Gelernter’s Captain Grey’s Gambit (Norton, Apr.) takes British naval intelligence officer Thomas Grey, posing as a chess player, to Europe in an effort to smuggle a high-level aide of Napoleon to England.
Where did the idea for this series come from?
My grandfather, Richard Backus, introduced me to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books. No doubt one of the reasons that series hooked me was the similarity of “fighting naturalist” Stephen Maturin to my grandfather, who was the navigator of a B-24 bomber during WWII. After the war, he studied ornithology and became an oceanographer. He was hired by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, became one of the field’s foremost experts both on sonar and sharks, and sailed around the world. When Peter Benchley was writing Jaws, and needed information on sharks, he called Woods Hole to talk to my grandfather.
How did that lead to Thomas Grey?
In 2019, I read Goldfinger and got a big kick out of it. The scenes in Switzerland made me think of my grandfather, who made an emergency landing there during the war—and the thought suddenly popped into my head, what if O’Brian’s Napoleonic war fiction had told spy stories instead of sea stories? There didn’t seem to be any such novels around, and I wanted to read one, so I wrote Hold Fast, the first Grey novel.
You’ve said that you don’t aspire to remind readers of John le Carré. Why?
I think that you can break spy books down into Fleming and le Carré—books where the good guys are clearly the good guys, and the bad guys are clearly the bad guys, and those where there’s a lot of moral ambiguity and the good guys are deeply flawed and the bad guys, you know, are bad—but not in ways that the good guys aren’t. You’ve got your hopeful spy novels and your bleak spy novels, and I prefer reading more hopeful novels in general. I feel like I get enough bleakness just from regular life and as a Mets fan; I don’t really need it in my books.
Was Grey always going to be half-American?
That was one of the things that had changed the most from my original conception for the series. I had wanted to leave his ancestry ambiguous, because I thought it might present a good future plot opportunity. My agent said that it would be really interesting, since the books’ settings are approaching the War of 1812, and there’s going to be a lot of tension. And you have an American audience—maybe you could throw some more Americanness into the book. And so it seemed obvious that Grey should be half-American.
