5 Tips for Building Suspense in a Spy Thriller

When I started writing my debut novel, The Handler—an espionage thriller in which a despairing spy blackmails the CIA into exfiltrating him on his terms—I wouldn’t say that I knew much of what I’m about to tell you. As a debut writer, my suspense was built through painful, time-consuming trial and error.

(5 Things to Keep in Mind When Writing About Spies.)

But by the time I sat down to write the second book in the series, Dead Drop—where a suave Iranian spy manipulates events to turn Israel’s Mossad against the CIA—I had the benefit of reader reviews. In analyzing their feedback (oh, so much of it), I saw consistent comments related to various suspense. (Hint: They like it and want more of it). 

Based on these reader reactions, I’ve now distilled five critical elements of spy-thriller suspense that I use in my writing.

If a reader cares about the people in a drama, then they’ll want to know of their fates. I think this should be just as true in spy thrillers as it would be in any genre. For example, in The Americans (based on the book Deep Undercover by real-world KGB spy Jack Barsky), it’s easy to end up caring about this band of KGB spies. 

Through strong characterization, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings have budget struggles, marital conflict, child-rearing problems, and questionable fashion choices in 1980s America. But they’re also about to be nabbed by the FBI, constantly. Every show put me on edge because I cared about these people. Their quirky, intimate details made them seem so real that I just had to know what would happen to them.

You probably already know that one of the writer’s jobs is to “raise the stakes.” Put simply, it means that the events of the plot must have dire consequences—otherwise, who cares? In my view, this is where spy thrillers have a leg up since the characters can have government-scale resources, world-changing motivations, and the ability to impact thousands of lives. 

In the first season of Amazon’s Tom Clancy Jack Ryan, for example, our CIA hero is racing to keep a terrorist from setting off a dirty bomb… which we later learn is buried under a hospital, no less. Through good characterization, we’re already invested in Jack. But now we also care about the outcome of his mission. Go, Jack, go!

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We all know that a novel is a little world in which something happens to characters who change as a result. Yes, the reader should sympathize with the characters and worry about the big thing at stake. But we can ratchet the suspense a little further with a ticking clock. 

As an example, think of nearly every Mission Impossible movie. Ethan Hunt must find the guy who knows the other dude who will know how to locate the crazed villain who has planted the nuclear bomb somewhere. But Ethan must unravel this challenging chain of ne’er-do-wells in the next 72 hours or the world will be immolated! Subtle? No. Illustrative? Hopefully. 

Whatever the important stakes are, the tension is high because there is only so much time to avoid the terrible outcome.

Suppose we’ve created sympathetic characters, massive stakes, and a timebound problem. If all of that is based on a plot that is just too hard to believe, then why bother? (Ref above—Impossible, Mission). In my opinion, readers enter genres with a preconceived set of expectations. When the writer crashes through them too harshly, then the eye wanders from the page in an ocular 360. 

(M.P. Woodward: On Authenticity in Spy Thrillers.)

Within the context of a spy thriller, my own eye flutters when any of the previous three elements above are blown too far out of proportion. For example, during the daring escape, our defecting spy just happens to know how to fly a helicopter? (Ethan Hunt again). Or, all along, the CIA director was the Russian mole? (Reminiscent of every single Scooby-Doo episode ever broadcast on a Saturday morning).

In my view, a character-driven espionage/spy-thriller novel should be about betrayal. The double-cross of the hero should matter to us (characterization), have far-reaching effects (stakes), must be avenged quickly (timebound), and seem plausible (the pupil has stayed locked on the page). Still, if there are no surprises, then the book is hanging out in three-star-review-land. 

For an example with at least two more stars, consider Le Carre’s classic The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Yes, we care about poor, suffering Leamas. He’s sacrificed everything on his clever mission to take out Mundt, the East German counterintelligence boss. Villainous Mundt has the capacity to completely undermine British intelligence and blow the whole damned Cold War. Come on, Leamas, get him. Only in the book’s final two pages, we learn of a twist. As it happens, poor, sympathetic Leamas had been operating under a double-cross all along by his boss, the famous spy-master Smiley, because it turns out that Mundt was….

Well, you see, you’ll have to find out for yourself. Because that’s the essence of suspense.