The Art Restorer Who Came in From the Cold: Daniel Silva on Gabriel Allon, the Truest Fake Spy

The Israeli art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon is as real as George Smiley or Hercule Poirot. He even has his own Wikipedia page. The CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel describes herself on X as a friend of Gabriel Allon before she gets around to mentioning her husband, the best-selling thriller writer Daniel Silva who, of course, is the creator of Allon. As with all successful literary inventions, of course, Silva is as much Allon as Allon is Silva. Silva-Allon. Amongst the most lucrative partnerships in contemporary fiction.

Unsurprisingly, Silva still hasn’t managed to kill off Allon. Twenty-six books into the series, the retired Mossad legend turned Venice art restorer is the truest fake spy in the business — a character so real that Silva, who seems to revel in his insularity, has to lock himself away from imagining how readers receive him. Or perhaps he’s locking himself away from Allon.

In Ransom, out today, a billionaire real estate baron asks Allon to find his vanished wife, the dazzling socialite Alice Winter — who has, of course, a darker life. Behind Silva’s latest summer best-seller looms Russia’s shadow war on Europe. That’s the post-cold war cold war politics of Ransom. Unit 29155, the GRU’s sabotage specialists, are hitting pipelines and flying drones over Copenhagen, an MI6 officer describes the Russians as feral animals, and Ransom’s climax unfolds at an emergency Downing Street summit with Zelensky without the United States in the room. It’s a terrifying narrative as real as Gabriel Allon.

Five Takeaways

•       An Art Restorer Who Used to Be a Spy. Gabriel Allon was invented for one book — a 1999 novel inspired by the Camp David peace process, written like a demon in a cottage near Land’s End — and was never meant to continue. Twenty-six books later, Silva has flipped the character’s formula: once an operative whose cover was art restoration, Allon is now an art restorer who used to be a spy, formally retired and living in Venice. As for his age, Silva freezes time the way Christie froze Poirot: Allon is aging in reverse, quite intentionally, and Silva will write him for as long as people want to read him.

•       Russia’s Shadow War on Europe. The serious spine of Ransom is the campaign of sabotage and subversion that Russia is waging against all of Western Europe — the GRU’s Unit 29155 hitting pipelines, running hacking operations, and flying the drones that shut down Copenhagen Airport and pushed Denmark toward its highest state of alert. One MI6 officer tells Silva the Russians are acting like feral animals, and the worse the battlefield goes, the more aggressive the sabotage becomes. Silva has been here before: Moscow Rules put him ahead of the curve on Putin in 2008, and Allon’s personal war with Putinism enters its latest round.

•       Writing an Israeli Hero After October 7. Allon is the old Israeli liberal establishment made flesh — secular, social-democratic, the Ashkenazi security elite whose surviving members now oppose the conduct of the war. Silva, an avowed two-stater, saw the change coming years before October 7: quoting his friend Richard Haass, this is not your parents’ or grandparents’ Israel. Allon, he insists, would never serve in a cabinet alongside far-right extremists like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich — and they wouldn’t have him. What happened on October 7 was barbaric, Silva says, but this war has gone on far too long.

•       The Super Rich, With a Judgmental Eye. It’s fun to write about the rich — the jets, the expensive toys, the glamour of Venice, Knightsbridge, and Ibiza — but Silva does