With epic car chases, cocktails on the French Riviera, sparkling dialogue and a cast of characters assembled from Russia, America, Germany and other parts of troubled 1935 Europe, Mark Mills’s latest novel seems ripe for a film adaptation.

So it’s no surprise to learn that the author of House of the Hanged was a screenplay writer before turning his hand to novels. Frustration at the vagaries of the film industry sparked his move, and he has never regretted it. “I had had a couple of projects which I was disappointed by, and most of the stuff you do never sees the light of day,” he said.

Having studied history and history of art at Cambridge, he had fallen into film writing almost by accident after his then girlfriend (now wife) Caroline got a job at Paramount Pictures in London. “I started by reading scripts, then someone fired a writer and asked me to step in. I was lucky — I was never out of work from that moment on.”

His second novel, The Savage Garden — a Second World War mystery focused on a Renaissance garden in Tuscany — has been optioned by a film company, but someone else is writing the script. He is trying not to fret about the suggested changes to the plot. “Having worked in that world, I feel entitled to laugh at the way they feel obliged to change things.”

Now settled in Tackley with two children, he goes about his research like a professional historian, concentrating on first-person accounts of his chosen era, such as diaries and memoirs.

His third book, The Information Officer, also had a Mediterranean setting — Malta. Does he have a penchant for beautiful locations? “My wife is always joking about that. The main body of the book is written during the winter and I love being off somewhere exotic in my head. I couldn’t do 1921 Warsaw in the depths of winter, or Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.”

In fact, House of the Hanged does start in deep snow — in 1919 Petrograd, where the young Tom Nash loses his lover Irina to the Soviet secret police. Some 16 years later, Tom has quit the British Secret Service to start a new life as a writer in the small French village of Le Rayol. The author knows the area around Toulon well, because his wife grew up there and they take frequent holidays in the South of France. Into this tranquil setting, a professional killer arrives, with Tom as his target.

We are soon hooked into a fast-moving plot which Mills handles with the confidence of an experienced creator of suspense.

The story seems to hark back to classic Cold War spy novels, and the author says the espionage angle was inevitable. “There were shifting sands in European politics. Everyone was changing position. The British were trying to find ways of neutralising Mussolini. The year 1935 was fascinating, because nothing had happened. If I do a sequel, it will be set in 1937, because everything had changed then.”

Because of his professional attitude to writing, his stories don’t appear to draw from his own life, but he says friends recognise certain patterns, for example the conflict between good and evil — not in the James Bond sense, where the reader has no problem picking out the baddies. In Mills stories, the conflict is enacted inside each character. Nothing is black and white, and our hero comes to realise that he cannot trust even his closest friends.

The novel is packed with contemporary resonances, including the seeds of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, and the extremist politics arising from economic depression. “There was a loss of faith in capitalism and liberal democracy; the feeling that we are all going to hell in a handcart.

“There is much of the same thing going on now,” says the author.

His publishers are keen for a sequel, but instead he is playing with the idea of a contemporary story set in Oxfordshire, “a dark tale involving hedge-fund guys — the only people who can afford to take on these country estates”.

His many fans must be hoping for a return of Tom Nash, and childhood friend Barnaby, a hack journalist who dreams of becoming a nature writer. Like the author, who moved here from Stockwell in South London, Barnaby wants to “shake the city dust from my feet and go rustic”.

Barnaby has second thoughts about his “damp little cottage with an overgrown garden and horny-handed country folk for neighbours” in Oxfordshire, when his friend points out that he might have to stay there for good.

Let’s hope that a cold winter in Tackley will inspire Barnaby’s creator to travel to more exotic places inside his head.

* House of the Hanged is published by Harper at £7.99.