A Direction, Not a Place

The problem of where to put him

Most series detectives come with an address. Elvis Cole has a deck above Laurel Canyon. Marlowe has an office on Hollywood Boulevard. John Rain has a merchant street in Sengoku, Sonchai has Krung Thep, Dominika Egorova has a Moscow she is quietly trying to burn down from the inside.

John Wells has nothing. Across twelve novels he is in the North-West Frontier, Montana, New Hampshire, Washington, Moscow, Jeddah, Mecca, Kandahar, Nairobi, Dubai, Hong Kong, Guatemala, Bangkok and Raqqa. He owns a two-room hunting shack in the Sawtooths with no electricity, no running water and no cell service, and the last quality is the one he likes best. He is an American who spent a decade inside al Qaeda and came home to a country that had moved on without him and an Agency that was on the verge of declaring him a terrorist. Placing him is impossible on purpose. Not belonging is the whole character.

But there is one fixed thing, and it solves the problem. Five times a day, wherever he happens to be, Wells works out which way Mecca lies and turns that way. In Dubai it is almost straight west, across the gulf. From a guesthouse in Pakistan it is west and a little south. From Montana it is northeast, over the top of the world. The single constant in his life is not a place at all. It is a bearing.

Hamilton, Montana, and ten years in the mountains

His father was a surgeon at the hospital in Hamilton, in western Montana where the plains run into the mountains. His mother taught school. In 1936 his grandfather, a navy sailor on shore leave in Beirut, fell for the daughter of a Lebanese trader named Noor and somehow persuaded her, and her family, that she belonged in Montana. She gave up her faith when she came to America but she taught the boy enough of it to interest him, and she is the reason for his dark hair and colouring. Wells is one quarter Muslim by birth and does not look like what he is, which turns out to be the most useful thing about him.

He was a starting linebacker and running back by ninth grade, then played at Dartmouth, where he broke a Yale quarterback’s leg and felt nothing about it afterwards because the hit had been clean and violence was part of the game. He also studied Islam there. The CIA recruited him for exactly what he was, and sent him into the mountains along the Pakistani border before the towers came down.

He stayed ten years. He learned Arabic and Pashto. He converted, and he meant it. He came within a bomb’s width of dying at Tora Bora. He killed men in cold blood while pretending to be one of them, and he still cannot talk about that decade to anyone, not to his handler, not to the women who have loved him. His mother died and was buried while he was eight thousand miles away.

What he found on his return is the quietest and best scene in the first novel. In an airport bar a salesman tells him, a total stranger, about being caught with the maid, and complains about the pressure of two houses and three cars, and Wells loses his temper and then sits at the gate furious with himself, wondering whether he would ever belong in America.

The faith, taken seriously

Here is the thing that makes this series unlike any of its neighbours on the shelf. It is a mainstream American thriller, published five years after September 2001, whose hero is a practising Muslim, and Berenson does not treat that as a costume he can take off at the end.

Wells prays. Berenson writes what he loves about it plainly: the strength and simplicity of a religion with five rules, which anyone who honestly tries to follow can belong to. In a threadbare guesthouse mosque in Dera Ismail Khan, kneeling among men who touch their foreheads to a concrete floor as fervently as if they were in Mecca, he remembers why he converted, and thinks he belongs there as much as he belonged anywhere.

Then the contradiction, which Berenson never resolves and never pretends to. In a five-star hotel in Dubai, Wells kneels toward the setting sun and asks forgiveness for blood he has shed and knows he will shed again. He acknowledges that his more orthodox brothers would find such a prayer wanting, and that only God can judge, and that God is keeping His opinion to Himself. On a plane full of Saudi businessmen he wonders what they would make of an American who took their religion for his own, and concludes: misguided at best, a fraud at worst.

He dreams of the Kaaba and finds he is circling it the wrong way round, unable to turn, pushed forward by the crowd until someone shouts and the cry spreads. Imposter. American. Apostate. He has been to Mecca and never seen the Grand Mosque, and he thinks that fact sums up his whole life.

And Berenson is honest about the other direction too. Alone in an American apartment, Wells finds his faith going flat like a slow puncture, because Islam was a way of life as much as a creed, and without the umma around him the Quran starts to feel foreign.

Both things are allowed to be true at once. Very few thrillers would risk that.

The wars, reported rather than run

Berenson graduated from Yale, joined the New York Times in 1999, and did two stints covering the occupation of Iraq, which is what pushed him into writing fiction. He left the paper in 2010 to do it full time. That matters, because it produces a different kind of authority. A book by a retired case officer teaches you how the trade is done. Berenson’s books take you into rooms he reported from and show you what the wars did to the people who were in them. A black site in Poland and what interrogation does to the interrogators. An American platoon in Afghanistan on its fourth tour, held together by heroin and nothing else. Aid workers kidnapped in northern Kenya and the industry that put them there. The House of Saud from the inside. And, across two novels, intelligence being carefully manufactured to justify a war with Iran, which is the story Berenson watched happen once already and clearly could not stop thinking about.

Wells ages through all of it, which the genre usually refuses to allow. He accumulates injuries and a body count. He loses Jennifer Exley, who asks him to choose between her and the work and does not like his answer. He loses Anne after that. He writes half a dozen letters to his son Evan and finishes none of them. He admits to himself that he cannot quit partly out of duty and partly because he is afraid of being bored, afraid that one day somebody will ask him: Didn’t you used to be John Wells?

What he has instead is Ellis Shafer at Langley, a rumpled, insubordinate analyst who is an atheist Jew and Wells’s closest friend, and Vinny Duto, who runs the Agency and later the Senate and is his enemy roughly half the time. That is the whole of it. One friend and a hunting shack.

Where to begin

With The Faithful Spy (2006), which won the Edgar for best first novel and is where the ten years in the mountains are paid off. Then read forward. The series runs twelve books to The Deceivers (2018) and there is a genuine arc through it, though most of the middle novels stand on their own if you want to sample.

If you want the two best, they are The Midnight House and The Shadow Patrol. The first is the one where the interrogators start dying and Wells has to decide what he thinks about what was done in those rooms. The second is Afghanistan at its most exhausted, and it is the closest Berenson comes to writing straight reportage inside a novel.

One honest warning. Berenson has opinions about Washington and about how these wars were run, and by the later books they are close to the surface. He is more hawkish than most writers in this end of the genre, and some readers find the arguments intrusive. Others read the series precisely for them. You will know within two books which sort you are.

So there is no address to give you. There is only the bearing. In Dubai it is almost due west. In Kandahar, west and slightly south. In a cabin in the Sawtooths with the woodstove going, it is northeast, over the pole. Wherever the next book puts him, he will work it out, and kneel, and ask forgiveness for blood he has already shed and knows perfectly well he will shed again.

That is where you will find him. Facing the same way. Every time.