'I never considered writing in any field but spy fiction,' Silva says.

His parents, he says, were 'big readers,' and he recalls sneaking into their bedroom to read their copies of such mid-century best-selling authors as Sidney Sheldon. Allon, whose cover as an art restorer was all but blown after he thwarted a terrorist attack on the Vatican in last year's 'The Messenger,' must work with Muslim informants to save her.īorn in Michigan, raised in California, Silva wanted to be a novelist from childhood. But that's only a prelude to the main event - the kidnapping of an American ambassador's daughter by Egyptian and Palestinian jihadists. Silva's latest Gabriel Allon adventure, 'The Secret Servant,' begins with the murder of an outspoken terrorism scholar that recalls the 2004 assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. It was years before I could even think about it clearly, let alone write about it.' 'From my house I could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon that day. '9-11 was a tear in the fabric of history,' Silva says.

Yet Silva, already famous for his series featuring Israeli secret agent Gabriel Allon, wrote three more novels without reference to terrorism. 'I don't like to say it, but, yes, 9-11 has been good for spy fiction,' Silva says by phone from his home near Washington. Suddenly the global war on terror gave the international spy thriller a fresh diet of red meat. The aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War proved very hard on established masters of the genre, forcing the likes of John le Carre to scrounge in such marginal fields as corporate malfeasance to find conflict shady enough to write about.Īll that changed with 9-11.

Spy fiction famously thrives in times of unrest and turmoil. Daniel Silva, the best-selling spy novelist, is uncomfortable with the suggestion that terrorism has been a boon for his profession.

The unlikely spy