Charles Cumming

Charles Cumming (born 1971) is a British writer of spy fiction and a screenwriter.

Early life and education Cumming was born in 1971,

In 1995, Cumming was approached for recruitment by the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) but did not go on to work for them.

Career Cumming's first novel, A Spy by Nature, was published in the UK in June 2001. The novel's hero, Alec Milius, is a flawed loner in his early 20s who is instructed by MI5 to sell doctored research data on oil exploration in the Caspian Sea to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In August 2001, Cumming moved to Madrid.

A sequel, entitled A Colder War, in which Kell investigates a traitor inside western intelligence, was published in 2014. The novel won the CrimeFest eDunnit Award for Best Crime eBook of the Year. The third novel in the Thomas Kell series, A Divided Spy, was published in 2016.

Cumming's ninth novel, The Man Between, was published in 2018. Released in the United States as The Moroccan Girl, it tells the story of a writer who agrees to spy for MI6 while attending a literary festival in Morocco.

In 2020 Cumming published BOX 88, a thriller set in both the present day and in 1989. The protagonist, Lachlan Kite, is recruited into a top secret UK and US intelligence network while attending Alford, a fictional public school modelled on Eton College. A sequel, JUDAS 62 was published in the UK in 2021. Now a university student, Kite is sent to the Russian city of Voronezh in 1993 to extract a chemical weapons scientist. In the present day he mounts an operation against the FSB in Dubai. The third novel in the Lachlan Kite series, KENNEDY 35, was published in 2023. Kite travels to Senegal in 1995 to capture a Hutu war criminal, an operation which has ramifications for Europe in the present day. The fourth novel in the series, ICARUS 17 was published in 2026.

Cumming's novels have been translated into fourteen languages. His work is published in the United Kingdom by HarperCollins, in the United States by Mysterious Press and in Spain by Salamandra.

In 2015, Cumming sold an original screenplay, The Plane, to DiBonaventura Pictures. The film was released by Lionsgate as Plane in 2023 starring Gerard Butler and Mike Colter. It was directed by Jean-François Richet. Cumming was also part of the writing team assembled by Ronan Bennett for The Day of The Jackal.

Cumming was also an assistant editor of The Week from 1996 to 2013.

Personal life Cumming lives in west London. He is married and has four children.

He is one of the trustees of The Pierce Loughran Memorial Scholarship fund, which provides tuition fees for the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. He is also the founder and President of the José Raúl Capablanca Memorial Chess Society.