This podcast, it's a Costod and Touchstone production.

Hi, I'm John Kiroakur. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. Before we introduce you to our guest today,

former CIA officer and multi-time best-selling

author Barry Eisler, I want to thank you, as always, from storyteller to storytellee, for listening.

And if you would be so kind as to like, review, share, or comment on the podcast, wherever you're catching us,

that would really help us reach the widest possible

audience. For podcasts and podcasters, that's the mission. Thanks for helping us succeed.

Barry Eisler is hardly the first former intelligence officer to quit storytelling as a spy

in favor of storytelling as a pure storyteller, you know, for fun and profit. But few former

intelligence officers have succeeded in the way that Barry has. As you'll hear since 2003, when he

quit working for the man and went full time as a creative, Barry has come to view the secret

world quite differently than he did when he worked inside it as part of it.

But the secret world can be incredibly constraining to a person with ideas and ambition.

Barry's ideas and ambition have led to three very successful book series, not books, book series.

John Rain launched Barry into the fiction stratosphere.

Then he did the Ben Trevin series, and most recently a series about a Seattle detective named Livia Lone.

Barry's secret sauce, he weaves a collection of great characters together into a compelling story, and the writing is sublime.

Spies and writing, writing and spies, there is simply a literary quality to espionage.

It's all that gray matter navigating all that gray territory.

And one writes a lot as a spy.

Writing is just part of the job.

I don't think I can accurately count all the words I

...