When I met up with a literary agent earlier this year to discuss the thriller I'm writing, he asked me whether I'd read Damascus Station by David McCloskey.
No, was my reply. Big mistake. He looked at me with a mixture of scorn and incredulity and said I should remedy the situation at once. And so, I headed for the nearest branch of Waterstones and bought a copy.
It was immediately clear from the quotes on the cover what all the fuss was about. 'The best spy novel I have ever read,' (General David Petraeus, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan and Iraq before becoming director of the CIA).
'One of the best spy thrillers for years' (The Times). 'Breathlessly gripping and truly terrifying' (the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore).
And the contents lived up to the hype. As McCloskey spent years as a CIA analyst in field stations across the Middle East, he had a ringside seat for some of the most consequential conflicts of the 21st century and developed a knowledge of field craft that's second to none.
As a result, when he describes how to make a pipe bomb or shake off a tail, his accounts have an unmistakable air of authenticity.
The lead character he introduced in that book, a pocket rocket of a CIA station chief called Artemis Aphrodite Procter (5ft in her socks), has now appeared in three of his four novels to date.
And she makes her fourth appearance in McCloskey's fifth book, London Station, published on Thursday, in which she has an unlikely co-star in the shape of the Daily Mail whose scoops, in the author's words, 'drive almost the entirety of the action' (of which more later).
David McCloskey's fifth book, London Station, is published on Thursday and features an unlikely co-star in the shape of the Daily Mail
The plot revolves around what happens when a Trump-like president comes to power in Washington and is determined to shake up the 'special relationship' between Britain and the US.
Given that the 'America First' brigade are currently ruling the roost in the White House, with the result there are regular rows with us Brits over everything from tariffs to the war in Iran – not to mention the abrupt withdrawal this week of 12 heavy bombers from RAF Fairford – it could hardly be more timely.
In London Station, the Trump figure is President John Wood and he has Britain's spies in his sights.
The way he sees it, the Brits are 'pickpockets', or – as McCloskey's narrator describes them – 'a band of charmingly accented thieves trading on faded imperial glory to collect crumbs of intel and hawk them to the CIA in exchange for a fine meal'.
In a bid to rebalance the scales, Wood gets rid of the time-served professional running the CIA and appoints Bobby Jerome, founder of the biggest house-building company in the US, as his successor.
(If you think this sounds a little improbable, it's worth bearing in mind that McCloskey pointed out in a recent article for The Spectator that, shortly after he had finished writing London Station, Donald Trump appointed Bill Pulte, the heir to a home-building fortune, as acting director of National Intelligence.)
The appointment does not go unopposed. As a senator on the Intelligence Committee observes of Jerome, he has 'zero intelligence or national security experience'.
But when the Congressman asks Jerome if he intends to run the CIA like he runs his family business, the Texan businessman comes out fighting: 'So if you're asking Senator, if I wish to run a bloated, roguish, government bureaucracy… with the same commitment to excellence that I've brought to my company, then the answer is yes.'
To this end, he makes his son-in-law Harry Kellman director of operations, with a brief to make sure the Agency is getting value for money from its allies. So far, so Trumpian.
Kellman starts as he means to go on by denying aid to Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – people on the inside never call it MI6 apparently – at a crucial stage in a death-defying op to extract an asset from Tehran.
This has calamitous consequences and the stage is set for a battle royal between two spy agencies who are supposed to be allies.
Cue a first appearance by the Daily Mail. 'CIA leaves MI6 agent to die in Iran,' blares the front-page headline. The significance of the story is not lost on Artemis Procter, who has made a miraculous return to power after spending some months on what could have been described as gardening leave if it hadn't involved her spending the time alligator-wrestling on her cousin's 'alligator-focused tourist-trap' in Florida.
'The Daily Mail is kind of a character in London Station,' McCloskey (pictured) said when he visited the Mail's offices this week
Following her appointment as Chief of London Station, the Mail has become her newspaper of choice.
As McCloskey told me when he dropped into the Daily Mail office earlier this week: 'Procter is the kind of person who wants to know what's going on in the world and she wants a lot of the fun stuff, too. And so I wanted the information to get leaked to her favourite British press outlet, and the answer I came up with was the Daily Mail.'
In his novel it doesn't take long for the Americans to conclude that the story had been leaked to the Mail by a source close to the head of MI6 or a senior figure in Whitehall, and Jerome is incensed.
But – spoiler alert – not half as mad as he is 50 pages later when the Mail breaks an even more incendiary scoop.
'The Daily Mail is kind of a character in London Station,' says McCloskey. 'One of the major sub-plots of this novel.'
This newspaper becomes a key part of the 'information battle' between the CIA and MI6. As McCloskey says: 'Lo and behold, who gets the scoop? The Daily Mail. And the fallout from this Daily Mail piece really drives almost the entirety of the action and leads the CIA director to do some really wild and kinetic things in retaliation.'
He adds: 'I think one of the biggest myths about the world of espionage is the superhero spy: well-armed, much more attractive than your average person, drinking martinis, all those kind of tropes.
'Those stories are very interesting, they're quite fun, but when you actually look at the world of the spy business and what they're doing day to day, it just bears no resemblance at all to reality.'
That said, all great espionage thrillers tend to rely on a memorable central protagonist, and Procter – whose Russian is described as 'fluent' and her English as 'profane' – has matured into one of the most distinctive characters in the spy fiction genre.
McCloskey fans know her as a vodka-swilling hard-ass, but in London Station she is off the booze, replacing it with an addiction to energy drinks and candy. She still keeps a shotgun in her office, however.
McCloskey's particular brand of genius is that he combines first-hand experience of the spy game with a novelist's eye for detail and a playwright's ear for dialogue.
You couldn't ask for a more sure-footed guide to the murky world of espionage and the struggle for supremacy between the world's great powers.
David McCloskey and Ben Macintyre, author of Redwood, will be in conversation with Tim Shipman, political editor of The Spectator, at 7.30pm on Friday, at the Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Tickets, £15
Dominic Midgley is the author of Abramovich, The Billionaire From Nowhere