The Art of Writing Cold War Political Assassin Fiction
Recently, I’ve been working on my fiction. The art of writing Cold War political fiction stories set in the days of political assassins who hail from every nation which has something to win or lose.
Concrete walls, dark figures sitting in a bar, a pub located just fifty metres from Check-Point-Charlie. “The Black Eagle”. A real meeting point in the day.
Colourful characters of the night who pass slips of paper to dog walkers — “The spring flowers are late, no?” — “It will rain, then they will bloom again.”
So tempting to write tongue in cheek clap trap, the English sense of humour is always the writer’s foe.
They are spies, they don’t want to be caught in the act of bad dialogue — they must escape the scene. Get away, but nearly be caught by the cleaning lady with a mop who is in fact not a cleaning lady with a mop, but Carla, the Russian agent renowned for her adept manner in killing enemy agents.
She doesn’t bat and eyelid as cyanide hisses from the end of her silver pen. Her victim slumps over the banister. The wooden handle of her mop clatters to the floor, a door slams, and Carla is gone. She will never be caught…
