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Cromwell has to deal with all manner of spies, frauds, and delegates in order to serve his throne, protect his own family, and most importantly, to keep his master satisfied. Returned to England, he enters the service of Cardinal Wolsey, England’s de facto foreign minister (of the moment). Isn’t Mantel’s masterpiece really an international thriller, at heart? Her hero, Thomas Cromwell, is the ultimate diplomat-sent abroad as a boy, educated in many customs and trades, a creature of the market and the port.
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The negotiations over the Consul aren’t exactly on the Yalta level, but the screwball mischief gives way to a rather jarring pathos, as the characters’ fates intertwine and begin to careen. The Consul is inept, pitiful, cuckolded, and of no particular importance to anyone, except possibly Greene’s protagonist, the cuckold trying to wipe his conscience clean. In The Honorary Consul, a backwater on the Argentine-Paraguayan border finds itself at the center of a political maelstrom when freedom fighters hell bent on kidnapping the US Ambassador accidentally take the British Consul instead.
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Greeneland is full of schemers, hustlers, smugglers, firebrands, whiskey priests, and anglers of all types-the perfect cast for a diplomatic scandal. Greene’s work, especially the entertainments and hybrid novels, usually gets lumped into the spy fiction category, though often the international intrigue has very little to do with intelligence operatives.
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Marías uses the forms of bureaucracy and translation to astonishing effect, the novel a series of missed connections and barely altered meanings leading toward a chilling conclusion. Juan shuttles back and forth between Madrid and postings in New York, where his friend, Berta, another UN translator, subjects herself to a string of lousy men through a video dating service. Their courtship, played out during the simultaneous translation of a tense negotiation, is one of the more finely drawn scenes in modern literature. Juan is a translator for the UN, as is his wife, Luisa.
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His investigations play out adjacent to his diplomatic service. In A Heart So White, it begins subtly, with a newly married couple and a question that niggles at Juan, the groom: What now? That query spirals out until Juan is looking into his own family’s hidden past: a suicide, a mysterious marriage, a string of secrets. Gamboa sets off to find the boy’s sister before he’s executed, and as the search unfolds, the siblings’ past reflects the tragedy of Colombia’s contemporary history.Īt the heart of every Marías novel is an investigation of one kind or another. In Night Prayers, the attaché is summoned to Bangkok to help Manuel, a young Colombian locked up in a notorious prison on drug trafficking charges. His duties are mostly bureaucratic, but like any good PI, Gamboa (the fictional) finds himself driven toward obsession, mostly by his own demons or by his sense of compassion and decency, or quite often both at once. Officially, he’s obliged to look into all manner of delicate situations, whatever kind of trouble Colombians abroad happen to find themselves in. The role proves a useful one for an investigator. Like his fictional avatar, Gamboa served as Colombia’s cultural attaché in New Delhi. Gamboa’s work might well be the high-water mark of diplomacy noir. Here are nine of the very best novels that make up “Diplomacy Noir.” The question they pose can never quite be answered, even after political tensions settle and the bureaucrats go home. In times like these, I like to read from my own personal favorite sub-genre of crime literature, located somewhere between spy fiction and existential mystery, a grouping of books I like to think of as “Diplomacy Noir.” These are, by and large, world-weary stories shot through with dread, resignation, and more than a little gallows humor. and Moscow are locked in a complicated, possibly erotic folie à deux, a spymaster secretes himself into North Korea to initiate talks with a leader long labeled a “madman,” a trade war nobody seems to want escalates between the world’s most powerful economies, and Nikki Haley is left holding the bag at the United Nations.
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Still, if not worse, the era’s diplomacy certainly does seem to be a little unhinged. So perhaps it’s unfair to make any grand claims about our current epic and the lost art of colloquy. Diplomacy is one of those things that seems always to be in peril, probably because, like a septic tank or a knee ligament, we hardly ever think of it unless it’s breaking down.