A Spy by Nature

Charles Cummings' first novel is an easy-to-read spy thriller set in the dog days of the Major government in the mid-90s. Alec Milius is a twenty-something ex-public schoolboy in a dead end job when he's offered the chance to apply to work for MI6 (or the Secret Intelligence Service as it is properly known). Loosely based on Cummings own experiences we are taken through the exam and interview process as Milius vies with half a dozen other candidates for the chance to become a spy. But the flaw in Milius' character is that he doesn't know when to stop lying, or at least embroidering the truth. A quality a spy needs, you might say, but with Milius it scuppers his chances and he finds himself out of work and at a loose end.
It is then that fate, in the shape of ex-spy and family friend Michael Hawkes, hand Milius a chance to indulge in a little industrial espionage with the dangling carrot of a job at MI5 at the end. So Alec starts work at a small oil company called Abnex, with orders to befriend two Americans who work for a rival company. They are also CIA agents. Welcome to the murky world of spy vs spy.
Cummings' prose is fluid and well written. The problem for me is that his protagonist isn't the most likeable of people. Milius is self-obsessed and incapable of sticking to the job at hand. The second two thirds of the book, where he's feeding false info to the Americans is rather aimless and meanders a bit too much. By the end he's put almost everyone he cares about in danger and this reader's reaction was “Well you shouldn't have been such a twat, should you?”
This modern spy thriller isn't in the same league as the best of LeCarre or Deighton, lacking the former's world weary density and the latter' down-to-earth depiction of the mundanity of espionage.
So, an easy read and it's probably worth exploring Cummings' later works. But the heir to Deighton, on this evidence, he's not.