imagination. The president, who is never named, is a fictional character, formerly a Texas congressman, with attributes drawn from men who have occupied the White House.
And is there a reason you had Alex previously stationed in Moscow as opposed to Beijing or Tehran or Pyongyang? Or West Orange, New Jersey, for that matter?
There is a saying: spy novels are set in Berlin and Moscow because that’s where the spies are. And yes, Alex Matthews was formerly CIA station chief in Moscow. He had recruited a network of assets there, naming each after an English Romantic poet. The novel’s through line centers around a Russian double agent named Byron.
The Poet’s Game is clearly a spy novel. But is it a spy novel like Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels or is it more grounded like one of John Le Carre’s?
The novel is grounded in emotional relationships, which makes it closer to the types of spy novels written by Len Deighton and Joe Kanon. I am drawn to a spy’s personal life more than to plot antics, though there is plenty of plot in the novel. My characters could have gone into banking, or publishing, or real estate, but chose to join the dangerous service of intelligence. But, at their core, they are people with fears, ambitions, resentments, and needs.
Also, is it just a spy novel, or is it something else as well, like noir or a murder mystery?
The Poet’s Game is a love story that is disguised as a spy novel. Much of the plot deals with the exfiltration of a Russian asset, and the accompanying suspected mole in the CIA who is undermining the operation, but the heart of the novel, and what gives it emotional energy, is a love story.
The Poet’s Game is your seventh novel. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Poet’s but not on anything else you’ve written?
Len Deighton, who I had not read until two years ago, is a wonderful writer whose work is not as well known as Le Carre and Ian Fleming, but his novels hold up extremely well, and there is a hint of his literary sensibility in The Poet’s Game. The Ipcress File, which came out in 1962, launched his career, but his nine Bernie Samson novels were the peak of his talent.
What about non-literary influences? Was The Poet’s Game influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games?
Short answer, no.
Now, the cover of The Poet’s Game says it’s “A Spy In Moscow.” Your 2022 novel The Matchmaker was subtitled “A Spy In Berlin.” I know Poet’s isn’t a sequel, or in the same series as Matchmaker, but do the two novels take place in the same fictional universe? Oh, god, are we witnessing the birth of the Vidichverse?
Ha! There probably is such a thing as the V-verse, but if you’re in the bubble, as I am, I can’t see it. It takes looking in from the outside, a trick I haven’t mastered. But, there is a moral sensibility in my novels that is a little different from other writers in the genre. My protagonists suffer the moral ambiguity of their work, and sometimes question what they’re required to do. They operate in the gray toned world of espionage and are challenged by the work’s emotional demands.
But to answer the question, The Poet’s Game and The Matchmaker do operate in the same fictional universe. The settings are different, characters different, plots distinct, but the moral choices of the protagonists are similar.
You said earlier that The Poet’s Game wasn’t influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But do you think Poet’s could work as a movie, a TV show, or a game?
I think it would make a wonderful movie, or even a TV series. The novel has been pitched by my film co-agent to Hollywood, but no one had taken the bait.
But if someone does take the bait, who would you want them to cast as Alex and the other main characters?
Eddie Redmayne would make a very good Alex Matthews. He has the right reserve and cautious innocence to capture Matthews’s moral complexity. I have enjoyed him in the remake of The Day Of The Jackal.
So, is there anything else you think potential readers need to know about The Poet’s Game?
There is a dramatic scene in Moscow’s underground tunnels, which were built in the late nineteenth century to redirect a tributary of the Moscow River, but were expanded by Stalin to permit escape from the Kremlin in the event Moscow came under siege by the Nazi’s. There book has some interesting lore about the tunnels.
Finally, if someone enjoys The Poet’s Game, what spy novel of someone else’s that’s set in Russia, or involves a spy who worked in Russia, would you suggest they check out?
I would recommend Joe Kanon’s Defectors, which is set in Moscow. It’s a well written Cold War story about betrayal between two brothers.
