People imagine spy novelists at mahogany desks, surrounded by maps and burner phones. The truth, in my case, is far less glamorous and far more caffeinated. Almost every page of the Hari Vandra novels - Lodhi Road: The Puntland Assignment and Buddha's Requiem was drafted, doubted, deleted and rescued in the coffee shops of Brighton.
There is something about writing espionage in a café that feels honest to the genre. Spies live in public spaces. They watch, they wait, they nurse a drink long past politeness. When I sit in a window seat with a notebook and a cooling flat white, I am doing exactly what my characters do - hiding in plain sight, eavesdropping on the ordinary world while an entirely different story runs underneath it. Reading works the same way. A le Carré paperback tastes better with the hiss of a steam wand behind it.
Brighton itself is a co-conspirator. A seaside town of pleasure and shadow, of Regency facades and back-lane secrets - it is no accident that Buddha's Requiem begins with a quiet death in Hove. I only had to look up from my table.
So here, with gratitude and a mild caffeine dependency, are the six coffee shops where the Vandra books get written.
Komodo, Brighton Square (Store Location)
Tucked into a corner of the Lanes, Komodo is where I go when a chapter needs precision. The coffee is the best in the city - single-origin, seriously made and the small, calm room concentrates the mind. First drafts of interrogation scenes happen here. Something about the intensity of the espresso.
DANDY, Sydney Street (Store Location)
A slim little room down a side street in the North Laine, which is exactly where a safe house should be. Outstanding flat whites, good music, and on Friday evenings it turns into a wine bar useful when a plot problem needs solving by other means. I've read whole novels in the front seat, watching Sydney Street go by.
Olea Speciality Coffee & Matcha, North Road (Store Location)
Warm, Mediterranean, impossible to leave. Olea is my long-haul café - the place for the unglamorous middle of a manuscript, when the only way through is time and toast. When the afternoon slumps, their matcha carries me to the evening pages.
Ikigai Coffee, Queens Road (Store Location)
Minutes from the station, which suits a writer whose characters are forever catching trains. Ikigai - the Japanese idea of a reason for being is a fitting name for a place where I've asked, more than once, what Hari Vandra actually wants. The honey toast helps with the answer.
Pelicano Coffee Co., Lewes Road (Store Location)
Open from half past seven, which makes it my dawn-raid café. The early chapters of the day get written here, before the world's noise starts a proper roaster's coffee, plug sockets everywhere, and staff who let a man sit unhurried for hours. The sort of place where a notebook full of RAW tradecraft attracts no attention at all.
Ease Coffee, Gloucester Road (Store Location)
The name is the promise. A calm, beautiful room just off the main lanes, laptop- friendly, with plug points and a vegan carrot cake that has salvaged more than one dead afternoon. Revisions happen at Ease - the slow, patient work of making a thriller look effortless.
Six cafés, two novels, and more flat whites than any doctor would sanction. If you're in Brighton and you spot a man wearing a black fedora sitting at a window seat, scribbling about intelligence chiefs and designer-drug cartels between sips, say hello. But quietly. The chapter might be going well.
