Author Interview – Brad Buchanan – Spy’s Mate

On The Table Read Magazine, “the best arts and entertainment magazine UK“, Brad Buchanan shares his journey from a cancer survivor to the author of Spy’s Mate, a gripping chess novel that weaves personal triumph with Cold War intrigue.

Written by JJ Barnes

www.jjbarnes.co.uk

I interviewed Brad Buchanan about his life and career, what inspired him to write his new book, Spy’s Mate, and his creative writing process.

Tell me a bit about who you are.

I’m a lifelong chess fan, online chess addict, and avid student of chess history and culture. In my other life, I hold degrees in English Literature from McGill University, the University of Toronto, and Stanford University. I taught British and Postcolonial Literature, as well as Creative Writing, at Sacramento State University until my retirement in 2016.

My poetry, short fiction, and scholarly articles have appeared in more than 200 journals, and I have published four book-length collections of poetry: The Miracle Shirker (Poet’s Corner Press, 2005); Swimming the Mirror: Poems for My Daughter (Roan Press, 2009); The Scars, Aligned: A Cancer Narrative (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Chimera (Finishing Line Press, 2022). I have also published three academic books, most recently “’Indict the Author of Affection’: Affectation and Catachresis in Hamlet” (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023).

My medical memoir, Living with Graft-Versus-Host-Disease, was published by Armin Lear Press in 2021. I’ve also had a lot of medical problems in the past 10 years. I was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma in February 2015, and underwent a stem cell transplant in 2016, which involved a lengthy recovery and temporary vision loss. I am currently in remission, though I suffer from graft-versus-host disease (GvHD). I am currently Northern California chapter leader of Man Up to Cancer, a support group for men coping with cancer. I also facilitate recurring online Writing As Healing workshops through the UC Davis Cancer Center, the Sacramento Society for the Blind, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Additionally, I am a spokesperson and mentor for GvHDnow, an informational group sponsored by Incyte Corporation that raises awareness about graft-versus-host disease. I have two daughters, Nora and Lucy, who are 20 and 16 years old respectively.

When did you first WANT to write a book?

When I was 11 years old, I was more or less the class clown, and wasn’t doing especially well in school. However, I had an unusually perceptive and imaginative English teacher, Mrs. Shaughnessy, who sat me down to find out why I was misbehaving. Our long talk inspired me to want to write a novel. I suppose I wanted to show her that, even though I was playing the fool, I could actually accomplish something meaningful.

When did you take a step to start writing?

After that long talk with Mrs. Shaugnessy, I biked home from school during lunch hours for a few months in a row to write a novel I ended up calling Henry, A Mouse Glorified. It was the story of my favorite stuffed animal, Henry Mouse, achieving hockey fame by scoring important goals for Team Canada despite being in deep mourning after his father’s death. I remember sitting and eating my sandwich while pecking out the words on my mother’s old manual typewriter, trying to avoid having to use too much Liquid Paper to correct my typos. I also remember feeling, “so this is what it’s like to write a novel…” Naturally, this novel was never published, but Mrs. Shaughnessy was very kind in her praise for its “pathos”—a word I had to look up in the dictionary.

How long did it take you to complete your first book from the first idea to release?

If we’re talking published books, then it would have to be my scholarly monograph on the fiction of Hanif Kureishi, a writer most famous for screenplays such as My Beautiful Laundrette and his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. I was commissioned to write this book in 2005 for the New British Fiction Series (Palgrave Macmillan) and spent a year or so researching and writing it. It was published in 2007.

How long did it take you to complete your latest book from the first idea to release?

The idea for Spy’s Mate had been germinating for a few months before I queried a few agents to see if they liked the idea and then (having gotten some preliminary feedback) sat down to start writing it in October 2022. It took me a year or so to write the first draft of the novel, show it to some trusted friends, and revise it fairly thoroughly.

I started querying literary agents systematically in early 2024, then after waiting a few months for agents to reply, I reached out directly to chess publishers in June 2024. By the end of July 2024, I was under contract with Thinkers Publishing to deliver a finished draft to them by the end of May 2025. I then embarked on a another extensive round of revisions, with feedback from more readers and chess experts, and finished everything more or less on time.

The book’s publication date is October 14, 2025, so all told, it has taken about three years for the project to mature from an idea to a finished product.

Focusing on your latest release. What made you want to write Spy’s Mate?

The story of Spy’s Mate begins as my story: when I was a little boy, my mother taught me how to play chess. My mother was a remarkable person: a math whiz and professional accountant with a love for English Literature who was as devoted to her sons as she was intellectually curious.

Under her influence (though without her skill with numbers) I became fascinated with the way the chess pieces moved. I played imaginary games in my room where I was both White and Black, just like Yasha Basmajian, the protagonist. However, I was also a sports-crazy kid who loved being outdoors, and so over the next few years I lost touch with chess and immersed myself in baseball, soccer, and (because I grew up in Canada) street hockey.

I dropped in to the school chess club occasionally, winning the odd game, but my intellectual energies became focused on reading great literature (I discovered James Joyce’s Ulysses in high school) and writing poetry (my favourite poet was T.S. Eliot). I earned all the degrees I could in English Literature and got a job teaching at Sacramento State University in 2002.

Around 2012, I began to have chess dreams, in which the pieces themselves seemed to be possessed of some mysterious yet compelling energy. I decided to take the game up again, and began playing online games every day. I taught the game to my daughters, Nora and Lucy, as soon as they were able to understand the basic moves, and connected with some friends in Sacramento who enjoyed playing casual games. I was still playing soccer three times a week, however, and didn’t take my subconscious attraction to chess as anything more than a pleasant distraction.

Then I was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma, a form of malignant blood cancer, in early 2015. My life was turned upside down: over the next year I underwent 7 cycles of chemotherapy, total body irradiation, and a stem cell transplant that nearly proved fatal. My body was badly damaged by all this, and I lost the athletic ability I once saw as central to my life. I was left not just disabled but saddled with a chronic illness that I still live with today: graft-versus-host disease. Then chess rescued me: unable to play more physically active sports, I became obsessed with the game once again.

Even when I was legally blind for 18 months (an unexpected side effect of my transplant) I managed to peer at my iPad out of the corners of my eyes and practice against the computer. Although I couldn’t yet play real games again, I found a new chess-related hobby: making personalized wooden chess sets for friends and family. I bought square wooden boards from a local wood shop and painted them (with some help from my daughters). To make the pieces, I glued together wooden shapes and figures I found at craft stores.

When I recovered my eyesight (four eye surgeries later), I started to read chess books, to play online and in-person games once again, and to think seriously about writing a book about chess. By this time, I had published three books of poetry, three academic books, and a medical memoir, and I felt I was ready to write something about the game that had become the only outlet for my competitive energies. But what kind of book?

During the pandemic, like so many others, I watched and read The Queen’s Gambit with fascination and admiration. I also realized that chess had become a worldwide cultural phenomenon for exactly the same reasons it had haunted my dreams and inspired me after my medical catastrophe. Chess was not just a training ground for strategic and tactical thinking; it was also a treasure trove of mythic stories, archetypes, and memorable personalities, all united in a visually striking contest between opposing forces. Chess was Star Wars and John LeCarré Cold War novels all combined into one.

The final event that drove me to write my chess novel was my own mother’s death in late 2021 from complications of blood cancer, an ailment that seems to run in our family. I wanted to pay tribute to the long-ago impulse that led her to teach me a game that would last me a lifetime, and that would sustain my mind when my body failed. Thus SPY’S MATE was born.

I put myself into Yasha’s shoes, learning chess from his mother in an Armenian village on the fringes of the Soviet empire, and ascending the perilous ladder to the very top of the game. Yasha asked his mother, herself chronically and irreversibly ill, to promise him that she would live long enough to see him become World Chess Champion. Along the way, he has to contend with, and indeed overcome, the sinister plotting of KGB agents, as well as tragedy and treachery in his own circle. It is a hero’s journey that only chess can offer; a truly remarkable story of perseverance and pluck, with some amazing brilliancies built in. I think my mother would absolutely love it.

What were your biggest challenges with writing Spy’s Mate?

The biggest challenge in writing a novel was the daily routine of sitting down to write a complete scene—or between 700 and 1,000 words—every day, with only my own imagination to rely on. In other writing projects, I usually have lots of notes to work with, and primary or secondary sources to quote from, but with fiction I must create the entire thing from start to finish. When my inspiration flagged, I would stay engaged with the project by reading more about the historical background of the book, or studying chess lore for more memorable incidents to weave into the story.

Who or what inspired you when creating your Protagonist?

Yasha is very loosely modelled on former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, a non-Russian whose ascent into the Soviet chess elite would be made more difficult by his ethnicity, which was a mixture of Jewish and Armenian heritage. Kasparov challenged the prevailing Communist ideology of the Soviet Union, which gave his many hard-fought battles against more orthodox Soviet grandmasters an extra political and historical importance

I gave Yasha an Armenian background for a few reasons: I’ve been fascinated by the historical status of Armenians worldwide for many years; they were victims of a genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, and they have a widespread diaspora as well as a homeland that suffered under Soviet domination for a long time. My own Irish heritage has given me an affinity with such groups, and I absorbed quite a bit of Armenian culture and religious iconography when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. There I met Father Mesrop, an Armenian Orthodox priest who invited me to witness a traditional Armenian wedding, and who and discussed the finer points of Armenian Christianity with me over multiple lunches. I worked some of these details into Spy’s Mate, partly to offer an alternative to the bleakness of Soviet life, and partly because I wanted Yasha to be an underdog and an outsider.

Who or what inspired you when creating your Antagonist?

Yasha’s Antagonist, Evgeny Volosin, is a loyal Communist who represents the status quo in the Soviet Union, and as such is loosely modelled on Anatoly Karpov, a former World Chess Champion and Garry Kasparov’s chief antagonist. However, Volosin is also a narcissistic sexual predator and a paranoid behind-the-scenes manipulator who plots with the KGB to spy on, discredit, or indeed destroy his rivals. Volosin plants what he thinks is an informant in Yasha’s camp and tries to disrupt Yasha emotionally and psychologically during their World Championship match by having Yasha’s father arrested.

What is the inciting incident of Spy’s Mate?

The inciting incident of Spy’s Mate is Yasha’s first defeat over the chessboard at the hands of his cousin Semyon, who tricks Yasha with an old device known as the Siberian Trap. Yasha’s competitive spirit is kindled from this moment on, and we see that he plays not just out of a love of the game, but out of a passionate hatred of losing.

What is the main conflict of Spy’s Mate?

The main conflict of Spy’s Mate is Yasha’s struggle to realize his potential as a chess player, and to live up to a rash, indeed crazy pact he has made with his ailing mother: that she survive long enough to see him become World Chess Champion. To do this, of course, he has to negotiate an obstacle course that includes bullying from overbearing coaches, jealous rivals who try to sabotage him and his team, spies planted in his team and in his affections, and of course formidable opponents at the chessboard.

Did you plot Spy’s Mate in advance, or fly by the seat of your pants and write freely?

I had a loose outline of the plot in my mind at the outset, and so I wrote many of the chess scenes pretty freely. However, since I had to weave together multiple story lines, I began tracing the different story lines with different coloured markers on big sheets of paper, making lists of scenes on cue cards, and creating charts showing different characters’ development over time, noting places where missing scenes would need to be written, and using a white board to draw connections between characters.

Did you get support with editing, and how much editing did Spy’s Mate need?

I showed my first draft to a few trusted friends, who gave me lots of good insights and drove me to edit the book pretty comprehensively before I showed it to any agents or publishers. Having taught fiction writing at the college level, I have learned a few tricks over the years, as well as some pitfalls to avoid. I wanted the novel to read like a movie screenplay, i.e. to feature scenes driven by action and dialogue rather than by long psychological passages, or self-indulgent descriptions of the physical settings.

The biggest editorial decision I had to make was concerning the narrative voice: my first draft had a rather chatty first-person narrator who played a minor role in the story; however, I eventually realized that he was much more trouble than he was worth, so (like a spy master dealing with a double agent, I suppose) I quietly got rid of him. Fortunately, I tend to write pretty fluently and confidently in in my first drafts, so the book didn’t need too many sentence-level edits otherwise.

What is the first piece of writing advice you would give to anyone inspired to write a story?

Read Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. This book offers many good pointers about how and when to use summary versus writing complete scenes, and how to create conflict via dialogue, as well as lots of tips about beginner’s mistakes to watch out for.

Can you give me a hint about any further books you’re planning to write?

Since the advance orders for Spy’s Mate have been so robust, I’m happy to report that I am already under contract to write a sequel! I can’t share too many details about that project, but I certainly have learned a lot from writing Spy’s Mate—both about chess and about the history of the Soviet Union in its last days— that will contribute to the sequel. Although I am old enough to remember Gorbachev and Yeltsin and the fall of the Berlin Wall, I have been reading a lot of background material to help explain how Putin’s rise came about, as well as how chess’s political importance has changed since the days of Bobby Fischer and, later, Garry Kasparov, so that too will factor in to Spy’s Mate 2, or whatever its title will turn out to be.

I have some other writing projects in the works too: a book about the health benefits of expressive writing, for example, is under consideration with a reputable publisher. Finally, my fifth book of poetry, The Birds of Poverty Ridge, will be published in early 2026 by Finishing Line Press.

And, finally, are your proud of your accomplishment? Was it worth the effort?

Absolutely, I am very proud that I’ve finally written a publishable novel! After Henry, A Mouse Glorified there were three other novels I finished and tried to get published, but to no avail. They recounted mainly my own life and experiences, and lacked any real dramatic interest for other readers to latch onto. So putting the time into Spy’s Mate, which has the potential to appeal to a much wider audience, was definitely worthwhile!

Pop all your book, website and social media links here so the readers can find you:

People can pre-order Spy’s Mate through the Thinkers Publishing Website: https://tinyurl.com/9usyxuxv

People can pre-order Spy’s Mate through Amazon here:

Paperback: https://amzn.to/46wMAnJ

Hardcover: https://amzn.to/4pWnZk0

People can pre-order Spy’s Mate through Bookshop.org: https://tinyurl.com/3h2pe69z

My website is www.bradthechimera.com

I’m on Facebook as Brad Buchanan, and on Instagram, X, and Bluesky as @Bradthechimera

Spy’sMate is also on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.