Ask the Author: Mark Zvonkovic
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Mark Zvonkovic
The idea for A Lion in the Grass came from two sources. I enjoy history. Reading about World War II and its aftermath, I saw a similarity to the conflicts in Yugoslavia and French Indochina. They were both regional conflicts made bigger by meddling from western countries. In World War II the allies were conflicted about which group to support in country: Tito or Mihailovic in Yugoslavia against the Germans and Ho Chi Minh or France in Indochina against the Japanese. The conflicts spilled over to the post-war world with devastating consequences. My reading concerning those conflicts led to the chapters in my book about the difficulties of my protagonist, Raymond Hatcher, when he was in those countries. The second source came from my reading over many years of literary spy stories, from John Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy to the wonderfully written stories of Alan Furst (The Spies of Warsaw), Joseph Kanon (Istanbul Passage), Eric Ambler (A Coffin for Dimitrios), Charles Cumming (A Spy by Nature) and John le Carré (Smiley's People). I thought it would be interesting to follow a young man from his recruitment as a spy to the end of his life as a very old man. Everyone has difficult hurdles to overcome in his or her career, whether he or she be a lawyer, doctor, engineer or spy, and the internal moral challenges for a spy (which you never hear about from the James Bond type characters) I thought would be fascinating to imagine and develop. But would these challenges be that different from those faced by the rest of us? Raymond Hatcher thinks to himself on several occasions that his whole career has been a lie. To some extent, perhaps in not so spectacular a fashion as for Raymond, all of us who spend thirty to forty years in a job ask ourselves the same question.
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