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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

And this week, I'm very pleased to be joined by the former FBI director James Comey,

who makes his debut as a thriller writer with Central Park West. Central Park West is a story

of a US prosecutor called Nora Carlton, whose long-running mob case is curiously complicated when it

crashes into a case that's being prosecuted just down the hall of the murder of disgraced former

governor of New York. It's an engrossingly twisty thriller, and it's set in a world that the author

knows all too well. James, welcome. What made you start a right fiction? Surprising move. Great to be with you. Thanks for

the conversation. It started with pushing from the nonfiction editor who told me I could write

narrative and dialogue well. I really ought to consider fiction. And I resisted at first. But the farther

I got from the work of the FBI,

the easier it became to think about the work.

And so I finally gave in and decided to give it a try

and found it harder than nonfiction, but addictive.

And so now it's what I want to be when I grow up.

Well, you're already grown up, certainly, by the size of you,

I hope not grow anymore.

I mean, I'm always, anyone who writes a thriller, I'm always wanting to ask this.

This is very tightly plotted, it's very twisty, there's a lot of reverses and switchbacks in it.

...