Paul Vidich

Paul Vidich's seventh and newest novel is The Poet's Game. His previous novel, Beirut Station: Two Lives of a Spy, was selected by CrimeReads as one of the best espionage novels of 2023. Vidich's debut novel, An Honorable Man, was selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top 10 Mystery and Thriller in 2016. It was followed by The Good Assassin. His third novel, The Coldest Warrior, was widely praised in England and America, earning strong reviews from The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. It was shortlisted for the UK’s Staunch Prize and chosen as a Notable Selection of 2020 by CrimeReads.

Recently I asked Vidich about what he was reading. The author's reply:

I am fascinated by the different paths that espionage fiction has taken in the England, where is began with Erskine Childers and Eric Ambler in the early 20 th century, and its American expression, which didn’t emerge until the 1960’s with Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry. There are interesting differences between English and American spy fiction and to understand the differences, I recently began to reread early American spy fiction classics, Charles McCarry’s The Tears of Autumn and Robert Littell’s The Amateur.

McCarry, a CIA intelligence officer before he turned to writing novels, reimagines the assassination of JFK as an act of revenge for America’s killing of South Vietnam’s president Diem in 1963. McCarry’s protagonist, Paul Christopher, is a weary anti-Bond figure who pursues his theory against the advice of agency’s higher-ups, and finds himself out in the cold. It’s a fine novel with an interesting premise, and what makes it stand out is McCarry’s empathy for his protagonist’s loneliness, which borders on loveless despair.

Robert Littell’s protagonist in The Amateur is also an agency employee who goes out into the cold to exact personal revenge for the murder of his fiancé, also an agency employee, by terrorists affiliated with the KGB. Littell gives his protagonist the urgency of an amateur motivated by revenge, but his sardonic sense of humor adds needed humanity to the assassin he becomes.

Visit Paul Vidich's website.

Q&A with Paul Vidich.

My Book, The Movie: The Mercenary.

The Page 69 Test: The Mercenary.

Writers Read: Paul Vidich (January 2022).

The Page 69 Test: The Matchmaker: A Spy in Berlin.

Writers Read: Paul Vidich (October 2023).

My Book, The Movie: Beirut Station.

The Page 69 Test: Beirut Station.

--Marshal Zeringue