Editors note: Daniel Silva is one of America’s most prolific and popular novelists. His latest book, The New Girl, is officially out today, July 16th. Look for a full review of the book in The Cipher Brief this Friday, written by Cipher Brief Expert Rob Richer, who himself has had an incredible real-life career filled with intelligence and intrigue.
Silva’s latest book, The New Girl is about the daughter of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia who goes missing from her exclusive private school in Geneva and how Gabriel Allon, the head of Israeli intelligence, is the unlikely choice to try to rescue her.
Just before setting out on a cross-country book tour, I asked Silva a few questions about the new book. Full disclosure: I’ve known him for more than 20 years, so in this interview, rather than focus too much on the details of book, we talked more about the process and challenges of producing a series of novels and relying on real-world events as inspiration. The transcript of our conversation has been slightly edited for length and clarity.
Harlow: Congratulations on the publication of The New Girl, which if I'm not mistaken, is your 22nd novel?
Silva: It is my 22nd novel.
Harlow: I looked it up, and you've published a new novel every year since 1996, with the exception of 1997 and 2001.
Silva: Well, '97 was a hiccup in that my first book was published in very late December, and it was, for all intents and purposes, it was a '97, winter of '97 book. It just had a weird anomaly where the actual copyright is '96. But I have published a book a year. Then I just slid a little bit in a calendar, but I've never really missed a full year.
Harlow: Good, I thought you might have been goofing off for a couple years there.
Silva: I wasn't goofing off (chuckling). What I was doing, was trying to hold down two jobs. I was trying to keep my day job and write novels on the side. It just took me a little extra time to get the second one finished. The way I got the second one finished is that my publisher tacked a few extra books onto my contract, made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and so I left journalism and started writing full-time.
Harlow: You open The New Girl with a note to the readers where you explain that you had started work on the book in August of last year using Mohammad bin Salman as a model for one of the principal characters, then you had to set it aside following the Khashoggi murder. While you still have an MbS-like character in the book figuring large, clearly, you had to make adjustments. Has this put you off a bit when it comes to future books and basing characters too much on real world situations?
Silva: No, I feel very comfortable writing about the world as it exists around us. I think one of the interesting facets of the Gabriel Allon series is that it has chronicled the first 18, 19 years of this new millennium. The books have been published, as you say, once a year. They are roughly in sync with the real calendar. Things don't always happen in the Gabriel Allon universe the way they happen in the real world and the world in which you and I live. It's a fascinating, sometimes chaotic period of history which we find ourselves in, and the world is changing rapidly.
I've had it happen a couple of times where something I was writing was actually happening in the real world. I tried to capture the Arab Spring as it was happening, and I managed to do that successfully. A couple years ago, I wrote a book called The Black Widow that depicted an attack by ISIS in Paris. In that year, it happened in November, where what I had written had sort of come true.
It's just something that I wrestle with all the time. I write very close to the edge, and I try to catch history in the act and try to catch lightning in a bottle. But, no, this does not deter me from doing that in the future.
Harlow: One of the hallmarks of all of your books is the enormous attention to detail that you provide on geographic locations and descriptions of locales. One of the things that I like is that at the end of the book you have a section where you tell the readers which things are true and which ones you've made up. Does that come from reader feedback or is it just something you do?
Silva: It's something that I like to do. Part of it is a little bit tongue and cheek if you read it carefully. It's a little signal to the reader that while my books deal with serious issues, I don't necessarily take everything quite so seriously. But I am aware of the fact - because I'm guilty of this myself - that when I'm reading non-fiction, people read differently now. If you're reading an e-book on your iPad or your phone, I don't know how people read fiction on a phone, but they do, and you have a little computer right there, and you can highlight and check and look at things and look at pictures and imagery of and video of things that I'm writing about, while you're reading the book. I do have a large fan base and a large international fan base, and heaven forbid if I make some mistake or choose to make a mistake.
In this novel, for example, everything isn't exactly in sync in terms of the Iran Nuclear Deal, and what happened in Saudi Arabia and the murder of my fictitious journalist. Everything's a little slightly out of order in Gabriel's universe, but I guarantee you that I will be inundated with emails from readers. Despite the disclaimer I put in, that this happened before this, and this happened after this and things like that.
A part of it is an attempt on my part to come clean at the end, to say, what I was inspired by, and where I drew from. These are the facts to support my conclusions within the book. Also, it's just a defensive shield to let people know not to take everything they read in this book as gospel.
Harlow: One of the other things I noticed as a long-time reader of yours is that there are a lot of references to previous books in the manuscript itself. But, if you hadn't the previous books, you'd think this was just exposition. Is that a wink and a nod to your long-time readers or just a way to expand the interest in some of the characters who have been in previous books?
Silva: Well, I have been wrestling for many, many years with a wonderful problem, and that is that unlike a lot of long-running series, the Gabriel Allon series continues to grow. I get many new readers with each new entry in the series. I have been engaged in a 10-year wrestling match, maybe even a little bit longer, of trying to balance competing interests - that I'm writing for people who have read every single book, sometimes multiple times, and I'm writing for many thousands of people who are new to the series, each and every book.
I try to get the balance right. I don't want to inundate old readers with unnecessary detail and backstory and references to previous exploits. But, at the same time, I've got to make sure that the new readers can pick up, in this case, number 19 in the series and be comfortable with it and not feel lost at sea, and asking why Gabriel Allon has this relationship with this person or that person, because, he does have a diverse cast of accomplices that includes art dealers, priests, art thieves, hit men. He's got a lot of strange relationships that he's accumulated over the years, like all of us. I need to give the reader a helping hand sometimes to make sure that he or she is comfortable with what's on the page, while, at the same time, not boring the old reader, so it's not easy.
Harlow: When you've written 19 novels with the same characters in it, do you ever find yourself writing a bit of dialogue, and then discovering that you used that same dialogue six books ago or something like that?
Silva: I am sure that there's repetition in the novels. But I can't sit and go back and read every single line that I've ever written. I do have searchable copies, and I look for glaring things. But, no, I don't worry about that.
Harlow: Your main hero, Gabriel Allon, is now the head of the Israeli intelligence service. But, essentially, he started out as an assassin. There are a number of successful series of fiction, including your books, Vince Flynn Mitch Rapp series, Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne series, where the heroes are assassins. Do you have any thoughts on why assassins are of particular interest to the reading public, where they wouldn't embrace a real-world assassin, but in the world of fiction that it's somehow intriguing?
Silva: Well, I tell you, with my assassin, I definitely built a whole other world around him and many other aspects of his character to justify and explain why he reluctantly did what he was asked to do by his country after the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. My character is not quite as cold-blooded, he’s an art restorer after all. And he was so affected by what he did when he was first drawn into Israeli intelligence, that his hair turned gray almost overnight, and he lost the ability to paint and became an art restorer instead. In creating a protagonist who's an assassin, I went to great lengths to make sure that he was a sympathetic character not some robotic killer. A lot of very popular characters on the literary landscape right now are men of violence. Jack Reacher, for example, is a man of violence. I think in a chaotic, unpredictable world, readers like to think that there are actors and operatives out there who are looking out for them, and who are giving the bad guys, the evildoers, the comeuppance and the justice that they deserve.
Harlow: You started out as a reporter. Your wife, Jamie Gangel, is a highly successful journalist, but, unless I'm mistaken, there aren't a ton of central characters in your books that are in the mainstream media. Is that intentional?
Silva: I've got a small, recurring character in the British media, but I have written journalists before. But, I interrupted you.
Harlow: No, I was just thinking, normally, people say: “write what you know.”
Silva: Oh God, that's the worst advice. Does George Orwell know about a world in the future that is controlled by Big Brother, and he's re-writing the English language and deleting words every day? That is just, I just always thought was just the dumbest, dumbest advice. That's what research and imagination are for.
Harlow: That takes me to my final question about imagination. Have you ever come up with assassination techniques or methods of mass murder, that you decide are too diabolical, and that you don't want to write about because you don't want to put ideas in someone’s head?
Silva: I think that if the bad guys are looking to my books for ideas that means we're probably all pretty safe. I've never been one for inventing giant diabolical sorts of plotting. I use the techniques that we see day in and day out. I would never, ever have imagined using a nerve agent and spreading a nerve agent around an English town to kill someone. Or using radioactive material to kill someone. Vladimir Putin's Russia is using techniques that I would have never even dreamed of using in a novel. A few years ago, it wouldn't have seemed remotely plausible, that a Russian leader might use weapons of mass destruction inside Britain. Gabriel Allon started out with a .22 caliber Beretta pistol, and that's the way he goes about his work.
Harlow: Thank you very much for your time. I’ve read and enjoyed all your previous books. The New Girlis my favorite. It’s a page turner to the very last page. Best of luck with it – and stay safe out there on the book tour.
Silva: Thank you.
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