Joseph Kanon, author of the spy thriller, “Defectors,” is interviewed by Richard Wolinsky.
Over the course of the last 22 years, Joseph Kanon has established himself as one of the best spy novelists around, in the vein of John Le Carre, Alan Furst, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler. His latest novel, “Defectors,” is about what happens after a Soviet mole defects to Russia. What is their life like? What happens then? Set in the early 1960s, “Defectors,” through copious research, sets up what life must have been like for people like Kim Philby and other Russian spies forced to leave the West to survive.