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Getting the Twist Right
Terminus centers around an aging intelligence officer tasked with impersonating another agent in order to trace a rogue numbers station. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
John Post, my protagonist, originally appeared in a short story I wrote for the Promptly Written Podcast. He was never meant to appear again, but he popped up in a couple more short stories despite this, and then I eventually had the compulsion to give him the full-length treatment. I wanted to do something pulpy, a story with some of the Ian Fleming tropes, but with John Le Carre’s cynicism. Something vintage like those old Signet paperbacks (as evoked by the Terminus cover art) that someone might read on a weekend excursion. I needed a plot, of course. I don’t recall why I chose to incorporate numbers stations, other than they intrigued me. But during WWII, Fleming was known for daring, unorthodox intelligence operations that he and his cohorts came up with, and so I brought him into chapter two of the story with an undercover cameo as “James Secretan” (an early, unused character name before Fleming landed on James Bond). Secretan’s risky plan to get Post to impersonate another agent whose likeness he shares seemed like just the sort of thing Fleming would’ve come up with. The Soviet parapsychology programs were real things at the time, and I thought their inclusion would add some really nice intrigue.
What is the most challenging aspect of writing a thriller? The most rewarding?
The most challenging aspect might be the research involved. Thrillers often hinge on technical knowledge of a particular craft or profession. For Terminus, I had to do a lot of reading about the Cold War in the 60’s, West Berlin, the early days of the CIA, etc. The time period and locations of the book are times and places I didn’t experience, and so I had to rely on others’ accounts. Fortunately, there is a lot of material documenting this era of history. I even went so far as to get menu items right, as taken from photographs of an old Cafe Schloss Marquardt menu, for example. There’s very little that I invented, aside from the plot, of course. And I mean very little. I endeavoured to accurately replicate the West Berlin clubs, architecture, and OSS/CIA details to the best of my ability. Any inaccuracies I made were not for lack of effort/intent.
The most rewarding aspect of a thriller is getting the twist right. Every thriller (at least conventional thrillers) needs to have a twist of some kind, and I think (hope!) I got it right with Terminus.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Part of John Post’s problems stem from the fact that he’s the old guard. I very much feel I’m the old guard in my personal life, especially at work. I kind of riffed on the feeling of pending obsolescence that one gets despite having been successful in the past, despite having a good track record. At some point, things begin to change quicker than you can adapt to them, and you wonder whether you’ve still got what it takes. You also tend to get more jaded the older you get, and I think Post is less than enchanted with the CIA and his role with them. Add to all of that Post’s fear of loss, particularly that of relational loss, and you’ve got an uneasy mix of negative emotion. But the main theme of the novel is one of trust. “Trust is a luxury” is a phrase that gets bandied about in the narrative, and it comes to represent the main idea of the novel. Even with what constitutes his strongest allies, Post wonders whether he isn’t ultimately expendable to them–and if not expendable, then at least his demise is worth risking.
Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
I recently started writing the fourth book in my Reeve series, titled The Reeve, the Veil, and the Rifle. I refer to it as a Gothic Western series, though I suppose it might be billed as Weird West. Essentially, it’s a Low Fantasy genre mashup of Batman, a Western, and Alternate History with some philosophical underpinnings. There will be five books when it’s all said and done.
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Terminus
Terminus, by Ian Lewis, is a Cold War spy thriller with a paranormal edge, and it follows John Post, an aging American intelligence officer sent to West Berlin in 1963 to impersonate another agent and trace a rogue numbers station called Terminus. What begins as a tense espionage setup slowly widens into something murkier, involving Soviet mind control experiments, a shadowy broker called the Silent Partner, and a mission that keeps shifting under Post’s feet. At heart, though, this is not just a book about spy craft. It is also about weariness, loyalty, and the uneasy feeling that the game has gone on so long it has started to hollow out the people playing it.
What stayed with me most was the writing itself. Lewis clearly loves the machinery of this world, and that love shows in the cars, the clothes, the hotels, the radios, the cigarettes, and the geography of Berlin and beyond. That kind of detail really immerses readers in the story. The book has the texture of a classic espionage novel. I also liked that Lewis gives Post an inner life that keeps the novel from becoming all mission brief and gunmetal. Early on, Post is already wrestling with age, loneliness, and the suspicion that he may be becoming obsolete, and that thread gives the book more weight than a straight plot machine would have had.
What I found most interesting is the author’s choice to mix old-school espionage with parapsychology and psychological manipulation. That sounds like a wild swing on paper. Sometimes it even sounds a little pulpy. But the book is smart about it. It keeps asking what matters more: whether the paranormal element is fully real, or whether belief, fear, and suggestion are enough to turn a person into a weapon. That idea lands. So does the moral fog around trust. Nearly everyone in this story is hiding something, and by the end, the book feels less like a clean hunt for a villain and more like a study in compromised systems and compromised people. I did think the novel occasionally leans a bit hard into withholding, and there were moments when I wanted a little less circling and a little more emotional payoff. Still, I admired the control behind it. The tension is patient, and the final stretch earns its bitterness.
I’d recommend Terminus most to readers who enjoy espionage fiction that is deliberate, atmospheric, and a little off-center, especially people who like spy novels where tradecraft matters as much as action and where mistrust is part of the air the characters breathe. If you like Cold War fiction with a professional polish, a reflective lead, and a premise that lets realism and unease rub against each other, this book is worth your time. It feels like a mix between the classic spy novel and the conspiracy thriller, and I came away thinking there’s more than it first lets on.
Pages: 211 | ASIN : B0G1VCYGLN
