Paul Vidich’s fourth novel, The Mercenary (Pegasus Books), a spy thriller set in the 1980s Soviet Union, features protagonist Aleksandr Garin, whose Russian roots belie his America loyalties.  It affirms Vidich’s status as a writer of character-driven stories involving espionage.  Since his debut novel, An Honorable Man, was selected by Publisher’s Weekly as a Top 10 Mystery and Thriller in 2016, Vidich has won praise for his smart and moving mysteries, which also include The Good Assassin and The Coldest Warrior, lauded in The National for its unflagging momentum and deft handling of vexing moral issues.

Before he turned to writing full-time, Vidich had a distinguished career in music and media at Time Warner, AOL, and Warner Music Group, where he was Executive Vice President in charge of global digital strategy.  A member of the National Academies Committee on the Impact of Copyright Policy on Innovation in the Digital Era, he testified in Washington on digital matters.

Vidich contributes short fiction and articles to publications including the Wall Street Journal, LitHub, CrimeReads, and The Nation. He received his MFA from Rutgers-Newark, and he is co-founder and editor of Storyville, which publishes one short story a week for phones and tablets.

In addition to his writing, Vidich serves as an independent board director, angel investor, and advisor to Internet media companies in video and music. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Vidich served as a Trustee and received a Distinguished Alumni Award from his alma mater, and received an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the board of directors of Poets and Writers, the New School for Social Research, and the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation.

In a conversation that ranged from Shakespeare and John Le Carré  to virtual trips to Moscow, Vidich spoke by telephone from his home in lower Manhattan with Bethanne Patrick for The National.

Q: First of all, congratulations on The Mercenary. At first, it seemed to me a bit more formula-driven than your previous books. Does this feel like a departure for you?

A: The challenge that you have after you've done one book is what book are you going to write next? Right. The Coldest Warrior, which was based on a close personal story, one that emerged from a family tragedy took a lot out of me. [Editor’s note: Vidich’s uncle, Frank Olson, an Army scientist who worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland, “jumped or fell” from his room at the Statler Hotel in New York City in 1953. Full story here.)

I decided that I wanted to have a story that had a conventional thriller arc. The new novel has a setup, what is known as a “request moment,” at the beginning, one of the conventions of spy thrillers.

But, as I try to do in all my books, I dig into my characters’ lives – and I found that the thriller arc was a convenient structure that allowed me to do more of that digging. Aleksander Garin became a very interesting and somewhat enigmatic character to me. I also wanted Natalya, the Russian woman he meets early on, to be his strong counterpart. In some ways, women are the moral center of all my books.

Q: Because we’ve spoken in the past, I know you are married and that your marriage is a happy one. Do you keep women as the “moral center” of your books because your wife is a strong woman, or because you think of women as providing the moral center for all families?

A: If I go back and describe my mother, who was my initial model for a strong woman, I would say she was unusual for her time. She was born in 1922, and entered the University of Wisconsin in 1940, where she met my father. She was politically forthright, and became a political leader on campus, embracing all of the major issues of the day. She was the daughter of a Protestant minister and had a deeply embedded moral compass, along with being ambitious in her own right. She wound up getting a Ph.D. and becoming a professor of sociology.

It was remarkable then, especially when I think of how she raised four children while working. I could see in my parents’ marriage that her ambition was difficult; the competition between them meant they divorced when I was 18. But she was a very smart woman who had a gift for appreciating the needs of people with less than her than she had.

My wife, Linda, also has a PhD, in literature. She taught at Hunter College. One of the things that’s been important to my writing career might sound strange. Linda had a stroke in 2014, before my first book came out. She’s recovered, but from 2015 to 2019 I effectively became her teaching assistant. I would go with her to class, sit with her, help her with the computer, and I basically took all her classes.

One of those classes was in Shakespeare, and the other a survey in Western literature, which included a lot of references to Shakespeare. I read all the plays, which I had never read before. My wife became my tutor, as I read literature that I had never read in college, or as an adult.

Q: Let’s talk about the title. It’s telling, and it also makes the reader ask who the real mercenary is.

A: I took a class with Rivka Galchen once and she made this comment about titles. “The title is the lighting in the room.” It establishes the ambience for the reader and, that's how I meant this title to work. It may be ambiguous as to who the real mercenary is, but there’s also a certain amount of irony implied. Nobody trusts the one character who is most trustworthy.

Q: Speaking of trustworthy or untrustworthy – your final scene takes place at the CIA’s Hall of Heroes.

A: I was in the CIA building Langley once as a reporter, but didn’t get beyond the guards. They have meeting rooms for the press that you go to before you go through any kind of lockdown. That was my only time on the premises, but I’ve been there many times in my imagination.

Sometimes you’re going to have to “go to” a place without actually having been to the place. One of the things I try to do in depicting the CIA is to show the good people, and also the ways in which the work can sometimes be corrosive. Good people rise up, and good people fall, and good people suffer. I always include family as part of this, which is part of my model of the CIA that I think is different from some people’s. When you read the biographies and some of these are autobiographies, you know, they talk about the work, but they also talk about the family and they also talk about the stress on the family.

I got an email from a woman this morning, as a matter of fact, in which she told me that her father worked at the CIA all through her childhood. She mentions she can talk about it now because he died in 2012, but growing up, she said, she could never talk about it with anyone. It was lonely for her. Then she says, he retired in the late sixties and became a history professor. It was then that her real father emerged, a kind generous, happy person. The students loved him, and she wrote “reading your books has really helped me understand my father and the stress those people were under.”

And he was only an analyst!

Q: The stress of trying to maintain a double life is huge. I love what that woman says about the real person emerging, because one of the things I noticed in this book is that when Aleks and Natalya do wind up in bed together for the first time, they don’t even have sex. They need time to let down their walls.

A: Exactly. I want to find the humanity in these characters. A friend from college who is a book critic in London recently wrote to me, about John Le Carré’s death, that sometimes a writer needs the structure of genre to fully tell a story, to fully explore his themes. I’m no Le Carré, but I do see that when someone who works in genre hits a stride as he did in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, he can release worries about plot and, as Le Carré did, comment on English social class. The conventions give you space to explore human frailties, and what’s most important about revealing frailties is that you also get to reveal their opposite. Honor and trust and truth.

Q: If you don't have a family, you're safer, but you're also more vulnerable. And for mercenaries, their “safe group” can wind up being like a family. You also have one particular family that survives.

A: Yes, and at first I was trying to create a little bit of conflict between husband and wife to ratchet up the drama. But the thing I discovered when I was reading a lot of autobiographies of Soviet KGB officers and others is that they’re identical, in some ways, to their CIA counterparts. They got caught up in the work because that was their way of getting ahead, for the Soviet officers sometimes their only way of getting ahead, and all of these people sacrifice a lot for their families and ask a lot of their families. Russia is a very family-oriented country, and the idea of defecting and leaving your wife or child behind is just unconscionable. 

Q: One of the Soviet characters is almost more cunning than your protagonist.

A:  Yeah, absolutely. Although he’s still at Garin’s mercy, at the mercy of what Garin can deliver. It makes them very uncomfortable, but they still form a bond. I think they formed that bond because in some ways, as I said, they are very alike. I think Garin admires his counterpart.

I tried to create a main character who has these deep and divided loyalties. First, although he was brought up in Russia, he never knew his father. He knows he has a Russian inheritance, but because of his later upbringing and education, he has an American mind, and that dichotomy creates all sorts of conflicts for him. When you’re creating characters, you try to think about the things that interest them but also the things that confuse them.

Q: You have told me before that you feel a tug between your two sides, as well. Tell us about that.

A: My father’s family is Slovenian, immigrants to the United States, while my mother’s family came over on the Mayflower. I’ve always been fascinated by the differences between those experiences. What combination of characteristics do I have, you know? On the other hand, it’s no contest when it comes to interactions in real life. I'm very close to my Slovenian cousins and my wife and I try to get there every year. Well, with this pandemic, maybe every other year. There’s a lot of affinity between my family and these cousins, we have a wonderful time when we visit for a few weeks. I even though about getting a Slovenian passport, but if I tried to use it to get into Slovenia, they might talk to me in Slovenian, which I can’t speak. It’s a complicated and unique language that would take a lot of time to learn!

Q: Tell me about your process for this thriller, and if it was different in any way from your process on the previous ones, because it does sound like you do a great deal of research.

A: It was a little different, because two of my books were based in Washington, D.C. and I could visit there. The one set in Cuba was different because I’ve been there a number of times and spent three years of my childhood in the Caribbean.

So, the biggest difference in researching this book was that I’ve never been to Moscow. I felt comfortable writing about the political environment, having lived through the final years of the Soviet Union, but I had to ask myself if I felt capable of writing a novel about a place I’d never visited. It was a bit daunting.

But I realized in a way that the book is about a place, and I did something that you could only do these days. I visited Moscow virtually. Not every city is like this, but with virtual reality you can walk down almost any Moscow street, look at the buildings, see the way people are dressed, the storefronts, and more. Even though I couldn’t literally see the Moscow of the 1980s, I could follow the streets my characters walk, look at the old U.S. embassy where the action takes place.

Q: Tell me a bit about how you work with and research setting, in this case, largely Moscow.

A: In some ways, when you’re writing a historical novel, nobody can really go back to its exact setting. You create a world and populate it and what you need to do is make that world authentic and correct for your characters. One thing I’ve learned is to write through the eyes of an American character. I don’t think it would work, at least for me, if I tried to write about a Russian, or a Cuban, or any other background. For this book I read about 30 books about Russia, all aspects of its life and culture, just trying to breathe in Moscow specifically.

Q: What can you share about your next book?

A: The next one features a woman as the main character, a young American woman who moves to West Berlin with her husband in 1989. They divorce, and she marries an East German, not knowing he works for the Stasi. It’s called The Matchmaker, and it should be out in 2022.

 Bethanne Patrick is a freelance book critic who writes frequently for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and others. She tweets @TheBookMaven and serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Patrick is currently writing a memoir for Counterpoint Press.