Spy author Charles Cumming discusses his new title 'A Foreign Country'

Just before Amelia Levene takes over the British foreign spy service, she disappears in the south of France. No one knows where she is and British authorities scramble to locate her before word leaks to other countries or, worse, the media.

Panicked executives at MI6 summon disgraced agent Thomas Kell, a longtime friend and colleague of Amelia, to figure out what’s happened and why. The personal and the political soon collide, with forays into North Africa and across Europe.

Welcome to the brainy spy world of Charles Cumming, a young British author who, with the publication of “The Trinity Six” in 2011, drew comparisons to renowned thriller masters Alan Furst, John le Carré and Olen Steinhauer, among others. He returns this month with the story of Thomas Kell in A Foreign Country.

Readers first meet Kell seven months after the spy service coerced him to retire at the ripe old age of 42. Childless and on the verge of divorce, Kell awakes in a strange bed, nursing a “hangover comparable in range and intensity to the reproduction Jackson Pollock hanging on the wall of his temporary bedroom.”

Kell isn’t a man of derring-do like James Bond or Jack Reacher. Instead he relies on a mixture of smarts and intuition to solve problems of international intrigue.

Cumming keeps things moving with plenty of surveillance and tricks of the trade, but retains enough plausibility to make his hero relatable. Like George Smiley and other literary spies, Thomas Kell fascinates because of the constant tension between his ideals and the pragmatic reality of his trade.

A thumbnail sketch in “A Foreign Country” illustrates Kell’s quandary. “It occurred to him, as it often did in the depths of the night, that he knew only one way of being – a path that was separate to all others. Sometimes it felt as though his entire personality had grown out of a talent for the clandestine; he could not remember who he had been before the tap on the shoulder at twenty.”

Kell broods, to be sure, but he also proves nimble at switching aliases, popping hotel safes, and sizing up unexpected threats. During a recent interview from England, Cumming discussed the future of Kell, the differences between American and British spies, and whether the notion of a happy spy is an oxymoron. Following are excerpts:

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