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| David McCloskey (photo: Claire McCormack) |
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David McCloskey, referring to his third novel set within the CIA, The Seventh Floor (coming from W.W. Norton on October 1, 2024), confessed, "This one was harder because it was a whodunnit." Shelf Awareness admitted to madly rereading the book to search for breadcrumbs along the way, leading to the mole inside the Central Intelligence Agency who's feeding information to the Russians. "I hope I supplied enough information on each subject to make everyone a suspect," McCloskey said. Indeed he did. He is the author of two previous novels, Damascus Station--in which the main protagonists of The Seventh Floor, Artemis Aphrodite Procter and Sam Joseph, are also both leading characters--and Moscow X. A former CIA analyst, McCloskey worked in field stations across the Middle East and has briefed senior White House officials and Arab royalty. He lives in Texas.
Procter mentions that her lead instructor told her: "Spying is writing." Is that also your belief? How has each informed the other for you?
I like that line. It's not the Hollywood view of the business. Yet the agency record can only exist as what is written down [by the agent]. It is vital for everyone in [CIA] headquarters. If a case officer is meeting with an asset, that's the only record of what was said at the meeting. It's about the clarity of writing, being concise; it's kind of mundane. It's not sexy. Coming out of the agency and writing now, it's very different.
Economy of language and being concise is still important. The training by the CIA helped in the analytic writing of novels. The president's daily briefings, the script of life, the anodyne, bureaucratic stuff--those are not stories. It's a less linear process to write characters and to discover voice. I'm not limited to brief, concise paragraphs.
Procter and Sam also figured prominently in a previous novel. Do you start with characters and then find situations for them to operate within? Or do you begin with the plot and then populate them with the right characters?
The answer varies throughout the books; it's always a bit of both. In The Seventh Floor, I wanted to try a mole hunt story. I knew I wanted Procter to be a prominent player. I didn't know what role she'd play or the menagerie of suspects. I used to outline; I don't now. I start by playing around with characters and voice.
I knew I wanted there to be a group of friends at the agency--some are suspects, some are not. It's a messy process, but I don't have a better way. It's a very inefficient way.
Although you always keep the narrative in the third-person point of view, you have a wonderful way of getting inside the head of each of your characters--Procter certainly, but also Rem (head of Russia's "Special Section") and even Rem's wife, Ninel (Lenin spelled backwards, brilliant!). Does that come easily in early drafts? Or is that something you massage later?
There were certain voices that hit right in the beginning. In the first couple drafts, Rem did not exist. Nor did Sam. Irene/MINNIE [an assassin hired by the Russians] was more psychotic in the early drafts. She was fun to write, but not working in the storytelling. Yet I needed that destabilizing entity.
Rem came pretty quickly in later drafts. Now I think, how could the book exist without him? There are people you meet and feel like you've known them forever. Others, it's a longer process to get to know them. It's not any less deep, it just takes longer. Other people, you instantly know you don't click and want to find ways to get away from them. It's the same with characters, some of them deepen with time.
The name Ninel was common for girls born [in the U.S.S.R.] in the early '30s. She's a little young to have that name, but I wanted to indicate these were died-in-the-wool true believers.
Petra (a "derm," whose job at the CIA is to look for moles--aka anomalies in the agents' reports) was a favorite character for this reader.
When you dig into counter-espionage molehunters--in both the U.S. and in Britain--the derms are always older women, trusted. Not typically a case officer, usually they've come up through a less traditional route. They provided operational support and don't have much political sway.
Petra is like Procter--both have sweat equity with the agency. They have complaints about it, but they're loyal to the CIA. They're both wrestling with the question: What do you owe the place?
Humor seems like a survival tool for Procter and Sam, as well as Theo perhaps, and maybe even, deep down, Debs. Would you say that's a crucial tool for a good agent?
I think so. The reason I say this, the case officer job, the successful ones, have a way of communicating well and understanding people. Dark humor and an ability to laugh at the insane things that happen on the job. It's hard to do the job if you don't have a working sense of humor.
With this book, I wanted to write a story about friends and what different friendships can look like, how they can change over a lifetime, and the limits of what you can know about people.
The juxtaposition of humor and horror is so effective in the novel.
To me, the humor arises from the characters I seem to find. Procter has a dark sense of humor and uses it as a coping and defense mechanism--though she'd never admit it. Give her any dark situation, and she'll approach it with humor. Even when she shits her pants in the director's office, she has something to say. From a reader's standpoint, you have to enjoy that to go along on the Procter ride. It's there in Rem's humor, in Sam's humor.
Humor lets readers breathe a bit. You can manage the horror with humor.
Can you talk a bit about the Kassab brothers? They clearly agreed to help because of their friendship with Sam; when Procter joins them, Sam notes a look from them that says, "Not this lady."
The Kassab brothers played a decently large role in Damascus Station. There are people the CIA needs for their ability to do things in hostile and hard-to-get-around societies; they don't have the secrets themselves.
One of the reasons I wanted to put Sam in this story is that Procter and Sam go through hell together. In a book about friendships, Procter and Sam's was a genuine reciprocal friendship. Even though they don't know each other well, they probably have the most genuine friendship. Procter has a longer history with Bratva [her classmates at the Farm--Gus Raptis, Mac Mason, Theo Monk]. But she has a purer friendship with Sam.
Procter's life has been the Central Intelligence Agency. She's avenging people for CIA but also for herself. Because she's spent her life there, if she turns her back on it, she turns her back on herself. --Jennifer M. Brown