Here is what the author says about his novel:
"`The Confidential Agent' was written in six weeks in 1938 after my return from
Mexico. The Spanish Civil War furnished the background...I was struggling then
through `The Power and the Glory', but there was no money in the book as far as
I could foresee. Certainly my wife and two children would not be able to live
on one unsaleable book...so I determined to write another "entertainment" as
quickly as possible in the mornings, while I ground on slowly with `The Power
and the Glory' in the afternoons.
The opening scene between two rival agents on the cross-channel steamer--
I called them D. and L. because I did not wish to localize their conflict--
was all I had in mind, and a certain vague ambition to create something
legendary out of a contemporary thriller: the hunted man who becomes in turn
the hunter, the peaceful man who turns at bay, the man who has learned to
love justice by suffering injustice. But what the legend was to be about in
modern terms I had no idea.
I fell back for the first and last time in my life on Benzedrine. For six
weeks I started each day with a tablet, and renewed the dose at midday. Each
day I sat down to work with no idea of what turn the plot might take and each
morning I wrote, with the automatism of a planchette, two thousand words
instead of my usual stint of five hundred words. In the afternoons `The Power
and the Glory' proceeded towards its end at the same leaden pace, unaffected
by the sprightly young thing who was so quickly overtaking it.
`The Confidential Agent' is one of the few books of mine which I have cared to
reread--perhaps because it is not really one of mine. It was as though I were
ghosting for another man. D., the chivalrous agent and professor of Romance
literature, is not really one of my characters, nor is Forbes, born Furtstein,
the equally chivalrous lover. The book moved rapidly because I was not
struggling with my own technical problems: I was to all intents ghosting a
novel by an old writer who was to die a little before the studio in which I
had worked was blown out of existence. All I can say as excuse, and in gratitude
to an honoured shade, is that `The Confidential Agent' is a better than Ford
Madox Ford wrote himself when he attempted the genre in `Vive Le Roy'".
Read by Patrick Tull.
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