I’ve read my fair share of spy fiction – it’s an interesting genre. What’s most surprising about it, I find, is that there is so much variation in what would seem to be a relatively narrow spectrum of possible storylines. On the one hand you have James Bond and Jason Bourne, those made-for-Hollywood action stories in which things are constantly exploding, the protagonist ever propelled toward a climax after which we know all along he will be the last one standing.

Those sorts of stories can be fun, and I’m not at all one to look down my nose at them. I still remember the pleasure and exhilaration I felt while reading Robert Ludlum’s The Matarese Circle many years ago. As much fun as they can be, though, these sorts of spy novels are popcorn literature. You consume them voraciously while they’re in front of you, but there’s not a lot of nutrition to them.

Authors like John le Carre, on the author hand, produce spy fiction that is more aptly compared to a good steak. As anyone who’s read The Russia House can tell you, you don’t plow through a le Carre novel. You savor it. This type of spy fiction is not about action so much as it is about relationships: the relationships the characters have with others, and the relationships they have with themselves. These books make you consider the good and the bad of spycraft, and the toll that sort of work can take on the people who do it. In my opinion, le Carre’s characters are some of the most finely crafted characters that have ever been put on the page – not just in spy fiction, but in fiction period.

If there was one thing that put me off le Carre’s fiction, though, it was the plots – they were always so convoluted. The paranoia of his characters was never baseless; each novel seemed to contain a multitude of double-crosses and triple-crosses and it was always difficult for me to follow who was really on which side. I remember watching the film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy a few years ago (the novel of which I had not read) and thinking I should have taken a notebook to the theater with me so I could keep track of what was going on.

All of which is to offer a very long prelude to the discussion of the latest book I’ve finished, Olen Steinhauer’s All the Old Knives. Steinhauer is, apparently, already a well-regarded spy novelist, but I hadn’t read any of his novels prior to this one.

The novel takes place entirely over the course of a dinner at a restaurant in a small California town. Henry Pelham works for the CIA and is doing an investigation into an operation that went disastrously wrong many years ago. His dinner companion is Celia Harrison, who left the Agency – and Henry, who had been her lover – after the operation and started a new life. It is suspected that there was a mole within the Agency during the operation, and Henry has been assigned to find out if Celia might have been the traitor.

The story is narrated alternately by Henry and Celia, either or both of whom, we quickly realize, may be unreliable narrators. The story is related both through their conversation at dinner as well as through flashbacks to the Vienna operation, narrated by each of the characters. The book’s about 300 pages long, but it’s got fairly large type, and I managed to finish it in just about two or maybe three hours of reading. There’s not an single unnecessary syllable in this story, and while you might think that a story that takes place entirely over dinner at a fancy restaurant would be dry, you’d be wrong. It’s not violent, there’s little action and no sex – it’s not a Ludlum novel, in other words. But because Steinhauer has an excellent sense of pacing, because he knows just when to reveal a crucial detail, there’s little opportunity to become bored.

Henry and Celia are well-drawn characters. They’re not quite as fully fleshed-out as the characters in a le Carre novel would be, but I think that mostly owes to the constraints imposed by the setting. As it is, you learn enough about each character that you really want to find out who is lying, and that’s enough.

Although the entire story takes place over the course of one dinner, all the elements of a spy novel are here: secret surveillances, double-crossings, lies, paranoia, murder. There are no set pieces, no train-top fistfights or car chases through the streets of Venice. All the Old Knives is like a spy novel where everything that is not absolutely essential has been whittled away. The book flap says that the author has written the screenplay for a film adaptation, but I think this story might be better adapted as a play. After all, when you come right down to it the whole thing is really just two characters, facing each other at a table, having a conversation. And yet it is riveting.