Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed Mike Ripley WINNER OF THE HRF KEATING AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTION CRIME BOOK 2018An entertaining history of British thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed, in which award-winning crime writer Mike Ripley reveals that, though Britain may have lost an empire, her thrillers helped save the world. With a foreword by Lee Child.When Ian Fleming dismissed his books in a 1956 letter to Raymond Chandler as ‘straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety’ he was being typically immodest. In three short years, his James Bond novels were already spearheading a boom in thriller fiction that would dominate the bestseller lists, not just in Britain, but internationally.The decade following World War II had seen Britain lose an Empire, demoted in terms of global power and status and economically crippled by debt; yet its fictional spies, secret agents, soldiers, sailors and even (occasionally) journalists were now saving the world on a regular basis.From Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean in the 1950s through Desmond Bagley, Dick Francis, Len Deighton and John Le Carr? in the 1960s, to Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins in the 1970s.Many have been labelled ‘boys’ books’ written by men who probably never grew up but, as award-winning writer and critic Mike Ripley recounts, the thrillers of this period provided the reader with thrills, adventure and escapism, usually in exotic settings, or as today’s leading thriller writer Lee Child puts it in his Foreword: ‘the thrill of immersion in a fast and gaudy world.’In Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Ripley examines the rise of the thriller from the austere 1950s through the boom time of the Swinging Sixties and early 1970s, examining some 150 British authors (plus a few notable South Africans). Drawing upon conversations with many of the authors mentioned in the book, he shows how British writers, working very much in the shadow of World War II, came to dominate the field of adventure thrillers and the two types of spy story – spy fantasy (as epitomised by Ian Fleming’s James Bond) and the more realistic spy fiction created by Deighton, Le Carr? and Ted Allbeury, plus the many variations (and imitators) in between. Copyright (#ulink_f41b4eaf-6f90-5711-881b-ce2f414d7589) Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017 Copyright © Mike Ripley 2017 Foreword © Lee Child 2017 Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017 Cover illustration: detail from When Eight Bells Toll by Alistair MacLean © HarperCollinsPublishers 1981 (front); Robert Kyle’s Kill Now, Pay Later by Robert McGinnis © Dell Publishing/Penguin Random House 1960 (back). Author photograph © Mike Ripley Mike Ripley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions on the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008172237 Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008172244 Version: 2017-11-20 Dedication (#ulink_ac13e2df-6a58-5562-8c69-af961c56fa77) For Len Deighton, who has a lot to answer for. SPOILER ALERT (#ulink_d2c51c61-aaa8-5887-9e1d-236e6c091755) There will be spoilers. Live with it. Many of the thrillers referred to here were published fifty years ago. You’ve had time. THRILLERS (#ulink_d2c51c61-aaa8-5887-9e1d-236e6c091755) ‘A book, film, or play depicting crime, mystery, or espionage in an atmosphere of excitement and suspense.’ Collins English Dictionary ‘What exactly is a thriller? The term seems to cover a multitude of sins and quite a fair proportion of virtues.’ Margery Allingham, 1931 ‘You after all write “novels of suspense” – if not sociological studies – whereas my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.’ Ian Fleming in a letter to Raymond Chandler, 1956 Contents Cover (#udc59de6c-705a-5f16-837a-b5dd8684ced7) Title Page (#uf1e68488-a37a-562f-b537-bfda3990b879) Copyright (#u410c475b-a55b-50a9-9378-37a894fc292f) Dedication (#u1de002b6-2251-5630-a02a-a9741f98c9e4) Spoiler Alert (#uea762348-777a-556b-8256-6b03bf9f65a4) Thrillers (#u0705f81d-32e3-5069-b28b-8edab0488c8e) Foreword (#ub1c8256a-9346-5c75-bf20-913967247a37) Preface (#u50ce7f8c-32b8-5ef5-9edb-12d0d97be045) Chapter 1: A Question of Emphasis (#u475a4cc9-159f-547b-afcd-024b1ad693f2) Chapter 2: The Land Before Bond (#u3266babd-843b-5a74-b4c1-0349f0a94fdd) Chapter 3: Do Mention the War (#u3ff8d1a8-0046-5dff-b7ed-1690d90a5d77) Chapter 4: Tinkers, Tailors, Soldiers, Spies. But Mostly Journalists. (#u9b2d9f6d-1a02-5a1a-ba20-6ddbfea76b58) Chapter 5: End of Empire (#uad88998d-aeab-5ff6-aa4c-b1d5f26ebf69) Chapter 6: Travel Broadening the Mind (#u5b7c88d5-f167-5f71-9c9d-10fb2eeb70f9) Chapter 7: Class of ’62 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8: The Spies Have It, 1963–70 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9: The Adventurers, 1963–70 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10: The Storm Jackal Has Landed – The 1970s (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11: The New Intake (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 12: Endgame (#litres_trial_promo) Appendix I: The Leading Players (#litres_trial_promo) Appendix II: The Supporting Cast (#litres_trial_promo) Notes & References (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements & Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Mike Ripley (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) FOREWORD (#ulink_a0a10e0d-3ad8-5b33-bfc2-3e5d60509ebe) Some time ago Mike Ripley e-mailed and asked if I would write a foreword for his new book. I knew roughly what it was about: Mike and I bump into each other a couple of times a year, at industry junkets, and like writers everywhere we always ask about works in progress – secretly hoping, I suppose, that the other guy is having it even worse than we are. So I knew the project was a survey of British thriller fiction during the two golden decades between the mid-Fifties and the mid-Seventies. Knowing Mike, I knew the scholarship would be meticulous; I knew the writing would be pleasantly breezy, but always willing to seize passionately upon a point, and render a clear and acute conclusion, without fear or favour. It would be a book I would want to read – maybe even pay for – so why not get it early and free? So I said yes. Mike is a slightly older codger even than I, so there was no immediate e-mail response to my response. I got the impression he treats e-mail like the country squire he pretends to be, treats the post, perhaps once a day, perhaps in the early morning, at the breakfast table. I spent the rest of my own day writing a newspaper article commissioned by the New York Times. I was never quite sure what they wanted, but it seemed to require a retrospective mood, even elegiac, starting right back at the beginning, which in my case meant growing up in provincial post-war Britain. I polished the piece and sent it off. Then – bing – the attachment arrived from Ripley. For the New York Times, I had started, ‘Objectively I was one of the luckiest humans ever born.’ Ripley’s preface started, ‘I am of the luckiest generation.’ He’s a couple of years older than me, which makes us a typical older brother–younger brother age pairing right in the middle of the luckiest demographic in history. For the Times I said we were a stable postwar liberal democracy, at peace, with a cradle-to-grave welfare system that worked efficiently, with all dread diseases conquered, with full employment for our parents, with free and excellent education from the age of five for just as long as we merited it. We had no bombs falling on our houses, and no knocks on our doors in the middle of the night. No previous generation ever had all of that, not in all of history, and standards have eroded since. We were very lucky. But, I said, it was very boring. Britain was grey, exhausted, physically ruined, and financially crippled. The factories were humming, but everything went for export. We needed foreign currency to pay down monstrous war debt. Domestic life was pinched and austere. We escaped any way we could. Reading was the main way. Thrillers were the highest high, and British writers were never better than during our formative years. But finding out about them was entirely random. Obviously there was no Internet – electricity itself was fairly recent in some of our houses – and it was rare to meet a fellow aficionado face to face, and enthusiast bookshops were inaccessible to most of us, and so on. We blundered from one random find to another. Some of us had older brothers blazing the way, and really that’s exactly what this book is – the perfect older brother, equipped with 20/20 hindsight, saying, ‘Read this, and then this, and this, and this.’ I can follow my own snail-trail across the landscape that Ripley so comprehensively describes. I can pick my way from A to Z, book to book, zigging and zagging. I can remember the joy of escaping, and the thrill of immersion in a fast and gaudy world, and wanting to do it again and again. In that sense this book feels like my own personal memoir, and inevitably it will to thousands of others too, with their own unique zigzag snail-trails, and as such it seems of great sentimental value, like a long-lost diary, like a list of the way stations that carried us through a time that promised to be forever grey. It’s also sad, in a way. We all missed so much. Zigging and zagging are all very well, but must always conspire to pass by most good things, simply by the law of averages. But what’s done is done. Instead we should treat this book like a catch-up manual, and fill in what we didn’t read the first time. Some of it might be really good. Some of it might recapture the feeling. Which would be worth something. A book I might pay for, indeed. Lee Child New York 2016 PREFACE (#ulink_caca5297-2f27-5a3d-9f26-ae28def0b0b9) I am of the luckiest generation, the one which avoided National Service and enjoyed a fee-free university education – they even gave you a grant for going. I spent my early teenage years, and all my pocket money, reading thrillers. It was the first half of the 1960s and I could, by haunting second-hand bookshops and market stalls, usually pick up two, sometimes three, recent paperbacks for the same price as a ‘Top Ten’ 45 rpm vinyl single, which seemed a far better use of my limited disposable income. At least that was my thinking until I discovered girlfriends, and the Rolling Stones recorded Beggar’s Banquet. I was brought up in a house where a large pile of library books, all fiction, were refreshed every fortnight. Even in a small coal mining village in the West Riding of Yorkshire, there was a public library attached to the infant school which was open two or three evenings a week and allowed four books to be borrowed on each library ticket. My father was a voracious reader of Westerns whilst my mother’s passion was for historical novels. I read thrillers and I knew exactly what I meant when I said that then, although today I would differentiate and describe myself as having started out on adventure thrillers and then moved on to spy thrillers. Unlike many of my peers, science fiction did not entice and detective stories or ‘whodunits’ to me were stale and unappetizing (with the singular exception of Raymond Chandler). A thriller would offer excitement and almost certainly a connection to WWII. This was a familiar and important reference point as the comic books I had been brought up on as a young lad did not feature Batman, Superman or a Hulk, but soldiers – invariably British or Commonwealth troops – fighting on land, sea, and air against implacable German, inscrutable Japanese and unreliable, if not cowardly, Italian foes. These 64-page book-format magazines were published, rather grandly, as ‘Libraries’. There was War PictureLibrary, Battle Picture Library, Air Ace Picture Library and, from a rival stable, Commando. They cost a shilling (5p) each and were, as far as I could tell being a bit of a military history buff, pretty accurate when describing the campaigns of World War II. Why the obsession with WWII? I do not come from a military family, had no career aspirations in that direction (not even the Boy Scouts), and the war itself had ended more than seven years before I was born. Yet it somehow dominated my childhood. The headmaster of my village primary school was a former Royal Navy chief petty officer, the village priest had been a Chaplain with the 14th Army in Burma, I had an impressive collection of toy soldiers, and war films always seemed to be on television – mostly proving that no prison camp could ever hold plucky British escapees when they set their mind to it. When the minor public school I attended took the revolutionary step of starting up a Film Club, the first feature it showed was The Guns of Navarone. (The Headmaster who sanctioned the formation of that Film Club also prohibited any boy from going to the local cinema to see Lindsay Anderson’s If … in 1968. He was clearly a man who understood the power of film.) It was inevitable that I would discover Alistair MacLean’s wartime classic about the Arctic convoys, HMS Ulysses, and although it is (honestly) more than fifty years since I read it, I can vividly recall incidents from it, not least the scene in a snowstorm when the ship’s pom-pom guns are fired whilst their metal muzzle covers are still in place. This was a war novel, but it was a tense, dramatic and thrilling story with lashings of suspense and mystery. Not ‘mystery’ as in ‘whodunit?’ but rather ‘how can they survive this?’ The next MacLean I tried, South by Java Head, was also set during WWII but with more skulduggery than actual combat. Other MacLean books were devoured in quick succession and these were not war stories, yet the heroes were resourceful and brave, the stakes life-and-death, the settings ranging exotically from the South Seas to Greenland, and the action fast and furious. These were not only ‘what is really going on?’ mysteries but also ‘how do they get out of this?’ adventures. I was no longer reading war stories, I was reading thrillers and then, at the age of 12, I discovered James Bond and realised there was more than one type of thriller out there. With the benefit of half a century of hindsight I realise that there was a real purple patch of British thriller writing in the Sixties and into the Seventies and I had been hungrily reading my way through it. The ‘Golden Age’ of the British detective story (usually accepted to be the Twenties and Thirties) had well and truly lost its lustre by the Swinging Sixties, but a new generation of thriller writers had emerged after the war, appealing to a much wider audience. Thanks to the expansion of public libraries and attractive, mass market paperback editions British writers dominated the national and international bestseller lists. Nobody, it seemed, when it came to action-adventure heroes, secret agents, or spies, did do it better. After the dull, austere post-war period as Britain declined as a world power, its thriller fiction had – like British pop music and Carnaby Street fashion – moved from black-and-white to Technicolor. The thrillers just kept coming: bigger, brasher, and more fantastical than ever. The early death of Ian Fleming in 1964 did nothing to slow the rush of would-be successors to Bond, in fact it accelerated the flow as did the success of the Bond films. New voices joined in, establishing a school of more realistic spy fiction born in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and more films followed. The year 1966 seemed to have been a peak year, with twenty-two spy or secret agent films released in the UK – admittedly several of them spoofing the genre and only a few of which have stood the test of time. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang attempts to be a reader’s history – specifically this reader – of that action-packed period around the Sixties when, having lost an Empire, Britain’s thriller writers and their fictional heroes saved the world and their books sold by the million. It was very much a British initiative and it only faltered in the mid-Seventies when American thriller writers began to flex their muscles, different types of thriller emerged, and the detective or crime story began to enjoy a renaissance. This book concentrates unashamedly on the British spies, secret agents, and soldiers, and their creators and publishers, who saved the world from Nazis, ex-Nazis, proto-Nazis, the secret police of any (and all) communist country, super-rich and power-mad villains, traitors, dictators, rogue generals, mad scientists, secret societies, ruthless businessmen and even, on one occasion, an ultra-violent animal protection league which kills anyone who kills animals for sport! I will shamelessly ignore the fictional heroes of other countries and concentrate on British authors, with the exception of a handful of Australians and South Africans, whose primary publishers were in the UK. It will also limit itself to thrillers rather than ‘detective stories’ or ‘whodunits’. This means that some famous names hardly feature at all, those authors who may well have dipped a toe into the thriller pool but are far better known for their crime novels; for example, the wonderful and much-missed Reginald Hill. Similarly, I will down-play one of my favourite writers, that supreme stylist P. M. Hubbard, who wrote novels of suspense on a domestic, almost micro, level. The thriller-writers taking centre-stage here are those who worked on a broader canvas with sweeping brush-strokes and who came to prominence in the period 1953 to 1975. Some who had established themselves before the Second World War were still writing and experienced something of a ‘second wind’ in the Swinging Sixties. I should insert here a warning: fans of Eric Ambler (1909–98) and Graham Greene (1904–91) will feel themselves short-changed. Both these authors were immensely influential on the form and tone of the thriller genre (novels and films); indeed, their surnames became adjectives frequently used by reviewers. It was high praise indeed for a thriller to be called ‘Ambler-esque’ and everyone knew exactly where ‘Greene-land’ was. Yet neither of these giants were a product of the period under scrutiny as they had cemented their reputations two decades previously, although both were still producing work of high quality, notably Ambler’s Passage of Arms (1959), The Light of Day (1962) – famously filmed as Topkapi, and The Levanter (1972); and Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958), and The Comedians 1966). Their legacy and importance in the genre will be acknowledged, though not in enough detail to satisfy their dedicated fans. I have also relegated Leslie Charteris and Dennis Wheatley to the pre-war era for, although ‘The Saint’ was an immensely popular figure on British television in the early Sixties, Charteris had ceased to produce full-length novels and Dennis Wheatley’s novels in the period under scrutiny tended towards the historical or the occult stories with which he had made his name in the Thirties. One limitation is not self-imposed, and that is the absence of women writers. Adventure thrillers and spy stories tended to be what is known in the book trade as ‘boys’ books’ or, pejoratively, ‘dads’ books’ and were to a very great degree, written by men – some might say men who had never grown out of being boys. A notable exception was Helen MacInnes, a Scot based in America, whose first novel had appeared in 1939. By the Sixties, she was a well-established and popular writer and had three notable bestsellers in that decade, but she, like Ambler and Greene, was not a product of that period when Britain ruled the thriller-writing waves and so gets an honourable, but passing, mention here. And it should not be forgotten that it was in the Sixties that some rather talented female writers, notably P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, were laying the groundwork for a revival in the British detective story and crime novel. It is difficult to pin-point the exact end of this ‘Golden Age’ (or purple patch) of dominance by British thriller writers. One option would perhaps be the death of Alistair MacLean – the biggest name in the adventure thriller market – in 1987, or alternatively the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which threatened to put many a spy-fiction writer out of business. In truth, the writing was on the wall (if not the Berlin one) from roughly the mid-Seventies onwards as the Americans, slightly late as usual, entered the fray. The beginning of the boom is rather easier to identify. The 1950s were grey and austere for a supposedly victorious wartime nation whose empire was starting to crumble. You might say Britain had been expecting you, Mr Bond … Chapter 1: (#ulink_706eb4ec-ee61-545b-8160-6a267aaa4925) A QUESTION OF EMPHASIS (#ulink_706eb4ec-ee61-545b-8160-6a267aaa4925) You can smell fear. You can smell it and you can see it and I could do both as I hauled my way into the control centre of the Dolphin that morning. Not one man as much as flickered an eye in my direction … they had eyes for one thing only – the plummeting needle on the depth gauge. Seven hundred feet. Seven hundred and fifty. Eight hundred. I’d never heard of a submarine that had reached that depth and lived. Alistair MacLean, Ice Station Zebra Was it a Golden Age or an explosion of ‘kiss-kiss, bang-bang’ pulp fiction which reflected the social revolution – and some would say declining morals – of the period? Both are reasonable explanations, depending on your standpoint, for the extraordinary growth in both the writing and reading of British thrillers, between 1953 and 1975. Popular fiction, as opposed to literary or ‘highbrow’ fiction was always, well – popular; but suddenly the thriller seemed to be out-gunning all other forms. Writing in the middle of the Swinging Sixties, in his economic history Industry and Empire, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that since 1945, ‘that powerful cultural export, the British detective story, has lost its hold, conquered by the American-patterned thriller.’ Professor Hobsbawm was certainly correct in that the traditional British detective story had been replaced by the thriller as a cultural, and in fact economically valuable, export but wrong in suggesting they were ‘American-patterned’. This was a very British boom. The British, or probably more accurately the English detective story had flourished in the period, roughly, between the two World Wars, a period which earned the epithet ‘Golden Age’ and was characterized, often unfairly, as the era of ‘the country house murder mystery’ or the ‘whodunit?’ It had given rise to the concept of ‘fair play’ whereby the reader was presented with clues to solving the puzzle presented, ideally before the fictional detective did, and the puzzle element was very important. There were even ‘rules’ (fairly tongue-in-cheek ones) on what was and was not allowed in a detective story, and a self-selecting, totally unofficial, Detection Club of the leading practitioners of the art to set the standards of good writing – or just standards in general. After WWII tastes changed and readers began to demand something other than an intellectual puzzle. Cynics may say that the launch of the board game Cluedo in 1949 was an ironic final nail in the coffin of the ‘whodunit?’ – all those fictional cardboard characters being reduced to actual pieces of cardboard. Of course, it wasn’t the end; it was a period of cyclical dip and transition. Readers were looking for exotic settings, not country houses; heroes and heroines who often acted outside the law rather than plodding policemen; suspense rather than a puzzle; more realistic violence rather than a ridiculously over-elaborate murder method; and, above all, action and excitement at a time when, in the Sixties, everything seemed exciting and moved much faster. For a period of more than two decades the British thriller delivered on all counts, and on a truly international level. It may not have been a Golden Age but it was certainly a boom time. This is not a work of literary criticism or comparative literature; it is a reader’s history of one specific category, or genre, of popular fiction – the thriller – over a particular period when British writers dominated the bestseller lists at home and abroad. There will be little, if any, discussion of heroic mythology, social individualism, the atemporality of the appeal of the thriller, the symbiotic relationship between hero and conspiracy, or genre theory. Those debates are left to others on the grounds that, to paraphrase E. B. White: dissecting a thriller is like dissecting a frog – few people are really interested and the frog dies. But there has to be some attempt to define the term ‘thriller’, a term used as loosely in the past as ‘noir’ is today (‘Tartan Noir’, ‘Scandi Noir’, etc.) to describe an important segment of that exotic fruit which is generally known as crime fiction. Whether it matters a jot to the reader who simply wants to be entertained is debatable, but again, it probably does. Crime fiction is a recognised genre, just as horror, science fiction, romance, fantasy, westerns and supernatural are all genres of popular fiction and genres tend to have dedicated followers. The idea of genre fiction evolved in the late nineteenth century and blossomed in the Thirties with the advent of cheaper, paperback books with crime fiction among the first instantly identifiable genres thanks to the famous green covers used by Penguins and logos such as the Collins Crime Club’s ‘gunman’. Dedicated readers were steered to genres they liked and genre readers appreciated the guidance – though they did not want to read the same book again, they did want more of the same. Within a genre as big as crime fiction, which could be described as a broad church (albeit an unholy one) readers tended to specialise often to a slightly frightening degree. There are those who only read spy stories (and some who only read spy stories set in Berlin), those who only read the Sherlock Holmes canon, those who refuse point blank to read anything written after 1945, those who only want to read about serial killers, those who always prefer the private eye novel, those who disparage the amateur sleuth preferring police detectives, and these days there are those naturally light-hearted optimistic readers of nothing but Scandinavian crime fiction. Thankfully only a few crime fiction readers go as far as some science fiction fans and attend conventions dressed as their favourite fictional heroes but all like the security of identifiable categories and so some attempt must be made to define the terms used in this book. As a recognisable genre, the thriller is certainly as old if not older than the detective story which, casually ignoring the interests of students of eighteenth-century literature and languages other than English, is generally dated from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841. With reluctance, the honours could also go to America, with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy (1821) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826) for the earliest examples of the spythriller and the adventure thriller. Already the dissection of the term ‘thriller’ has begun, yet by the time the British had flexed their writing muscles things were becoming clearer. Both Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), published in the same decade in which Sherlock Holmes took his first bow, were fully-formed adventure thrillers. They were adventure stories which thrilled and distinctly different from the detective story, which could of course be thrilling but in a different, perhaps more cerebral, way. If that was not confusing enough, the 1890s saw the early days of the spy novel – albeit in the shape of a string of xenophobic potboilers which revelled in the fear of an invasion of England by Russia, France, or even Germany. They were certainly meant to be thrilling, if not hysterical, but a quality mark was soon achieved with Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and the work of John Buchan, seen by many as the Godfather of the quintessential British thriller, although he preferred the term ‘shocker’ presumably in the sense that his stories were electrifying rather than revolting. When the Golden Age of the English detective story dawned, it suddenly seemed important that the thriller was publicly differentiated from the novel of detection which offered readers ‘fair play’ clues to the solution of the mystery, usually a murder. At least it seemed important to the writers of detective stories, who saw themselves as, if not quite an elite, then certainly a literary step up on the purveyors of potboilers and shockers. The Golden Age can be dated, very crudely, as the period between the two world wars, beginning with the early novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers (when it actually ended is still a matter of some debate – an often interminable and sometimes heated debate). Although a boom time for detective stories, it was also a boom time for spy thrillers. Donald McCormick in his Who’s Who in Spy Fiction (1977) claims that the years between 1914 and 1939 were the most prolific period of the spy thriller, the public’s appetite having been whetted by the First World War and real or imagined German spy-scares. ‘The spy story became a habit rather than a cult’ was his polite way of saying that this was definitely not a Golden Age for the thriller. Names such as Edgar Wallace, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Sydney Horler and Francis Beeding (Beeding’s books were publicised under the banner ‘Breathless Beeding’ or ‘Sit up with …’ after a review in The Times had declared that Beeding was an author whose books made ‘readers sit up [all night] until the book is finished’) are now mostly found in reference books rather than on the spines of books on shelves, whereas certain luminaries of the Golden Age of detective fiction, such as Christie, Sayers, Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley and John Dickson Carr are still known and respected and, more importantly, in print somewhere. Back in the day though, the fact of the matter was that the Oppenheims and Breathless Beedings et al were the bigger sellers. Edgar Wallace’s publishers once claimed him to be the author of a quarter of all the books read in Britain (which even by publishing standards of hype is pretty extreme) and they were to inspire in various ways, often unintended, a new generation of thriller writers. In 1936, a debut novel, The Dark Frontier, arrived without much fanfare marking the start of the writing career of Eric Ambler, who was later to admit that he had great fun writing a parody of an E. Phillips Oppenheim hero. Two decades later, the eagle-eyed reader of a certain age could spot certain Oppenheim traits in another new arrival, James Bond. In fact, the reader didn’t have to be that eagle-eyed. The question of what was a thriller, and how seriously it should be taken, seemed to exercise the minds of the writers of detective stories and members of the elite Detection Club, confident in the superiority of their craft, rather than the thriller writers themselves. One writer closely associated with the Golden Age, though happy to experiment beyond the confines of the detective story, was Margery Allingham. In 1931, Allingham wrote an article for The Bookfinder Illustrated succinctly entitled ‘Thriller!’ trying to explain the different categories then evident in crime fiction. It was a remarkably good and fair analysis of the then current crime scene, identifying five types (and one sub-type) which made up the family tree of the ‘thriller’, which were: Murder Puzzle Stories – which could be sub-divided into (a) ‘Novels with murder plots’ by writers ‘who take murder in their stride’ (such as Anthony Berkeley), and (b) ‘Pure puzzles’ such as those by Freeman Wills Crofts; Stout Fellows – the brave British adventurer or secret agent, usually square-jawed and later to be known as the ‘Clubland hero’ type (as written by John Buchan); Pirates and Gunmen – the adventurers and gangsters as found in the books of American Francis Coe and the prolific Edgar Wallace; Serious Murder – novels such as Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles (Anthony Berkeley) which Allingham put ‘in the same class as Crime and Punishment’; High Adventures in Civilised Settings – crime stories ‘without impossibilities and improbabilities’ for which she cited Dorothy L. Sayers as an example. Whether Dorothy L. Sayers was pleased with this somewhat lofty and isolated categorisation is not recorded, but it is likely that she bridled at being lumped, even in a specialised category, in the general genre of thrillers. She was crime fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times in the years 1933–5 and was not slow off the mark to say that a novel she did not approve of had ‘been reduced to the thriller class’. Responding to a claim, real or imagined, that she had been ‘harsh and high hat’ about thrillers, she claimed to hail them ‘with cries of joy when they displayed the least touch of originality’, whenever she found one that is, which seemed to be rarely and she clearly felt the detective story the purer form. (This in turn provoked the very successful thriller writer Sydney Horler, creator of ‘stout fellow’ hero Tiger Standish, to remark rather acidly that Miss Sayers ‘spent several hours a day watching the detective story as though expecting something terrific to happen’.) In fairness, during her time as the Sunday Times critic, Sayers did attempt to provide a working definition of what a ‘thriller’ was and how it differed from the (in her opinion) far superior detective story. Indeed, she had three goes at doing so, which suggests the lady might have been protesting a little too much. In June 1933 she suggested: ‘Some readers prefer to be thrilled by the puzzle and others to be puzzled by the thrills.’ She refined this in January 1934 to: ‘The difference between thriller and detective story is one of emphasis. Agitating events occur in both, but in the thriller our cry is “What comes next?” – in the detective story “What came first?”. The one we cannot guess; the other we can, if the author gives us a chance.’ Now Sayers believed in writing detective stories to a set of rules which gave the reader the chance, if they were clever enough, of guessing the solution to the mystery/problem posed before the author revealed the solution. She did not realise that there were readers out there who did not want the author to give them a chance, they just wanted to be thrilled however outrageous and implausible the story. Sayers had a third go, in her Sunday Times column in March 1935, where she defined the thriller as something where ‘the elements of horror, suspense, and excitement are more prominent than that of logical deduction’. By that time an intelligent woman such as Sayers must have realised that the fair-play, by-the-rules detective story as an intellectual game was running out of steam and that other types of crime fiction were taking over. She herself effectively retired from crime writing after 1937. Margery Allingham, who by her own set of definitions wrote most types of thriller, continued writing until her death in 1966 and kept a watchful eye on developments in the genre as a whole. In 1958 she was still wary of the superior status given to the detective story noting that ‘In this century there is a cult of the crime story as distinct from any other adventure story (thriller) – mainly read by people ill in bed.’ Allingham’s gentle analysis was that the detective story had been an intellectual exercise, whereas the thriller had included adventure stories, almost modern fairy stories – by which she presumably meant Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Now there was the crime story (in which she included the works of Georges Simenon and John Creasey) and the mystery story, a loose term which covered everything from the Gothic to the picaresque. In 1965, shortly before her death, like Sayers she predicted that the mysterystory was ‘going out’ and would be replaced by the novel of suspense. To further confuse matters, in 2002 in The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction compiled by Mike Ashley (one of the most respected anthologists in the business) Ashley excluded thrillers from his truly mammoth work on the grounds that ‘whilst some crime fiction may also be classed as a thriller, not all thrillers are crime fiction’. For his purposes, Ashley defines crime fiction as a book which involves the breaking and enforcement of the law, which is fair enough, but then he also excludes spy stories and novels of espionage – on the grounds that they constitute such a large field they deserve a study in their own right and even though spying usually involves breaking someone’s laws. Even excluding thrillers and spy stories, as well as stories involving the supernatural or psychic detectives and anything labelled ‘suspense’ or ‘mystery’ (when describing the mood rather than content of a story), and then only dealing with authors writing since WWII, Ashley’s splendid encyclopedia weighs in at almost 800 pages. Does any of this soul-searching by people in the business (writers, editors, reviewers) over terminology really matter? Because the field of crime fiction, or what the Victorians would have called ‘sensational fiction’, is now so large – so popular – it probably does, at least if one is trying to make a point about a particular aspect or time period. To keep it simple, let us say that the overall genre of crime fiction encompasses crime novels (which contain danger, a puzzle or a mystery centred on an individual or individuals, the outcome of which is resolved by more or less lawful means by characters who are usually law-abiding citizens or officers of the state) and thrillers where the perceived threat is to a larger group of people, a nation or a society and a solution is reached by heroic action by individuals taking action outside the law, usually having to deal with extreme physical conditions or an approaching deadline. Paraphrasing Dorothy L. Sayers, in the crime novel it is what happened in the past (who did the murder? what motive did the murderer have? how did a particular cast of characters happen to come together?) which is important; in the thriller it is what is going to happen next. A good dictionary will define a thriller as a book depicting crime, mystery, or espionage in an atmosphere of excitement and suspense, which could, of course, also define the crime novel – accepting that espionage is a crime, or it certainly is if you are caught. So perhaps, to quote Sayers again, it is all a question of emphasis. In the crime novel the emphasis is on the crime and its consequences. In the thriller the emphasis is on thwarting or escaping the crime or its consequences and the thriller usually requires a conspiracy rather than a crime. P. G. Wodehouse is reputed to have called readers of thrillers ‘an impatient race’ as they long ‘to get on with the rough stuff’ and rough stuff, or action, is certainly more predominant in the thriller, often taking place in a hostile environment – at sea, under the sea, in the Arctic, or under a pitiless desert sun, sometimes cliff-hanging from the edge of a precipice. In keeping with Edgar Wallace’s ‘pirate stories in modern dress’ description (of which Margery Allingham would have approved – she was keen on pirates and treasure hunts), the exotic foreign location became a popular trait of the British thriller. More than that, it became a major component and though it would be too simplistic to say that crime novels happened indoors whilst thrillers happened outdoors, the concentration on action and ‘rough stuff’ thrills did often require a large, open-air canvas. If the key building blocks of crime fiction are: plot, characters, setting, pace, suspense and humour (the latter may come as a surprise, but there is a long tradition of humour in British crime writing going back to the days of Wilkie Collins), then one can logically assign large blocks of plot, character, and suspense and smaller characteristics of setting, pace, and humour to the crime novel whereas the thriller’s foundation might be huge blocks of plot, setting, and pace, with smaller proportions of bricks devoted to characters and suspense and sometimes no humour at all. (Ian Fleming disapproved of the use of humour in thrillers, though many other writers found room for a wise-cracking hero.) Once again, it comes down to a question of emphasis. For the period under review here – 1953 to 1975 in Britain – our basic division of crime fiction into crime novel and thriller is a starting point only. Any assessment of crime fiction over the period 1993 to 2015, for example, would certainly require a different schema and to cover the entire history of crime writing just in Britain would produce a family tree with so many sprigs and branches it would resemble a Plantagenet claim to the throne. Such an exercise would be an interesting challenge, but this is not the place. Even so, we must divide our sub-genres into sub-sub-genres, but hopefully not too many. If we can accept that the crime novel is an identifiable entity, and that we know one when we read one, then it is reasonably safe to assume that we can all recognise Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express as a crime novel, but Ian Fleming’s From Russia, with Love, which involves at least two murders on the Orient Express, as something else – it’s a thriller. In another example of compare-and-contrast, 1954 saw the publication of two novels which were both initially billed by their publishers as ‘adventures’. The Strange Land by Hammond Innes had a lone hero figure in an exotic location (Morocco) struggling with a shipwreck, arid desert and mountainous terrain. Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming had a lone hero in an exotic location (America and the Caribbean) battling gangsters and communists as well as Voodoo and sharks. Both were clearly thrillers, but different types of thriller. The Innes was an adventure thriller, for want of a better term, and the Fleming was a spythriller, albeit featuring a hero who did little actual spying and who acted more as a secret policeman, and not a particularly secret one at that. Ten years later, that distinction was redundant as a new, more realistic type of spy story began to appear. Live and Let Die may have been one sort of spy thriller but The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was obviously of a different ilk. For the purpose of this survey, the novels under discussion – all thrillers – can be counted as adventure thrillers (for example, the work of Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean), and, following the suggestion of Len Deighton, spy fantasy (for example, Ian Fleming and James Leasor) and the more realistic spy fiction (John Le Carr?, Deighton, Ted Allbeury). What makes a good, or bestselling, thriller is anyone’s opinion or guess; there is no set formula though at times it seemed that writers assumed there was. The best thought, if not the last word, on this goes to Jerry Palmer in his 1978 study Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre: ‘I would say that thriller writing is like cookery: you can give exactly the same ingredients, of the highest quality, to two cooks and one will make something so delicious that you gobble it, the other something that is just food.’ Whatever the quality of the cooking, between 1953 and 1975 Britain’s thrillers certainly fed their readers well. From the dour and austere Fifties, through the fashionable ‘Swinging’ Sixties and into the more severe Seventies, British thriller writers saved the world on a regular basis and in the process achieved fame and fortune, making some of them the pop idols or football stars of their day. Chapter 2: (#ulink_13c8b815-6a62-500d-b8a8-f0af1f6dc0b2) THE LAND BEFORE BOND (#ulink_13c8b815-6a62-500d-b8a8-f0af1f6dc0b2) The Fifties was the decade when Britain had to come to terms with being ordinary. It had emerged from the Second World War as a hero, but an exhausted and almost bankrupt hero. Austerity was Britain’s peculiar reward for surviving WWII unbeaten at the cost of selling her foreign assets and taking on a crippling load of debt to the United States. Economically, Britain had been stretched to the point of snapping and it could no longer rely on its Empire for financial support, as it had relied on it for fighting men during the war – a vital contribution without which the outcome may have been different. British overseas assets in 1938 were estimated as being worth ?5 billion, but by 1950 had been reduced to less than ?0.6 billion and the countries of the Empire had already begun to cut their historic bonds with the mother country. This would not, or should not, have come as a surprise to anyone as independence or ‘home rule’ for many of the colonies, most significantly India, had been suggested or agreed during the war itself. There was also the plain fact that, whilst coping with its debt and a domestic programme creating a welfare state and a National Health Service, Britain could simply not afford the running costs of an Empire any more. Britain was no longer the global power it had once confidently assumed it always would be and was now running, or perhaps limping, in third place behind the USA and Soviet Russia in any international race. On the home front it struggled simply to get by, a depressing state of affairs for a country which thought it had won the war. Even seven years after the end of hostilities, basic foodstuffs were in short supply (sweets and sugar rationing ending in 1953), there were uncleared bomb sites in many cities and government restrictions on building materials for anything other than housing meant that many buildings including the morale-boosting British pub were at best badly run-down, at worst still bombed-out shells. Until 1952, Britons were required to carry Identity Cards, something perceived (still) as a very un-British, ‘foreign’ affectation unless there was a war on and in 1953, to add insult to injury, the England football team was soundly thrashed 6–3 by Hungary at Wembley Stadium and a new, small family car called a Volkswagen Beetle was being imported from, of all places, Germany. It may have been a scarred country stumbling to find its place in a reshaped world, but it was not all gloom. In 1953 Mount Everest was finally conquered (technically by a New Zealander and a Nepalese, but it counted as a ‘British’ achievement). The number of television sets increased to two-and-a-half million (from around 300,000 in 1950) so that an estimated twenty million proud Britons could watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and two young scientists at Cambridge, James Watson and Francis Crick, discovered something called ‘DNA’. And on 13 April, a thriller called Casino Royale was published. It marked, according to the critic Julian Symons, ‘the renaissance of the spy story’ and it unleashed the character of James Bond on an unsuspecting world. Prior to 1953, new fictional heroes had been compared to Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond, or Jonah Mansel, the ‘Terrible Trio of popular fiction between the two wars’ (as created by John Buchan, ‘Sapper’ and Dornford Yates). One could add Leslie Charteris’ Simon (the Saint) Templar to this list; but now Bond was the new standard. Casino Royale, Pan, 1955, illustrated by Roger Hall Bulldog Drummond, Hodder & Stoughton, 1920 Before Bond, heroes had been upright, square-jawed, patriotic, honourable, and always kind to women, dogs, and horses, though not necessarily in that order. If a John Buchan hero had a gun in his hand it was usually because he was striding through the heather of a Scottish grouse moor – and the same could be said of the heroes of Geoffrey Household’s thrillers of the early Fifties, substituting a Dorset heath for Scotland. Any game that James Bond was hunting with a gun was invariably human and he did not really seem to care too much if an innocent bystander got in the way, and whilst avid fans of E. Phillips Oppenheim and Peter Cheyney would feel right at home with the descriptions of luxury living and thick-eared violence, there was no doubt that Bond was something different. Unlike the grey and shady worlds created before the war by those masters of the more ‘realistic’ spy novel, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler (and indeed W. Somerset Maugham in his influential 1928 ‘novel of the secret service’ Ashenden – or The British Agent), Fleming had created a Technicolor dream land littered with fast cars, trips abroad, good food, fine wines, and beautiful women. It was just the sort of fantasy needed to brighten the monochrome Fifties landscape. Confident that he had written a successful thriller, Fleming himself indulged in a bit of fantasy. He bought a gold-plated typewriter and then requested a first print run of 10,000 copies from his publisher. The publisher, Jonathan Cape, took this request from a debut author as seriously as any publisher ever takes a request from a writer and printed half that quantity. That first run sold out in under a month and Fleming was left grinding his teeth when a second print of only 2,000 copies went equally quickly. However shaky, to Fleming, was the start for Casino Royale (though many a contemporary crime writer would be very pleased, in fact rather smug, with that initial hardback print run), it has been estimated that within five years, once the Pan paperback edition had appeared in 1955, a million Britons had bought Casino Royale, though fewer than one in 10,000 would ever visit a casino. They did not have to: the fact that James Bond was quite at home in a casino or a five-star hotel, or on a transatlantic jet-liner or a beach in Jamaica, was fantasy enough for most readers in those austere times. There was another male fantasy which James Bond provided in satisfying quantities in comparison with what had gone before: sex. Kingsley Amis put it succinctly thus: ‘No decent girl enjoys sex – only tarts. Buchan’s heroes believed this. Fleming’s didn’t.’ It may seem that James Bond provided everything readers, at least male ones, desired that they were denied in real life: sex, travel, luxury branded goods, un-rationed foods, alcohol, sadistic villains and guns to battle them with, cars, and all with an impressive salary of ?1,500 a year, as well as a small private income, as revealed in Moonraker. (Bond’s boss, ‘M’, by the time we get to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, received a staggering ?5,000 a year, almost as much as a Chancellor of the Exchequer.) Which red-blooded male would not want to be James Bond (perhaps without the famous Casino Royale carpet-beater torture scene), let alone read about him? Yet in the overall thriller market, Bond did not have it all his own way, far from it. Fleming himself took a keen interest in how his rivals in the bookshops were doing and in 1955 undertook a piece of undercover work, wining and dining an executive from a rival publisher, Collins. He was somewhat chastened to learn that the books of the leading writer of adventure thrillers, Hammond Innes, were regularly selling between 40,000 and 60,000 copies in hardback and were already proving successful as Fontana paperbacks. They were to be even more successful in the next decade, despite the fact that they contained no sex or sadism and relatively little violence. Innes’ heroes were anything but supermen, rather they were invariably honest, decent, and upright citizens. They certainly did not have expensive tastes in wine, food, or clothes and were more likely to be found driving a bulldozer or a snow plough than a supercharged Bentley (though Hammond Innes’ books always supplied a touch of the exotic through their settings). The reader could always rely on Innes for an exciting scene or two involving skiing or sailing, usually in extreme weather conditions, and travel to a foreign land unfamiliar to most readers. The Strange Land, published in 1954, was far from one of Innes’ best adventures but it was set in Morocco, a country which today is considered a tourist destination only a three-hour-flight away but for most readers back in 1954 must have been as mysterious as Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. There was also competition from other thriller writers who were now seasoned veterans. Dennis Wheatley, who had briefly worked with Fleming on deception initiatives during the war, was exorcising his two favourite demons in the shape of communism in Curtain of Fear and Satanism in To the Devil – A Daughter. That other stalwart of the thriller genre, Victor Canning, who like Wheatley and Innes had first been published before 1939, was also enjoying considerable success. Three of his thrillers – The Golden Salamander, Panthers’ Moon and Venetian Bird, set in Algeria, the Swiss Alps, and Venice respectively – had been filmed between 1950 and 1952, with reliable British stars such as Trevor Howard and Richard Todd. In 1953, arguably Canning’s best spy story A Forest of Eyes was published as a Pan paperback. Set in Yugoslavia, this book was clearly influenced by Eric Ambler’s 1938 thriller Cause for Alarm set in Italy (Canning and Ambler were wartime pals), which also, coincidentally, became a Pan paperback in 1954. A Forest of Eyes, Pan, 1953 Campbell’s Kingdom, Fontana, 1956 Paperback editions were becoming an important factor in the thriller market, both in style and volume. The Pan edition of Canning’s Venetian Bird had a ‘film tie-in’ style cover (though an illustration rather than a still photograph from the film) clearly showing Richard Todd in the lead role. The later Fontana paperback of Hammond Innes’ Campbell’s Kingdom similarly referenced the 1957 film, with an illustration of star Dirk Bogarde. On the crime fiction front, Penguin had shown what could be done in terms of volume by launching an author as a ‘millions’ author, starting in 1948. Prolific crime writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and John Dickson Carr would have ten titles issued simultaneously, each with a print run of 100,000 green-jacketed copies, making a million paperbacks per author. Cheap paperbacks may well have ‘democratised literature’ and even, in lieu of a shrinking Empire, spread British values across the world but they were not the only source of popular fiction. Between 1949 and 1959, the number of books in public libraries increased from forty-two million to seventy-one million, and an estimated 70 per cent of borrowings were thought to be fiction which naturally gave rise to grumbling in some quarters that ‘fiction on the rates’ was not a good use of public finances. It was hardly a subversive socialist plot as much of the library expansion came under Conservative governments, perhaps to help convince voters that they had never had it so good and as more than a quarter of the British population had a library card, it was a constituency too large to ignore. Not all libraries were in the public sector: there were commercial subscription libraries such as the Boots Booklovers Library in branches of Boots the High Street chemist. Established in 1898, the BBL attracted one million subscribers during World War II and, by 1945, Boots were buying 1.25 million books a year, but the decline set in during the Sixties with the boom in paperbacks and the Boots operation closed in 1966. A similar fate awaited the W. H. Smith Lending Library which had opened in 1860 and had specialised in crime and romantic fiction initially for railway passengers. It issued its last borrowings in 1961, though some subscription libraries attached to large department stores did continue to service loyal customers into the Nineties. For those thriller addicts who could not wait for the paperback of a favourite author’s latest, usually a minimum wait of at least two years in the Fifties (often three, sometimes five), a number of book clubs started up offering cheaper hardback editions to members who usually subscribed to a set number of titles per year, one of the earliest being the Thriller Book Club. These clubs were to flourish in the Sixties, often producing their own promotional catalogues and developing stylish artwork for the jackets. They attracted the biggest-selling authors of the day and continued into the 1980s. From 1956 onwards, starting with Live and Let Die, Fleming’s Bond novels also appeared in cheaper editions published by The Book Club (established by Foyles, the bookseller), usually a year after the first hardback editions and a year before the paperback. The Bond novels also began to be serialised in national newspapers – an increasingly important promotional tool for books, as not only did more people use libraries in the Fifties, they also read more newspapers. From Russia, with Love was the first, serialised in the Daily Express in 1957 at the time the book was published (a comic strip version was to follow in 1960) and this undoubtedly helped sales. Fleming’s publishers (Jonathan Cape) were confident enough to have produced an initial print run of 15,000 copies of From Russia, with Love and it is difficult now, knowing how famous the title became, to understand how the book could not have been the top-selling thriller of 1957. The problem was that Bond was being out-gunned and out-actioned – if not ‘out-sexed’ – by another sort of thriller. The Guns of Navarone, a rousing, wartime adventure thriller and the second novel by a newcomer called Alistair MacLean, reputedly sold 400,000 copies in its first six months. MacLean was just one of several new thriller writers to make their mark in the decade of James Bond’s creation – along with such as Francis Clifford, Berkely Mather, John Blackburn and Desmond Cory (who does have something of a claim to having beaten Fleming to producing the first ‘licensed to kill’ secret agent). None were, in the long run, likely to seriously compete with Fleming and Bond, but for a while, MacLean certainly did. However, once Fleming’s books started to be filmed (something Fleming had been very keen on from the start – perhaps, as it turned out, too keen), Bond’s iconic status was assured of immortality. Fantasist though he might have been, even Ian Fleming could not have seen the future and the scale of the industry his creation would become, but he did have the wit to acknowledge the man who had shaped the more realistic modern spy thriller: Eric Ambler. As James Bond faces execution at the hands of assassin Red Grant across a compartment on the Orient Express in one of the most famous scenes in From Russia, with Love, both men have books to hand. Grant has a copy of War and Peace which is actually a cunningly-disguised pistol (Bond has given his own gun to Grant, proving perhaps that he wasn’t always the sharpest throwing-knife in the attach? case) but Bond has a copy of Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios, into the pages of which he slips his gunmetal cigarette case. When the assassin shoots, Bond whips the armour-plated book over his heart and stops the fatal bullet. It would be stretching a point to say that without Eric Ambler there would have been no James Bond, as Fleming took his inspiration from a more fantastical school of ‘blood and thunder’ thrillers and played up the fantasy element, rather than down. But in one way one could have said in 1957 that without Eric Ambler there would have been no more James Bond … Chapter 3: (#ulink_9b5bd188-e996-5f22-ac39-6e8d909a34fd) DO MENTION THE WAR (#ulink_9b5bd188-e996-5f22-ac39-6e8d909a34fd) In his 2012 study ‘British Crime Films – Subverting the Social Order’, Barry Forshaw surveyed crime movies over the period book-ended (roughly) by the two versions of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in 1947 and 2010, and he put up a valiant defence of films unjustly forgotten or ignored by a generation of cinema-goers who have never seen a black-and-white film. His central thesis was that crime films acted as a prism through which British society, its attitudes and morals, could be viewed and indeed subverted by the film-makers and posed the question as to whether it was possible ‘to read a nation through its popular entertainment’. Reviewing Barry’s book at the time I suggested that, certainly post-1945, their comedies and, in particular, their war films might provide a more accurate insight and were a far better way to ‘read’ the British. The satires of the Boulting brothers in the mid-to-late Fifties, especially I’m All Right, Jack, took a scalpel, if not a harpoon, to the white whale that was the British class system, but the war films of that decade did not attempt to prick or cut away accepted British attitudes. In fact, they reinforced the certainties – that Britain won the Second World War, that simple British pluck could defy and defeat a tyrannical enemy, and that we were all in it together; especially when we stood alone, guardians of an empire on which the sun never set. It was only in the early Sixties, with films such as Tunes of Glory, King & Country and Guns at Batasi, that the British love affair with their armed forces began to be questioned. Significantly, none of those movies were actually set during World War II. The effort and sacrifice of 1939–45 was such an ingrained part of the British psyche that film-makers seemed loathe to challenge it. Heroism, sense of duty, making do, carrying on and stoicism in the face of overwhelming odds were the values expected by cinema-goers of their military men (and of course their women) and these were faithfully reflected by the film-makers, be the characters on a suicide mission in a midget submarine, dropping dam-busting bombs or escaping from a POW camp. Whether or not the war films of the Fifties can be said to be a way of ‘reading’ British society at the time is still up for debate. It was always a precept of the sociology of cinema that when times were hardest, popular cinema responded with carefree, escapist fantasies; the example always cited being the Hollywood musicals of Busby Berkeley which waved a feather boa in the face of the American Depression of the 1930s. Britain was not replaying the Great Depression in the Fifties, but austerity was the watchword (and a word somewhat diluted in strength in the far more comfortable twenty-first century) as economic recovery from the bankruptcy caused by winning the war – if not the peace – came painfully slowly. This was surely a time when British cinema could have stepped up and lightened the mood with some spectacular dance routines or a few show-stopping musical numbers. Yet British audiences seemed to prefer squads of khaki-dressed soldiers (or POWs) drilling on a parade ground and the nearest they got to a musical number was the obligatory scene in an RAF Mess featuring a sing-song around a pub piano over half-pints of flat mild ale. If the war films of the Fifties provide an unreliable lens through which to ‘read the British’ they certainly influenced what the British read when it came to popular fiction. Cinema admissions in Britain declined throughout the Fifties and by 1962 were roughly a quarter of their peak in the post-war year of 1946. The biggest single factor in this decline was the growth of television, with a second broadcaster, ITV, challenging the BBC’s monopoly from 1955. The number of domestic television licences grew from around two million in 1953 – the year when an estimated television audience of twenty million viewed the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, presumably ten people watching each set – to over ten million licences by the end of 1959. The growth of television, a medium always hungry for product, may have torpedoed cinema-going but it provided a life-raft for British war films in the form of a new audience – teenage boys obsessed with all things militaria and who, after 1960, no longer had the opportunity to vent their excess adolescent energy in National Service. War films became regular fare on television, particularly in the BBC’s Sunday ‘Film Matinee’ slot, and British studios and producers had ensured there was a healthy back catalogue of stories of derring-do featuring familiar faces (John Mills, Richard Attenborough and Jack Hawkins were rarely seen out of uniform) and they, almost invariably, guaranteed a British victory. Taking the period between the first Bond book (Casino Royale) in 1953 and the first Bond film (Dr. No) in 1962, the British film industry refought the Second World War on land, in the air and on – and under – the sea and a surprising number of these films still surface on British television in the twenty-first century, some of them quite regularly The Cruel Sea, Malta Story, The Red Beret, Albert R.N., Appointment in London, The Dam Busters, The Cockleshell Heroes, Above Us the Waves, The Colditz Story, Battle of the River Plate, Reach for the Sky, The Man Who Never Was, A Town Like Alice, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Ill Met by Moonlight, Yangtse Incident (not actually WWII but close enough), Battle of the V-1, Carve Her Name with Pride, Dunkirk, I Was Monty’s Double, Ice Cold in Alex, Sea of Sand, The Silent Enemy, Danger Within, The Long and the Short and the Tall, The Guns of Navarone, The Password is Courage. With only a few exceptions, where big American stars were parachuted into productions to secure funding or transatlantic release such as Alan Ladd in The Red Beret, William Holden in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone, these were very British films (in spirit if not finance) celebrating British pluck, decency, and the fine art of keeping the upper lip stiff. They depicted heroes; British heroes, who could easily be distinguished from American film heroes, as British heroes won their medals by following orders however futile the outcome seemed, whereas gung-ho Americans tended to admire individual initiative and allowed their heroes to take matters into their own hands, disobeying stupid orders to grab the victory. Throughout the Fifties the British were washed with a steady stream of wartime imagery and military life and even two of the hit film comedies of 1958, Norman Wisdom’s The Square Peg and Carry On Sergeant (the first in the long-running – some would say interminable – series which would become a British institution) had WWII/National Service settings. Yet it was not only in the cinema. The war permeated the bookshops and libraries, two of the bestselling authors of non-fiction being Paul Brickhill and Lord Russell of Liverpool. Brickhill, an Australian fighter pilot and POW in Germany, became an international bestseller (and a fixture on most teenage boys’ bookshelves) with his retelling of true wartime exploits of the Royal Air Force. His books The Great Escape (1950), The Dam Busters (1951) which was the first Pan paperback to sell a million copies, and Reach for The Sky (1954), about the fighter ace Douglas Bader who had lost his legs in a pre-war flying accident, were said to have sold more than 5 million copies, been translated into seventeen languages and all were eventually made into very successful films. Lord Russell of Liverpool, a lawyer and a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals, was inspired and appalled by his legal duties and produced a controversial bestseller in 1954 in Scourge of the Swastika. This history of Nazi war crimes shocked and awed a huge readership, whilst attracting criticism for being sensationalist. Seemingly undeterred, Lord Russell followed up his success with The Knights of Bushido, dealing with Japanese war crimes and atrocities in the Far East, in 1958. The Dam Busters, Pan, 1954 Conditions in Japanese prison camps had already been chillingly documented in Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island, published with drawings by Braddon’s fellow POW Ronald Searle (famous for his illustrations of StTrinian’s and the Molesworth books). The book’s original publication date in February 1952 was overshadowed by the death of King George VI and the initial print run cut to 3,000 copies. Despite few reviews and little publicity, the reputation of the book spread and by the summer of 1952, thanks to rapid reprinting, it had sold 100,000 copies. It was published as a Pan paperback in 1955 with a cover that became iconic – a defiant prisoner giving Churchill’s ‘V-for-Victory’ sign to a threatening Japanese bayonet (a variation of that cover still being used in the 1980s) – and went on to sell more than a million copies. Pan Books had another success on their hands with the epic escape story You’ll Die in Singapore by Charles McCormac (reprinted by Pan Australia as recently as 2009). The biggest (in more ways than one) non-fiction blockbuster came in 1960 with American journalist William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the bestselling 1,200-page popular history title, and a positive text book for would-be thriller writers. If anything, it was to cause an even bigger sensation when it appeared in the UK as a paperback on 8 May 1964 at the unprecedented price of twelve shillings and sixpence (12/6). Therefore, it should be hardly surprising that in this climate, many a fledgling thriller writer would, either instinctively or at the behest of an editor or agent, make their debuts with a war story. The ultimate exemplar of this syndrome is Alistair MacLean, whose first novel HMS Ulysses (based on his personal wartime experience) set in the fierce and frozen battleground of the Arctic convoys to Russia launched his international career in 1955 when it became the first novel to sell 250,000 copies in hardback within six months of publication. MacLean was to draw on his naval service during WWII for background to his next two novels, The Guns of Navarone (1957) and South by Java Head (1958), but whereas Ulysses was a war story, and indeed a thrilling one, Navarone and Java Head were thrillers with a wartime setting. They both had casts of soldiers or sailors (plus a few suspicious civilians) and there was a war going on, the setting being a clearly identified theatre of WWII – the Aegean Sea and the immediate aftermath of the fall of Singapore in 1942. But the plots contained something more than straightforward military actions – they were there, but there was something else going on beneath the surface. Is there a traitor among the central, usually small, group of characters? Is the ‘mission’ or ‘objective’ the real agenda of the plot? Will our heroes survive against the elements (the sea, mountains, storms, etc.) as well as the official enemy (the Germans and the Japanese) and the enemy within? And with all these ‘MacGuffins’ (as Hitchcock would have called them) played out against a ticking-clock scenario, MacLean invented a template for the adventure thriller which he soon moved out of the wartime milieu with great success. MacLean was to return to WWII again later in his writing career and he was far from alone in using personal wartime experience and war stories as an entr? into the thriller business. South by Java Head, Fontana, 1961 Ice Cold in Alex, Pan, 1959 Christopher Landon’s best-known book remains Ice Cold in Alex (1957), for which he wrote the screenplay for the very successful film starring, inevitably, John Mills, which was certainly based on his own wartime experiences in the Medical Corps in the Western Desert. Landon’s debut, however, had been a gripping and much underrated spy thriller set in Tehran and wartime Persia where he also served, A Flag in the City, which was published in 1953, the year of Casino Royale. Interestingly, one of the other stars of Ice Cold in Alex had already extended his acting career into thriller-writing based closely on his wartime experiences. Anthony Quayle (1913–1989) had served with the Special Operations Executive during the war, rising to the rank of major. An unsuccessful SOE operation ‘behind the lines’ in Albania gave him the basis for a novel, Eight Hours from England, which was published in 1945, and which reviewers said had ‘masculine appeal’. A second thriller, On Such a Night (which had a British wartime Cabinet minister suspected of treason), followed in 1947 and became a successful paperback in 1955, the year of HMS Ulysses. Quayle, later made Sir Anthony, wrote no more thrillers but went on to act in some memorable film thrillers with wartime settings, including The Guns of Navarone, Operation Crossbow and The Eagle Has Landed. The year 1953 had also seen (from the same publisher as Casino Royale), the debut novel of Francis Clifford, a genuine and very modest war hero. Honour The Shrine was a brutally honest WWII story set in Burma – possibly autobiographical – about a commando raid to destroy a Japanese railway bridge over a river. (The rather more famous TheBridge Over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle had been published in French in 1952 but the English translation did not appear until 1954.) Clifford was to become one of the most respected – and yet strangely instantly-forgotten after his death – British thriller writers. He returned to the jungles of Burma in fiction with a gruesome and utterly gripping war novel in A Battle Is Fought to Be Won in 1960. Honour the Shrine, Coronet, 1968 The Second World War continued to kick-start thriller writers into taking up their typewriters for at least a quarter of a century after it formally ended. Brian Callison started his lengthy thriller-writing career with A Flock of Ships in 1970 (of which Alistair MacLean said: ‘The best war story I have ever read’) and in 1974 George Markstein moved from television to novel writing with The Cooler, set in England on the eve of D-Day. For other writers, it may not have provided the initial impetus, but it certainly led to a breakthrough in terms of sales and a quantum leap in reputation for authors such as Colin Forbes (Tramp in Armour in 1969), Jack Higgins (The Eagle Has Landed, 1975, which was in fact his thirty-sixth thriller and certainly not his first wartime setting), and Ken Follett (Eye of the Needle, 1978). In a way the template had been created during WWII itself and very early on as well. Hammond Innes, who was to enjoy huge success in the Fifties, had published four novels before the war, but it was his three war stories – Wreckers Must Breathe, The Trojan Horse (both 1940), and Attack Alarm (1941) – which were to lay the foundations of his post-war bestselling career. Three excellent thrillers in less than two years is an impressive enough feat for anyone, let alone someone serving as an anti-aircraft gunner during an actual war. The imaginative and, no doubt at the time, sensational, if not terrifying Wreckers Must Breathe, about a secret U-boat base in the coastal caves and tin mine workings of Cornwall, was supposedly written as a result of a holiday in Cornwall by Innes and his wife in the late summer of 1939. Both The Trojan Horse and Attack Alarm would have been thrillingly ‘topical’ to the British reading public now at war and although Innes – serving in the Royal Artillery – did not resume fiction writing until 1946, his reputation as a storyteller survived and his readership was waiting for him. The damage and displacement left by the Second World War remained a central theme in British thrillers, its main legacy of course being the Nazis, the best fictional villains no writer ever had to invent. The swastika became a vital part of the tool-kit of every book jacket designer and no bookshop or library shelf was immune. Thirty years after the actual fall of the Third Reich, in 1975, British humourist Alan Coren published a collection of his funniest essays from Punch magazine under the title Golfing for Cats, having noted that as books about cats and golf sold well, this seemed as good a title as any. But Coren had also noticed how many bestsellers featured swastikas on their covers and so insisted that his publisher include one! The paperback cover showed a cat on a golf course where the pins marking the greens flew swastika flags. The European war against the Nazis and its aftermath formed, if not the setting, then the back story or main plot point to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of thrillers. Nazi war criminals, neo-Nazis, resurgent Nazis, Nazi secrets and secret weapons, works of art stolen by Nazis, missing Nazi submarines, and (very popular) hoards of Nazi gold, sometimes on board the missing submarines, were all grist to the thriller mill. The first three ‘Johnny Fedora’ novels by Desmond Cory – Secret Ministry (1951), This Traitor, Death (1952), and Dead Man Falling (1953) – all had Nazis or Nazis-on-the-run as villains. In a later adventure, Undertow (1962), Fedora is involved in salvaging secret Nazi documents (before his Russian KGB opponents can get them) from a sunken submarine off the southern coast of Spain. James Bond himself had to tackle a megalomaniac Nazi bent on attacking London with an upgraded V-2 rocket in the form of Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker in 1955, only a decade after the real thing. In 1958, John Blackburn’s A Sour Apple Tree suggested an evil legacy put in place by a William Joyce-like character, an English traitor who had made radio broadcasts for the Nazis (and escaped in a U-boat). Geoffrey Jenkins’ 1959 debut A Twist of Sand revolved around the wartime destruction of a top-secret U-boat off Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. In Watcher in the Shadows (1960), Geoffrey Household had his hero, who is mistaken for a Nazi war criminal, being hunted across the idyllic English countryside by a vengeful former leader of the French Resistance. Geoffrey Household being Geoffrey Household, and the author of the classic pre-war thriller Rogue Male, the result is something akin to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral being staged in St Mary Mead. In 1961, under the pen-name Martin Fallon, an early Jack Higgins thriller called The Testament of Caspar Schultz revolved around the hunt for authentic missing Nazis and in 1962, Philip Purser’s debut thriller Peregrination 22 exposed a neo-Nazi youth movement being secretly trained on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Secret Ministry, Frederick Muller, 1951 Horse Under Water, Penguin, 1965 Neither could the ‘new wave’ of spy-fiction writers in the Sixties resist the hypnotic glow of the Nazis. Len Deighton’s Horse Under Water (1963) had his un-named spy hero scuba-diving for secrets into a wrecked U-boat off the Portuguese coast; Adam Hall’s super-agent, the seemingly indestructible Quiller, single-handedly disabled a Nazi resurgence in The Berlin Memorandum in 1965; James Leasor’s Bond clone, Dr Jason Love, faced a megalomaniac ex-Nazi (armed with a fleet of U-boats) in Passport in Suspense in 1967; Lionel Davidson gave us a much more measured, less frantic, thriller about claiming reparations for Nazi crimes in modern Germany in Making Good Again in 1968; Reg Gadney’s Somewhere in England (1971) had wanted Nazis alive and well and living in the UK; and, possibly the most famous of all, in The Odessa File in 1972, Frederick Forsyth had them alive, well and very active just about everywhere. Passport in Suspense, Pan, 1969 The Achilles Affair, Fontana, 1961 The appeal of the Nazis for fictional purposes was fairly obvious. As far as the British were concerned they represented a force of pure evil which seemed to blend barbarism and paganism, even the occult, with modern technology and perverted science and medicine, truly heralding a new Dark Age for Europe if not the world, as Winston Churchill had warned. They were easily identified and immediately sinister. In Hollywood Westerns, the bad guys traditionally wore black hats; the worst of the Nazis, the SS, conveniently wore black uniforms. Even their so-called secret police, the Gestapo, had an iconic fashion sense, with black leather trench coats and soft black Fedoras which made them instantly recognisable to millions of cinemagoers. As villains went they were, thanks to Hugo Boss, tailor-made. Nazism had seen murder on an industrial scale; robbery and theft from individuals, the pillaging and piracy of entire countries; education, art, medicine, the media, and history twisted to a bizarre ideology. And it had been done with all the accoutrements that twentieth-century technology could provide. To schoolboys and men young enough to have missed the war years there was also a certain fascination with the hardware, the equipment, of the Nazi war machine. Their armies moved with lightning speed, they had charismatic commanders (Erwin Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’, was the ultimate ‘Good German’), plush Mercedes staff cars, powerful motor-bikes, and tanks with names such as ‘Panther’ and ‘Tiger’ which sounded far more dangerous than the ‘Matilda’ and ‘Valentine’ of the British army. They had fast E-Boats, pocket battleships, rockets and jet-engined aircraft for goodness sake. By the early Sixties, thanks to films and comics, schoolboys knew exactly what was meant when a character in a thriller appears armed with ‘a Schmeisser’ – the sub-machine gun as synonymous with the Nazis as the Thompson ‘Tommy Gun’ had been seen as the weapon of choice of Chicago gangsters in the Thirties. Plastic toy soldiers, Dinky and Corgi toy military vehicles and Airfix scale-model kits made sure that young males were totally familiar with the paraphernalia of the European war; less so with the war in the Pacific and the staggering scale of the Russians’ contribution to WWII hardly figured at all. Thriller writers quickly realised that if their plots struck a familiar resonance with the war, they would find ready acceptance among a young male readership. Their characters would be very straightforward: they would be male of course, and in the main British (though Canadian or a New Zealander might be allowed) as, after all, the British had won the war, hadn’t they? And the plot possibilities seemed endless: revenge and the settling of old scores, bringing war criminals to justice, reclaiming stolen treasure, uncovering treachery, revealing Byzantine espionage conspiracies, and secrets thought safely buried by governments. When he turned to writing novels after a decade of success as a radio and television dramatist, Berkely Mather set his first thriller, The Achilles Affair (1959), in the Eastern Mediterranean with a detailed back-story (almost a third of the book) involving the wartime resistance in Greece. In 1963, a writer who was to become possibly the closest to rival Alistair MacLean in the adventure thriller stakes, Desmond Bagley, made his debut with The Golden Keel, a sea-going tale of modern piracy which involved smuggling Mussolini’s personal treasure, lost during the war, out of Italy. Indeed, the Sunday Times said of newcomer Bagley that The Golden Keel ‘catapults him straight into the Alistair MacLean bracket’. Another thriller-writing talent coming into full bloom at the same time was Gavin Lyall and his highly regarded third novel Midnight Plus One in 1965 harks back to the ‘rat lines’ and escape routes used by the French Resistance during WWII. Even that rather more ephemeral talent and the epitome of Swinging Sixties London, Adam Diment, had former Nazis at the core of the plot of The Dolly, Dolly Spy in 1967, and Diment’s very modern hero, the rebellious, ultra-hip, pot-smoking Philip McAlpine toted a trusty ‘Schmeisser’ as his weapon of choice. If memories or hangovers from the Nazi-era were not enough, some thriller writers invented hereditary threats in the form of biological, rather than ideological, children of Adolf Hitler. Both Victor Canning and John Gardner speculated on Hitlerite off-spring in, respectively, The Whip Hand (1965) and Amber Nine (1966), and again in Gardner’s The Werewolf Trace (1977). Yet wartime settings never ever went out of fashion. For thriller writers in the 1960’s and ’70’s, ‘don’t mention the war’ was definitely counter-productive advice. Alistair MacLean was to revisit the war years several times, most notably in 1967 with Where Eagles Dare. Before he hit the jackpot with The Eagle Has Landed, Jack Higgins – writing as James Graham – produced A Game for Heroes in 1970, an exceptional thriller set on an imaginary Channel Island in 1945. The Sunday Express proclaimed the author as one who ‘makes Alistair MacLean look like a beginner’, but it was to be another five years before the eagle actually landed for Jack Higgins and he was able to move to the less onerous tax regime of a real Channel Island. In 1974, Clive Egleton scored with a convoluted scheme to assassinate Hitler’s Deputy, Martin Bormann, in The October Plot, and in 1978 Duncan Kyle presented an even more complicated scenario surrounding a suicidal commando raid on Heinrich Himmler’s spiritual home of the SS, Wewelsburg Castle, in Black Camelot. One of the leading spy-fiction writers of the 1970s, Anthony Price even provided a stunning wartime backstory for his contemporary spy hero Dr David Audley in The ’44 Vintage in 1978. A Game for Heroes, Panther, 1971 The ’44 Vintage, Futura, 1979 It should not be surprising that the war was a popular topic with writers (and by extension: agents, editors, publishers, and readers) as at least a third of the British thriller writers in the boom period of the Sixties and Seventies had seen active service during WWII. In many cases, the wartime experiences of these authors were stranger than any fiction they produced, but writers being writers, few life experiences were wasted. Miles Tripp, a noted crime writer who experimented with Bond-like thrillers under the pen-name John Michael Brett, flew thirty-seven sorties as a bomb-aimer with the RAF during WWII and his first novel about the crew of a Lancaster bomber, Faith Is a Windsock in 1952, was clearly semi-autobiographical. Berkely Mather – an old ‘India hand’ with considerable (and colourful) military experience in the Far East – certainly knew of what he wrote when he penned his bestselling The Pass Beyond Kashmir (1960) and the piratical treasure-hunt adventure thriller The Gold of Malabar (1967). Geoffrey Household, for whom the Second World War had started early and very unofficially in ‘neutral’ Romania, then served in Field Security in the Middle East for the best part of five years, which provided background for his 1971 thriller Doom’s Caravan, set on the border between Lebanon and Syria. Household was also affected by his experience at the very end of the war when he was with a British army unit liberating the Nazi concentration camp at Sandbostel near Hamburg, which he later described as ‘beyond experience or imagination’. Antony Melville-Ross (who was to create the only secret agent in fiction called Alaric) was a highly successful and highly decorated Royal Navy submarine commander and Lionel Davidson, who was to write some iconic thrillers, served in submarines in the Indian Ocean for most of the war, though much against the trend in adventure thrillers of the period, a submarine never featured in his fiction. Doom’s Caravan, Michael Joseph, 1971, design by Richard Dalkins Even when the cinema box office turned away from the war film and embraced the spy film after 1962, the Second World War continued to influence British thriller writing and indeed still does; as in the work of contemporary writers Philip Kerr, John Lawton, David Downing and Paul Watkins (also writing as Sam Eastland). Today’s wartime thrillers are more nuanced and certainly more cynical, with the methods and motives of characters blurred to suit modern sensibilities, but the war proved that you just can’t keep a good villain down and WWII was a war, if you were British, where it was very clear who the villains were. Chapter 4: (#ulink_664a0d39-24a9-5e78-93f2-20205e02c0bf) TINKERS, TAILORS, SOLDIERS, SPIES. BUT MOSTLY JOURNALISTS. (#ulink_664a0d39-24a9-5e78-93f2-20205e02c0bf) In 2009 I was approached by a small publishing company called Ostara which was making a reputation for itself bringing out-of-print detective novels back to life. Did I think there were old thrillers as opposed to detective series that were out of print and worth rescuing? I went to the fount of all knowledge – my bookshelves – and discovered that many of the paperbacks, cracked spines and yellowed pages notwithstanding, which I had treasured for more than forty years were indeed out of print. It came as a shock. Was it possible that authors who had thrilled and, yes, educated me in the Sixties and Seventies – authors like Alan Williams, Adam Hall, Duncan Kyle, Brian Callison and Clive Egleton – were being or had been forgotten? When I discovered that only one of Geoffrey Household’s novels (Rogue Male, his 1939 classic) was still in print, I needed no further persuading. Tracking down the owners of the rights to many of the thrillers I remembered from my youth was an education in itself. As most of the authors were writing in the days ‘B.C.’, i.e. Before Computers, details of their contracts, correspondence with their agents or literary executors were ‘paper records’ and had not been computerised. Whilst chasing an author I was told by one publisher that they ‘had no record of him’ (on their computer database) but that ‘the company archivist may know where the paper files are’. When I asked where the company archivist could be contacted, the publisher said, rather sheepishly, that the archivist had been made redundant ‘when we computerised’. Then there were two authors whom I was assured by their publishers were dead. One turned out to be delighted to see one of his thrillers back in print and even supplied an illustration – a wonderful cover design created by his artist wife in 1972 but never used. The other was not only not dead but so happy ‘to be thought of as a writer again’ that he bought me lunch in his Chelsea club, and an instance where an author buys a publisher lunch really is the world turned upside down. My search for out-of-print thrillers from the period when I did my formative leisure reading, roughly 1964 to 1972, made me realise just how many thrillers had been published in paperback in that period. It was a staggering number, and they all seemed to be by British authors – at least the ones on my bookshelf were. Not all had been first published in the Sixties but advances in printing and the use of photographic cover designs rather than painted or drawn ones meant that fresh, uniform paperbacks of an author’s backlist could appear alongside his latest novel. Paperback cover design was taken seriously in the Sixties. Well, perhaps not so seriously when it came to the many James Bond clones that sprang up after the death of Ian Fleming in 1964, but covers were certainly eye-catching and brasher, more exciting than anything that had gone before, just like the decade. It was possible around 1965, for example, to spot an Alistair MacLean paperback from quite a distance. Just over half the cover would be a solid colour on which was printed the author’s name (often the ‘Alistair’ was in black and the ‘MacLean’ in white) and top right would be the title, in type half the size of that used to identify the author. The bottom section of the cover would be a photographic image cut out on a white background, to suggest the story but nearly always showing a man holding a gun or perhaps an ice-axe. The same principle, from the same paperback publisher Fontana, applied to new editions of the work of Hammond Innes. They would have a block of background colour striped across the centre of the cover with the author’s name in a darker shade and the title in a (much) smaller font. There would be one illustration below the title and a related image on the back cover. For example, the 1966 edition of The Blue Ice had the image of a lone skier on the front, suggesting a trek across country rather than ‘Ski Sunday’, and the rear cover photograph was a dramatic one of a man (possibly the skier) with his mouth and beard obscured by ice. The avid fan knew immediately that this was one of Innes’ man-against-the-frozen-elements adventures – much of it is actually set on a glacier in Norway – and nobody seemed to mind that the book had been written in 1947 and had first appeared in paperback in 1954. By the Sixties, Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean were recognisable brands of a particular type of adventure story and their paperback covers were ‘branded’ to make them stand out on the bookshelves from the growing competition. The Blue Ice, Fontana, 1966 Thunderball, Pan, 1963, illustrated by Raymond Hawkey The brand of brands when it came to spy stories was, of course, James Bond and in the Sixties his name was shouted loudly and very proudly from the covers of millions of Pan paperbacks – literally. It was possibly the first time in publishing, at least in adult fiction, that a fictional character’s name was featured on the cover in type three times larger than either the name of the author or the title of the book. Not surprisingly, readers began to demand ‘the latest James Bond book’ rather than ‘Ian Fleming’s latest’. The unmissable placement of ‘James Bond’ in large letters was an innovation of designer Raymond Hawkey, who also came up with the famous ‘bullet holes’ cover for the paperback of Fleming’s Thunderball and the iconic ‘white’ covers of Len Deighton’s early novels. Looking back on it, it was a boom time for British thrillers and I loved it. There was a new author to find just about every week, and a weekly visit to a book shop was vital in case you missed the latest sensational adventure and a school friend found a new author before you did. There was definitely classroom kudos to be had from being the first to track down the latest Alistair MacLean or in discovering a Len Deighton or a John Gardner or a Gavin Lyall, and schoolmasters often joined in the hunt, recommending titles. If that sounds as if we were teenage nerds when it came to paperback thrillers, we weren’t. There were lots of other things to be nerdy about – for teenage boys there always were. Reading thrillers was just something we did, as previous generations of schoolboys had read the Biggles or Just William stories. We were lucky, it was the Sixties and we had James Bond. There was always time to devour a good thriller and reading one never stopped us from listening to music or trying to meet girls, though it didn’t necessarily help in the latter pursuit or make us anywhere near as cool as we thought it did (though a good one might supply the odd chat-up line). Perhaps it was because it was the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and attitudes were changing – though in a mining village in the West Riding they didn’t change that much – but no adult ever said ‘Are you sure you should be reading that?’ Our schoolmasters might have wished that our ‘holiday reading’ (at the start of each new term we had to report on what extra-curricular reading we had done) was on a slightly higher intellectual level, but encouraging teenage boys to read anything which did not come with pictures was a goal in itself and anyway, they were thriller fans themselves. The older ones were always willing to debate that the present generation of thriller writers were ‘not a patch on John Buchan or Erskine Childers’ whilst the younger masters were keen to swap notes on the new Alistair MacLean or the latest pretender to the throne of James Bond. The fantasy spy novels of Ian Fleming and his many imitators may have been regarded as somewhat risqu?, but nowhere near as salacious as, say, the works of Harold Robbins or Mickey Spillane – and if you were caught reading them you could be in trouble. The adventure thrillers of Alistair MacLean and Hammond Innes were perfectly acceptable, almost innocent, as they contained no sex or bad language, usually had upright, decent (British) heroes and were jolly exciting ‘ripping yarns’. The new generation of spy fiction novelists were not only seen as acceptable, reading them was positively encouraged. When at school, Graham Greene’s thirty-year-old novel Brighton Rock was one of the set texts for my O Level English Literature exam. By the early Seventies, the novels of John Le Carr? were on the syllabus. For male readers of all ages, Fleming, Deighton, Le Carr?, MacLean and Innes were instantly recognisable. The dedicated follower of the fashion in thrillers was also familiar with Blackburn, Lyall, Gardner, Leasor, Clifford, Mayo, Jenkins, Mather, Hall, Francis, Canning and a host of others. New names appeared on the covers of paperbacks every week, or if the names were not exactly ‘new’, the covers were. During the Golden Age of the Thirties it had been as if almost anyone – or at least anyone who was upper middle-class and reasonably well-read – could turn their hand to a detective story. In the Sixties, it was as if the same applied to thriller writing, with the prospect of substantially greater rewards. But were being middle-class and well-read sufficient qualifications? A classic English detective story might never leave the setting of a country house or a vicarage and require no more technical background knowledge than the use of pipe-cleaners, the distribution of keys among the senior servants, and when the clock in the hall is wound for the night. Thrillers had more exotic settings, usually foreign, and needed less domestic but far more technical information: on guns, on surviving a desert, a storm at sea, on a glacier or an ice flow, on radios, on navigation, on codes and the tradecraft of spies, on mixing with lowlife, on unarmed combat, and on enjoying the high life. Since the Bond books, it was de rigueur that every special or secret agent would eat only the finest foods and drink only the most expensive wines or elaborate cocktails, and though many of the descriptions of the licensed-to-kill gourmand never held up to really close scrutiny, they had to appear plausible. All of which meant that the writer of a good thriller had to be an experienced traveller conversant with foreign lands and cultures, who had enjoyed a varied and exciting, not to say dangerous, life – at least one more exciting than his (as it was invariably a ‘he’) readers. Surely not everyone could have such an interesting life, so who did? There were few tinkers and probably even fewer tailors tempted to try their hand at thriller-writing in the boom time of the Sixties and Seventies, but many who did had certainly been soldiers or sailors – or airmen during World War II or in National Service and a large proportion were members of Her Majesty’s Press. Of the 155 authors mentioned in this study for whom career details are known, over 70 per cent had experienced active military service other than peacetime National Service, or were professional journalists, in some cases both. Among other professions, teaching provided the biggest single breeding-ground for those seeking bestsellerdom, though of course careers often overlapped. Alistair MacLean, for example, had served in the Royal Navy during the War but was a school teacher when HMS Ulysses was published. Given the popularity of war stories, it was to be expected that anyone with actual wartime experience and a modest grasp of basic English would fancy their chances supplying stories to a growing and seemingly insatiable market. Notable military ‘veterans’ included Berkely Mather – a career soldier for twenty years before taking to writing radio and television plays and then thrillers, Francis Clifford – a genuine war hero, Clive Egleton – a long-serving professional soldier, Eric Ambler, Victor Canning and Hammond Innes, who all saw wartime service in the Royal Artillery. Also, John Gardner and James Leasor, who both served with the Royal Marines, John Michael Brett and Adam Hall were in the RAF, and Lionel Davidson and Antony Melville-Ross served in submarines throughout WWII. Quite a few that we know of had worked for the British Intelligence services. Famously, Graham Greene had served in MI6, as had Kenneth Benton and Ian Fleming in Naval Intelligence during the war and John Le Carr?, John Bingham and Antony Melville-Ross during the Cold War. Several others had experience of intelligence or counter-intelligence work during their military careers, for example: Ted Allbeury, Clive Egleton, Francis Clifford and Berkely Mather. It is also worth mentioning that of the few (five) women thriller writers in this period, other than Helen MacInnes who, in the words of American academic Professor B. J. Rahn ‘always seemed to be flying solo’, two also had similar useful experiences. Joyce Porter had served throughout the Fifties in the Women’s Royal Air Force where she learned Russian in order to work in Intelligence, and Palma Harcourt, after reading classics at Oxford, worked for various branches of British Intelligence including MI6 postings abroad. She began to write her ‘diplomatic thrillers’ in 1974, by which time Joyce Porter (now better remembered in America than Britain) had abandoned comic spies and was concentrating on comic detectives. The Companion Tenth Anniversary Issue, The Companion Book Club, April, 1962 There were career diplomats (for example, Dominic Torr), three advertising executives, two doctors, several television scriptwriters, two television presenters, and three actors. One of the latter, Geoffrey Rose, had a starring role in a popular BBC drama written by another thriller writer (James Mitchell’s When the Boat Comes In) as well as a part in the long-running soap opera Crossroads. The prospect of fame and fortune also attracted disciples from many a respectable, more stable, career. There was an accountant, a research chemist, a brace (at least) of publishers, several advertising and public relations executives, a graphic artist, a merchant seaman, a poet, a senior policeman, a technical writer for the Ministry of Defence, two bankers, a poultry farmer, a football commentator, and a Governor of Bermuda. Given their access to news sources not in the public domain (which many would call ‘gossip’), their natural links to publishers, and their opportunities for travel – particularly abroad – it was inevitable that journalists and especially foreign correspondents would be tempted into testing their typewriters with a thriller. At least a third of the authors named in this book were journalists by trade, and half of them had been foreign correspondents. It must have seemed, at certain points in the 1960s, that everyone on Fleet Street was bashing out a thriller in their spare moments. After all, journalists led pretty exciting lives – the travel, the deadlines, the expense accounts … Indeed, it is often forgotten that Ian Fleming was rather a good journalist before he created James Bond. Hammond Innes, Desmond Bagley, James Leasor, John Gardner, Duncan Kyle, and Anthony Price were all, among many others, journalists before they were thriller writers. Foreign correspondents who had reported from Russia were perceived to have an immediate advantage, and several put the experience to good use, notably Ian Fleming, Derek Lambert, Andrew Garve, Donald Seaman and Stephen Coulter (‘James Mayo’). But it was not just the traditional Cold War enemy which provided useful background for a plot or two. Frederick Forsyth spent many years as a senior correspondent in France, work experience which clearly proved useful for The Day of the Jackal. However, his first published book was non-fiction, a quite harrowing account of the Nigerian civil war he had covered in 1967, The Biafra Story, and he was to use his knowledge of Africa again in his third novel, The Dogs of War. In his 2015 memoir, The Outsider, Forsyth revealed that it was during his time as a reporter in Africa that he was approached by MI6 to take undertake minor jobs (unpaid, he stresses) as a courier. Other trouble spots covered by journalists also gave rise to some outstanding thrillers as well as dramatic reportage and, in the early 1970s, there was no more troubled a spot than Northern Ireland. Independent Television News reporter Gerald Seymour covered ‘The Troubles’ there, which provided the background and the inspiration for his first thriller, Harry’s Game, in 1975. Alan Williams too reported from the front lines in Northern Ireland and also from Vietnam, Rhodesia, and Algeria as well as covering the Arab–Israeli Six Day War in what was, to put it mildly, a colourful career. Even as a student at Cambridge, he had been drawn to political ‘trouble spots’ starting with the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule and later helping to smuggle a dissident student out of Poland via East Germany. (He was also credited with helping to smuggle the manuscript of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward out of Russia.) His coverage of the civil war in Algeria not only gave him the background for his thriller Barbouze (meaning ‘spy’ in French slang) but brought official complaints about him from both Arab insurgents and the French Army and made him something of a legend in Fleet Street. Barbouze, Panther, 1970 Many of Alan Williams’ contemporaries from Fleet Street told stories of his time in Algeria and of how his fondness for dressing in a white safari suit and Panama hat made him such a clear target for the gangs of roving gunmen (from both sides) that fellow foreign correspondents would discreetly move away from him whenever he entered a sidewalk caf? or a bar frequented by the press corps. In later years, Williams gleefully told the story himself. As part of their job, journalists mingled with thriller writers on a regular basis, whether they had their own ambitions in that direction or not. In a feature marking the 50th anniversary of The Ipcress File on the crime fiction website Shots Magazine, journalist and film critic Barry Norman recalled: I first met Len Deighton in the ‘Mucky Duck’ (The White Swan pub off Fleet Street frequented by reporters from the Daily Mail) when The Ipcress File had just hit the bestseller lists. He couldn’t believe his luck. Up to then he’d been known – if at all – as a cookery writer in national papers. Nice bloke, he seemed then, and personally I took to the guy. But I wasn’t all that happy with Deighton later after I’d written my first spy novel, The Matter of Mandrake, rather in the James Bond genre, and I wasn’t too chuffed about some bloke coming along and moving the whole business from upper and middle to the working class. But his were bloody good books and I still enjoy the films. Another Fleet Street stalwart, George Thaw, the Literary Editor for the Daily Mirror, became close friends with and a neighbour of one of the rising stars of that decade, Duncan Kyle – himself a journalist until he hit the bestseller lists with his debut A Cage of Ice in 1970. When Kyle’s novel was reissued in 2012, Thaw recalled how the author took his research seriously, sometimes allowing it to spill over into his private and social life: The research for Whiteout! (Kyle’s seventh thriller, published in 1976) included a sojourn at an American kind-of-secret base in the Arctic. Apart from background and colour (mostly snow white) for the book he emerged with the recipe of the most sophisticated dry Martini ever served in Suffolk and perhaps in Britain. It involved keeping a special tea pot in his fridge/freezer, carefully measured high-proof gin, un-waxed lemons and a very secret proportion of Martini to gin. It tasted fabulous and he always claimed the most important part of the whole business was using that teapot –and drinking with friends. The lure of writing a bestselling thriller which would lead to untold riches, film deals, and tax exile in Ireland (the popular choice for high-earning artists in the Seventies), was stunningly obvious. Journalists knew, or thought they knew, that they could write; former military men who had seen active service and overseas postings felt they had the required background knowledge. Journalists certainly had the confidence to attempt a thriller , yet the ability to produce a bestseller was not exclusively theirs. As well as Alistair MacLean, Harry Patterson (Jack Higgins) and James Mitchell (the creator of Callan) had also embarked on careers in teaching before they turned to writing fiction, which they did with great success. The most unusual professional crossovers, however, were those of Brian Lecomber and Ted Allbeury. Lecomber was a flying instructor on Antigua in the Caribbean – just the sort of character likely to appear, say, in a Gavin Lyall thriller – who wrote three successful thrillers with aviation plotlines between 1975 and 1978. He was then given the chance to join the famous Rothmans Aerobatic Team and immediately abandoned thriller writing completely, declaring it ‘boring’ compared to stunt flying. Ted Allbeury served in the Intelligence Corps during and after WWII but, before he became a highly successful and much admired thriller writer, he had dabbled with careers in advertising, in public relations, as a farmer, and in 1964 he embraced one of the icons of the decade by becoming the Managing Director of a pirate radio station! Initially, Radio 390 operated from the decommissioned wartime Red Sands sea fort off the north Kent coast near Whitstable and was the location, in 1966, for the filming of an episode of Danger Man starring Patrick McGoohan. The station then moved out to sea as a ship-board pirate station, renamed Radio 355. Exotic as some of their work experience was, the one thing necessary for the would-be thriller writer, possibly above all else, was a well-thumbed passport. A solid British thriller delivered danger, suspense, excitement, and possibly an insight into a richer, more privileged lifestyle, but crucially it delivered travel to foreign locations which the average reader could only realistically hope to explore through the printed page. Chapter 5: (#ulink_9fc92ce0-bc1b-54b9-bf61-a778ad792498) END OF EMPIRE (#ulink_9fc92ce0-bc1b-54b9-bf61-a778ad792498) In the Fifties and Sixties, the majority of secondary school pupils in Britain studying for ‘O’ and ‘A’ Level examinations would be issued with a Philip’s Modern School Atlas in which, on every world projection, the countries of the Commonwealth were coloured pink. Quite why pink was never explained, but every student could see at a glance, and be reassured, that British influence extended from Baffin Island to the Falklands, and from Sierra Leone to New Zealand. Editions of the same Atlas from before World War II would have displayed even larger swathes of pink, perhaps two-fifths of Earth’s land surface, to designate the British Empire rather than Commonwealth – perhaps that particular shade was called Imperial Pink – but the significance of the Empire, in economic and political terms, was fading from the map. Should it have mattered in terms of the British psyche? After all, Britain had bravely stood alone and had won the war, hadn’t it? Except of course it hadn’t. There was the perception that Britain had stood alone defying terrible odds from the fall of France and the Battle of Britain in 1940, although even in that iconic engagement, 20 per cent of aircrew defending British skies were non-British (Poles, Czechs, Belgians, French and Irish as well as ‘Empire’ contingents) and Britain’s effort in the land war in all theatres had been heavily reliant on troops called in from the Empire. Canadians had fought with great distinction in France, Australians and South Africans in the deserts of North Africa, Indians and New Zealanders in Italy, with many smaller colonies more than pulling their weight for the imperial good. Yet even with that magnificent straining of all the sinews of a global network, only the most die-hard of empire loyalists would seriously claim that Britain and its Empire had won the war. It had fought an outstanding holding action until the manpower of the Soviet Union and the economic and industrial strength of the United States had been brought into play. In 1939, the British Empire had been the sole world super-power. By 1950 it was clear it was the junior of three super-powers and its imperial building blocks were crumbling away. The dissolution of the Empire should have come as no surprise as the very ‘jewel in the crown’, India, had been promised independence during the war and achieved it, although far from peacefully, in 1947. Burma and Ceylon followed suit in 1948, and over the following decade (despite some foot-dragging by Conservative governments) the British gave up their interests in Palestine, the Sudan, the Gold Coast and Malaya. For the Caribbean territories, Cyprus, Malta and most of the African colonies, the political break from the ‘mother country’ came in with something of a rush in the 1960s, when it seemed that hardly a year went by without another country familiar to every schoolboy stamp-collector became a disappearing pink spot on the world map: British Somaliland, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Kenya, Malawi, Northern Rhodesia, Gambia, Guyana, Botswana, Basutoland – the process seemed, and was, inevitable. The undignified stalemate when Southern Rhodesia adopted a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the Empire (following the rather more famous example set by certain rebellious American states in 1776) in 1965 was perceived as yet another symptom of international impotence. The emergence of new nations from their colonial cocoons even impinged, albeit tangentially, on the daily routine of one very special civil servant: James Bond. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) Bond is researching for his mission with a visit to the College of Arms, where he is told that the College’s workload has recently increased due to ‘The new African states … Much work has to be done on their flags, the design of their currency, their stamps, their medals …’ Our hero is not, however, unduly inconvenienced. De-colonization, which may have been caused or hastened by the war, was not a sudden, or violence-free, process but it was inevitable and the majority of Britons accepted the change from Empire to Commonwealth. By May 1959 Empire Day had become Commonwealth Day, and in February 1960 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had delivered his famous ‘Wind of Change’ speech to the South African parliament in Cape Town. The official seal of approval, were one to be needed, came in April 1960 when that arbiter of all things British, The Times, abandoned the term ‘Imperial and Foreign News’ in favour of ‘Overseas News’. Not everyone accepted the loss of empire with good grace. In 1954 Arthur Chesterton, a former member of the British Union of Fascists and cousin of Detection Club President G. K. Chesterton, started the League of Empire Loyalists as a ‘ginger group’ on the far right-wing of the Conservative party. Yet even the most ardent imperialist had to admit that the debacle of the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Britain and France opted for military intervention in the Middle East but were forced by international outrage into ignominious withdrawal, showed that an era had well and truly ended. To mis-quote (and take out of context) Richard Usborne: ‘England was no longer governess of half the globe. Ius Britannicum did not apply over so many lands of palm and pine. There were fewer – far fewer – Government Houses flying the Union Jack. The Embassies and Consulates that have replaced them cannot summon the gunboats to revenge a British traveller thrown to the sacred crocodiles.’ The British had to come to terms with no longer being the major world power – and so did its thriller writers. Pre-war fictional heroes such as Richard Hannay, as created by John Buchan, and ‘Sapper’s’ Bulldog Drummond were, it is fair to say, imperialists by both nature and nurture. In the 1950s it seemed that Britain was resigned to giving away its proud imperial heritage, was being out-stripped in living standards by the United States, and was constantly looking apprehensively and impotently over its shoulder at the USSR. When it did flex its muscles, it was in messy colonial ‘emergencies’ or ‘insurgencies’ (never ‘wars’) in places such as Cyprus, Malaya, or, embarrassingly, in Egypt. To some, the deployment of American missiles in the UK in 1958 was another sign of the country’s military emasculation and, as the Cold War warmed up over the Cuban crisis, there were mutterings that the ‘USS Britain’ was no more than an American aircraft carrier conveniently anchored within range of the Iron Curtain. To the cynical, the ‘USS Britain’ was likely to be an expendable vessel should the war turn hot. The final insult, or so it was perceived at the time by the Daily Express (who called it a ‘stab in the back’), came when former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, almost as an aside, in a speech at West Point in December 1962: ‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role’. Britain, the noble war hero, was diminishing before its very own eyes and those, it seemed, of its closest ally with whom it thought it had a ‘special relationship’. Despite the feel-good factor generated by the social and cultural revolutions in music, art, and fashion during the ‘Swinging’ Sixties, the malaise was still felt. It was eloquently summed up by an unlikely source, Adam Diment’s fashionably rebellious Philip McAlpine, The Dolly, Dolly Spy himself in 1967: Our Empire has gone and our people remain lazy. We are clever, original, class-ridden and small. The sooner we can get back to being another small country and forget our now useless role of world arbitrator the better. Nobody has listened to our advice for years; it is just accepting this fact which is painful. The villains in many a thriller could not, of course, resist reminding plucky British characters of their loss of Imperial power. In that same year, 1967, in James Eastwood’s Little Dragon from Peking the heroes are berated by the villainess: ‘You British, since losing India, are never sufficiently ruthless. In trade, politics, even espionage.’ The reference to India, which had been independent for twenty years by then, would not only have been lost on one of the characters to which it was addressed but also on many a reader under 35, and probably says more about the respective age of the authors: Adam Diment was 23 when TheDolly, Dolly Spy was published, James Eastwood would have been in his fifties. Britain’s reputation for being exceedingly good at playing ‘the great game’ of spying, however, was seriously being called into question. Britain’s secret intelligence services had achieved a reputation for efficiency during both world wars. There had been few German spies operating in the UK – at least not for long – and even though the code-breaking achievements of Bletchley Park were to be kept from the public for many more years, the exploits of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) which sent immensely brave agents into occupied Europe were well-known through books such as Odette in 1949 (filmed in 1950) and Carve Her Name with Pride (filmed in 1958); yet the reality of the situation was far from a model of efficiency. The defection to Russia of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 caused scandal and provoked paranoia and mistrust, not the least on the part of America’s CIA. The situation was hardly calmed by the shambolic announcement and press conference in November 1955 that Kim Philby was not the ‘third man’ (he was) who had tipped off the defectors. In 1961 more Soviet agents were uncovered in a flurry of headlines; the Portland Spy Ring and the double agent George Blake, who received an unprecedented forty-two-year jail sentence after being tried in camera. His sentence was unexpectedly commuted by his dramatic escape from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 to follow Burgess, Maclean, and Philby to Russia. How could British thriller writers cope with the changing world order? The Empire was fading and no longer would provide a nursery for adventure heroes as it had in the days of Rider Haggard or John Buchan. One of the last of that generation of fictional heroes who had a ‘colonial’, though not privileged, upbringing was probably Idwal Rees, as created by Berkely Mather in The Pass Beyond Kashmir in 1960. Although proud of his Welsh heritage (as was Mather), the bulk of Rees’ early life had been spent far away from Wales (as had Mather’s) and he introduces himself to the reader thus: My old man had been the Far Eastern correspondent for a London paper and he never seemed to have any money so I had spent all my life up till 1939, and much of it afterwards, in India, Burma and China … the man who says he really knows the Far East is talking through his hat but I can claim to know just enough about the undercurrents to get by and to earn my modest fees. I’m built on wiry lines and sun and fever have burned my naturally dark hide to a uniform teak colour which makes me inconspicuous in most company where the features aren’t Mongolian – that’s if I’m dressed the same way. I’m not a master of disguises but if you look like me and can speak Cantonese and Hindustani with a bit of kitchen Arabic and a convincing pidgin-English with, when necessary, a bastard potpourri of the lot, you can get by as almost anything from Aden to Okinawa. Somebody who didn’t like me once spread it around that I was half Bengali. That wouldn’t worry me if it were true, but it’s not. I’m pure Welsh on both sides. The Pass Beyond Kashmir, Fontana, 1969 A character Kipling would have warmed to, one feels sure. The imperial network of trading, cultural, and legal links as well as job opportunities were formative influences on the lives of many a British thriller writer, let alone actual ‘colonials’ such as Wilbur Smith and Geoffrey Jenkins, who instinctively turned to the mother country when seeking a publisher. Before WWII, William Haggard had been a career civil servant and magistrate in India, and Francis Clifford had been in the rice trade in China and Burma. Desmond Bagley had left England in 1947 and after an epic journey across the Sahara to Uganda, eventually settled in South Africa until 1964. Another journalist, Barry Norman, who was to become the nation’s favourite film critic after trying his hand at thriller-writing, also worked in newspapers in South Africa. Many more, of course, had visited or been stationed in the colonies whilst on active military service but peacetime National Service in the Fifties offered less exotic, albeit safer, opportunities for gathering colourful background material, although Jack Higgins and the award-winning crime writer Reginald Hill (who was to occasionally dabble in spy thrillers) no doubt had their horizons broadened whilst serving with the British army on the border between West and East Germany. True, Britain’s armed forces still had a reputation for professionalism and bravery – and tough secret agents such as James Mitchell’s David Callan had learned their deadly skills in the army, fighting communist insurgents in Malaya – but now there were fewer gunboats to spare to send to foreign hot spots and everyone knew that only America could actually afford to pay for a war. After all, Britain was still paying for the last one, its WWII debt repayments only completed in the twenty-first century. And Britain’s intelligence services seemed ill-equipped to play any effective part in the Cold War, riddled as they were by some of the best (Cambridge) educated traitors in the world. So without an Empire to defend, no real power to wield or misuse, and security services that were far from secure, what was the British thriller writer to do for inspiration? The answer was blindingly obvious – especially to the many would-be authors who had journalistic backgrounds – never let the facts spoil a good story. Britain had won the war, it still ruled the waves and when the world was in trouble, there would always be a British hero to save the day. In fact, writers almost had a patriotic duty to reassure readers that Britain still mattered on the world stage, even if it could not actually afford to compete in the accelerating arms race between America and the Soviet Union. The economy may be a mess, its spies defecting to Russia in droves, its armed forces humiliated at Suez and its Empire going, if not gone; but dash it all, we had put up a jolly good show during the war, hadn’t we? We had stood alone, bravely and defiantly, and kept smiling through as our ships were torpedoed and our cities blitzed. We had marched into battle as if striding out to the crease and even when captured we had been determined to escape by the most ingenious (preferably cheekily humorous) method possible. The British had punched above their weight during the war and, although the world had changed and the villains were different, there was no reason why, when heroes were needed, they should not come from plucky Britain with the advantage of usually being underestimated by an arrogant enemy. In 1957, in From Russia, with Love, Ian Fleming wryly allowed a Soviet spymaster to display his ignorance of the British (‘English’) psyche. The character is General Vozdvishensky of the Intelligence Department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and he is addressing a meeting of Russian spy agencies planning the elimination of James Bond: The English are not interested in heroes unless they are footballers or cricketers or jockeys. If a man climbs a mountain or runs very fast he also is a hero to some people, but not to the masses … But the English are not greatly interested in military heroes. In England, neither open war nor secret war is a heroic matter. They do not like to think about war. The good general had only to look at what the ‘English’ were reading that year (apart from From Russia, with Love that is), namely Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone, and what they were queuing to see at the cinema, The Bridge on the River Kwai, to see how badly he had misjudged them when it came to military heroes. True, he was right when it came to climbing mountains, as when Edmund Hillary (albeit a New Zealander, as was Keith Mallory the mountaineer leader of the mission to spike those pesky guns on Navarone) had conquered Everest in 1953, and about men running fast, as Roger Bannister proved by breaking the four-minute mile barrier in 1954. English footballers and cricketers certainly could and still do become national heroes, even if only briefly, and in 1956, a certain jockey, Dick Francis, became a tragically heroic figure when his mount, the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch, collapsed fatally within sight of the finish of that year’s Grand National. Dick Francis was to go on to become if not a hero, then certainly a National Treasure, when he began to write bestselling thrillers at a steady gallop virtually every year from 1962 to the end of the century and beyond. To emphasise that it was always dangerous to underestimate the British, Ian Fleming returned to the point in You Only Live Twice in 1964. James Bond is in Japan trying to get the Japanese secret service to provide access to intelligence which the Americans (clearly worried about double agents such as Kim Philby) are refusing to share. Bond befriends the top Japanese spy Tiger Tanaka, but before he agrees to anything, Tanaka tests Bond, not by torture or threatening a female (methods we know don’t work on 007), but by criticising the British in a way which could have come out of the KGB handbook – or even the mouth of a former Colonial Officer now retired to Tunbridge Wells or possibly Bournemouth: You Only Live Twice, Panther, 1966, photography by Horst Tappe Bondo-san, I will now be blunt with you, and you will not be offended, because we are friends. Yes? Now it is a sad fact that I, and many of us in positions of authority in Japan, have formed an unsatisfactory opinion about the British people since the war. You have not only lost a great Empire, you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands … We will not go deeply into the reasons for this policy, but when you apparently sought to arrest this slide into impotence at Suez, you succeeded only in stage-managing one of the most pitiful bungles in the history of the world, if not the worst. Further, your governments have shown themselves successively incapable of ruling and have handed over effective control of the country to the trade unions, who appear to be dedicated to the principle of doing less and less work for more money. This feather-bedding, this shirking of an honest day’s work, is sapping at ever-increasing speed the moral fibre of the British, a quality the world once so much admired. In its place we now see a vacuous, aimless horde of seeker-after-pleasure – gambling at the pools and bingo, whining at the weather and the declining fortunes of the country, and wallowing nostalgically in gossip about the doings of the Royal Family … It is interesting to note that Tanaka cannot resist needling Bond by reminding him of Britain’s ignominious climb-down over Suez. Clearly it still struck a discordant note with many proud Britons, not the least Ian Fleming, but the most pitiful bungle in the history of the world? Surely the author doth protest too much, but it does have the required effect on Bond who shows his (and Britain’s) mettle in his response: Balls to you, Tiger! And balls again! … England may have been bled pretty thin by a couple of World Wars, our Welfare State politics may have made us expect too much for free, and the liberation of our Colonies may have gone too fast, but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at plenty of sports and win Nobel Prizes. Our politicians may be a feather pated bunch, and I expect yours are too. All politicians are. But there’s nothing wrong with the British people – although there are only fifty million of them. Bond’s answer proves him worthy of Tanaka’s trust and Japan’s intelligence secrets: ‘I thought your famous English stoicism might break down if I hit hard enough’ says Tiger, and Bond’s response shows there is ‘still an elite in Britain’ which is clearly capable of a world role. By the end of the Fifties, a disappearing Empire and obvious relegation from the top table of super-powers had been successfully ignored by British thriller writers. They had created heroes – be they soldiers, secret agents, or private adventurers – who could stand up and be counted whatever villains or the elements could throw at them. They were not standing up to restore the Empire, and often not necessarily for patriotic reasons, but they had the tradition (or myth) of empire-building in their genetic make-up – they were British, decent and honest – and all that meant they were heroes almost by natural selection and their skills could be put to good use in any part of the globe. Among the adventure writers, MacLean and Hammond Innes were the undoubted pace-setters. MacLean had moved from the wartime settings which had made his early reputation, into a spy thriller with a topical political background (Hungary) in The Last Frontier and then explored new territory, literally, with Night Without End set in the frozen wastes of Greenland in 1959; a novel quickly bought by Hollywood for a film which was to have been written by Eric Ambler and starring William Holden, but was never made. Hammond Innes, an inveterate traveller in real-life had criss-crossed the world, or at least the western half, to provide tales of high adventure in Canada (Campbell’s Kingdom, 1952), Morocco (The Strange Land, 1954), the stormy waters off the Channel Islands (The Wreck of the Mary Deare, 1956), and then back across the Atlantic to icy Labrador (The Land God Gave to Cain, 1958) before ending the decade with ‘his best yet’ according to the critics: The Doomed Oasis set in the ‘Empty Quarter’ of Arabia. More at home in Europe (Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and Majorca), Victor Canning was also broadening the horizons of his readers with adventures set in Brazil (The Man from the Turkish Slave, 1954), on the Red Sea coast (His Bones Are Coral, 1955), and Somalia in The Burning Eye in 1960. The expert on Africa, though, was a newcomer – Geoffrey Jenkins used the Namib Desert coastline for his debut thriller A Twist of Sand in 1959 and the Mozambique coast for his second, The Watering Place of Good Peace, the following year. The Wreck of the Mary Deare, Fontana, 1960 The Python Project, Hamlyn, 1967, illustrated by Mike Charlton All these authors, firmly in the adventure thriller market, did very well in the 1950s through sales of hardbacks and book club editions. They were to do even better in the 1960s through mass market paperbacks which sold by the millions internationally, in more countries than even those once coloured pink in the Atlas. The British may have begun to divest themselves of their empire but by the end of the 1950s, British spy fiction, or more accurately spy fantasy, had a clear and unchallenged emperor – Ian Fleming. The nearest rival to Fleming’s James Bond was probably Desmond Cory’s Sean ‘Johnny’ Fedora, who also had the distinction of applying for his licence to kill before Bond did, making his debut in Secret Ministry in 1951. Of Spanish–Irish parentage, Fedora was very much a British hero with a distinguished war record and a very British ‘Dr Watson’ sidekick – Sebastian Trout of the Foreign Office. By 1960, Fedora had appeared in more books than Bond (eleven, compared to seven Bond novels and a collection of short stories) and had taken readers to many an exotic location, from the Himalayas to the Congo to Venezuela on missions initially against ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis, but latterly against the KGB. In theory, Fedora should have been as well-known as Bond in this period – his adventures were well regarded in America and well-reviewed by no less than Anthony Boucher who publicly preferred him to 007 – but UK titles such as Johnny Goes East, Johnny Goes North, Johnny Goes West and, you’ve guessed, Johnny Goes South, perhaps made him sound more a competitor to Biggles rather than Bond. (His adventures in American editions had far more exciting titles such as The Swastika Hunt, Overload, and Mountainhead.) Two new heroes – both very British but spymasters rather than spies or secret agents – came on the murky espionage scene in 1958 and both were to attract strong, if not numerically overwhelming, supporters. Neither was remotely like James Bond, although John Blackburn’s General Charles Kirk did have a secretary called, cheekily, ‘Miss Bond’. The ageing General Kirk, with his war-damaged hand and a phobia about feeling cold, was billed as the Head of Foreign Office Intelligence and he made his debut in A Scent of New-mown Hay. In a nod to the traditions of the genre, Kirk is described in another novel (Broken Boy) as looking ‘like one of Buchan’s aristocratic villains, plotting a very low blow against the Crown’. Blackburn’s novels took spy fantasy to the limit, often including elements of supernatural horror and even science fiction and as a result he attained a cult rather than a mass following, though several of the books reflected the development of, and paranoia about, biological weapons of mass destruction. The other leading man (he was far too refined to be labelled anything as common as a popular hero) to emerge was Colonel Charles Russell, of the mysterious and seemingly autonomous Security Executive, created by William Haggard in Slow Burner. The urbane and patrician Russell, who could get on with traitors and his KGB opposite number far better than he could with his own political masters, was of similar mature years to General Kirk – and more the equivalent of ‘M’ than Bond – but not the old warhorse that Kirk was; more a rather superior, very senior, civil servant, which is exactly what his creator was. The Night of Wenceslas, Penguin, 1962 One other promising character, although reluctant spy and certainly no match for James Bond, to appear in 1960 was Nicolas Whistler who found himself, much against his better judgement, up to his neck in espionage in Czechoslovakia in the award-winning The Night of Wenceslas by Lionel Davidson. The book was soon filmed as the romantic comedy Hot Enough for June, starring that quintessentially British hero Dirk Bogarde, but no more was ever heard of Nicolas Whistler. His creator Davidson, though, went on to become one of Britain’s most respected – and best – thriller writers. That debut novel of Lionel Davidson is as good a punctuation point as any. The 1950s had well and truly ended and the Swinging (and Spying) Sixties were upon us. Lots of things, especially thriller-writing, were about to change. Chapter 6: (#ulink_e21dbaff-ea0b-53c0-8d66-b712763e484a) TRAVEL BROADENING THE MIND (#ulink_e21dbaff-ea0b-53c0-8d66-b712763e484a) One of the main attractions of British thrillers in the boom times of the Sixties and Seventies, apart from the excitement and escapism provided by their fantastical plots, was their ability to provide extremely cheap foreign travel without the reader having to actually move. It was, to be sure, the era of cheap packaged holidays at a time when a relatively young population had disposable incomes and between 1960 and 1967, the number of Britons holidaying abroad more than doubled to around the 5 million mark. For the vast majority, though, ‘abroad’ was still an undiscovered country. The first charter flight of holidaymakers from Britain had taken off for Corsica back in 1950 and the first passenger jet flew in 1952. The Convention on International Civil Aviation in 1954 relaxed their rules to allow for more charter flights and in 1957 BEA (British European Airways) established a route to Valencia in Spain and it is said that the term ‘Costa Blanca’ was invented to promote it. Dover–Calais car ferries offered the motorist a chance to explore the continent from 1953, the first Channel crossing by a hovercraft in 1959 offered the prospect of a far shorter (though notoriously more turbulent) journey, and in 1962 the first Thomson package holiday took eighty-two sun-seekers to Palma for thirteen days at a cost of around ?42 a head. British governments, however, seemed determined not to let the population have too much travel, or too good a time when they got there. Currency restrictions imposing a ?50 allowance on travellers were introduced after WWII as an austerity measure, abolished in 1959 by a Conservative government to prove that we had never had it so good, and then reintroduced in 1966 by a Labour government desperate to fend off a devaluation of the pound. One disgruntled Conservative MP commented that the paltry allowance resulted in impoverished British travellers abroad being ‘regarded as lower than Albanian tourists’. Victor Canning called it ‘scraping along on a ?50 travel allowance’ but writers, of course, would almost certainly have got away with a larger allowance on the basis that their trips abroad were vital ‘research’. Foreign travel may have been a minority sport but the possibility was now there and certainly there was a thirst for knowledge – at least in popular fiction – of foreign locales for, after all, foreign parts invariably meant thrills and excitement. For most Britons the very act of crossing a border was seen as an adventure in itself, an attitude which was said, unfairly, to apply to the English rather than the British as a whole – even when they travelled to Scotland. 1960s The Old Masters, Greene and Ambler, had been proving that ‘abroad’ equalled mystery, suspense, and intrigue for years and were continuing to do so. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (Indo-China) in 1955, Our Man in Havana in 1958, and The Comedians (set in Haiti) in 1966 are among his most famous novels. Eric Ambler, who had made his name with serpentine tales often set in old Byzantium, returned to the exotic eastern Mediterranean with The Light of Day in 1962 (filmed as Topkapi) and then tackled Africa in Dirty Story in 1967. Our Man in Havana, Heinemann, 1958 The Dark Crusader, Fontana, 1963 One group who could travel more than most were journalists. There was certainly a tradition of having a journalist as a sleuthing hero in detective fiction, back to the days of E. C. Bentley, Philip MacDonald and Anthony Berkeley. Some of them, certainly, were rather dodgy characters though as Eric Ambler had warned his readers: ‘The transition from newspaper man to desperado is a more arduous process than some people would have you believe.’ Hammond Innes – originally a journalist – was generally accepted to be the master of the ‘going foreign’ adventure thriller and he extended his research trips to include settings in south-east Asia, Greece, Malta, and Australia. Not far behind was another veteran, Victor Canning, and although Canning tended to limit his adventures to Europe and the Mediterranean in the Sixties he always preferred to set dangerous adventures involving Englishmen, in foreign locations because ‘in this country you could always call a policeman’. The big beast of the thriller pack, Alistair MacLean, certainly varied his settings, though the geographical location of his plots was always somehow secondary to the travails of the hero. In one of his lesser known works, The Dark Crusader, first published in 1961 under the pen-name Ian Stuart, British secret agent John Benthall, posing as a rocket scientist, ends up on a Polynesian island which at first glance could be the home of Dr No or Dr Moreau, possibly both. The reader, however, is not invited (or given the time) to dwell on the exotic setting other than to be reassured that the food served there by a Chinese cook ‘was none of this nonsense of birds’ nests and sharks’ fins’, as the more important concerns by far are: what’s going on, who can Benthall trust and how does he get past the armed guards and those Dobermann-Pinscher attack dogs which weigh between eighty and ninety pounds, have ‘fangs like steel hooks’ and which come at him out of the dark on a moonless night? That’s the sort of local colour the MacLean reader was after. The undisputed heir to Hammond Innes, when it came to providing foreign locales and being a similarly enthusiastic traveller, was Desmond Bagley, whose novels from 1965 onwards were framed by carefully and often lovingly described scenery from the High Andes to British Columbia, and Sweden to New Zealand. As was often said about Bagley, his books were not so much about spies or even crimes – though they certainly feature – but about a group of interesting people in an interesting, often dangerous, landscape. In the 1982 Whodunit?Guide to Crime, Suspense and Spy Fiction one of the editors (most likely Harry Keating) wrote Bagley’s entry in the ‘Consumer’s Guide’ section: [Bagley] derives a good deal of his creative force from the choice of exotic settings, carefully visited in advance. These have ranged from Iceland (Running Blind) to the Sahara (Flyaway), from northernmost Scotland (The Enemy) to southern New Zealand (The Snow Tiger). But he never allows his research, however massive, to get in the way of his story, although what facts he does let on to the pages greatly enhance the authenticity and interest of those stories. Bagley’s very natural, almost conversational, style convincingly imparts a local flavour without lecturing to his readers, as in Flyaway (1978) when he gives tips on riding a camel as his protagonists are about to cross the desert in Chad: A camel, I found, is not steered from the mouth like a horse. Once in the saddle, the Tuareg saddle with its armchair back and high cross-shaped pommel, you put your bare feet on the animal’s neck and guide it by rubbing one side or the other. Being on a camel when it rises to its feet is the nearest thing to being in an earthquake and quite alarming until one gets used to it. In those far-off days before the Internet, Google Earth or Lonely Planet Guides, this was useful information to the sitting-room traveller and had the feel of being written by someone who had been there and done that – as Bagley had. In many ways he could be credited with (or blamed for) being a forerunner of the tsunami of ‘Nordic Noir’ crime novels which was to flood Europe at the end of the century, when he used settings in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and particularly Iceland in his Cold War thriller Running Blind in 1970. Bagley and his wife Joan spent a month researching in Iceland in 1969 and their visit was clearly a big news event locally as all the Icelandic media reported a press conference they gave towards the end of their stay. When asked the inevitable question ‘why Iceland?’ Bagley, very honestly, replied: ‘Iceland is a very unusual country. It is also helpful, because so few people live here, so should I write some nonsense, then nobody knows what is right except in Iceland.’ A little more seriously, he said, ‘I choose my setting depending on whether people know a little or a lot about the country,’ and acknowledged that in Britain, the popular awareness of Iceland was limited to newspaper headlines about fishing disputes and ‘Cod Wars’. Long Run South, Panther, 1965 Snake Water, Panther, 1971 Running Blind, which was filmed by the BBC, was another bestseller for Bagley and in an article in The Writer in May 1973, he said: ‘The plot that was worked out in Running Blind came directly from the terrain and peculiar institutions of Iceland and I do not think that specific plot could have been set in any other country.’ Certainly the television adaptation was well-received and the week after it was shown in 1979, The Observer newspaper ran an advertisement for an ‘Icelandic Safari among the glaciers, hot springs, and volcanoes’ – holiday with the adventurous imprimatur ‘In the trace of Desmond Bagley’. Yet Bagley was not the first British thriller writer to discover Iceland. Journalist and foreign correspondent Alan Williams had used it as the setting for a key section of The Brotherhood (later retitled The Purity League) in 1968, where the hero, (a cynical, fairly right-wing journalist), flees for his life from the puritanical and very right-wing Brotherhood across an Icelandic glacier, before moving to the final shoot-out climax in communist Poland. From the start of his career as a thriller writer, Alan Williams had offered exciting foreign locations, recalled from first-hand experience as a foreign, or often war, correspondent. His first novel, Long Run South (1962), was set in Morocco and quickly followed by the excellent Barbouze, which begins among ancient Greek monasteries and meals of bread, olives, dried fish, ouzo, arak, and retzina, all of which (including bread other than white sliced) being rare and exotic things in most of Britain in 1963. Barbouze then becomes both more exotic and also politically topical by switching the action to Algiers, slap-bang – literally – in the middle of civil strife caused by the de-colonisation of Algeria by France. In his third novel, Snake Water (1965) , Williams pulled out all the stops when it came to impressing the armchair explorer, setting his treasure-hunt thriller in a rather vaguely located South American country blessed not only with a corrupt ‘banana republic’ government but a topography which included volcanoes, mountains, deserts, swamps, and jungle, not to mention a tribe of native Indians with a ferocious reputation. The plot concerns an ill-assorted quartet of two innocents and two natural-born killers following a treasure map to a hidden cache of diamonds, first across a desert called The Devil’s Spoon: They woke with the sun hanging like a fireball in the corner of the sky. The glare had gone and they could now see the great hollow of The Devil’s Spoon below. From here it looked less like a spoon than a frying-pan full of steam. The rim ran the length of the horizon in a dark line that was the cliff called the Chinluca Wall. The sky above was the colour of asphalt; below there was not a single land-mark – not a drop of water or blade of grass or cacti or weed or insect; not the smallest thing. Having crossed this heartless terrain, our intrepid travellers then have to face the hostile wildlife. Blocking their path through the mountains is a phenomenon which any natural history presenter, Sir David Attenborough included, would give their eye-teeth for: the mating dance of highly poisonous snakes seen by the light of a full moon: Less than ten feet along the ledge were about a dozen snakes. They were thin and long, striped yellow, black and green, twisting and looping with astonishing speed, their scales making a soft rustling sound on the scree. About half of them were moving flat on the ledge in rapid figure-of-eight patterns, the others crawling in and out of holes in the rock, streaking upwards, their diamond heads flashing like the points of spears, then plunging back into the sand to reappear a few feet away, always in the perfect arabesque movements of a meticulous ritual. This being a red-blooded thriller and not a nature programme, however, the scene does not end well for one of the treasure hunters – nor for the snakes ‘dancing’ in the moonlight. Yet more dangers lurk in ambush for the ragged bunch of adventurers along the way, this time as they enter insect- and leech-infested swamp country. Then, under the mangroves about thirty feet away, he saw a movement. At first he thought it was a trick of the shadows: a broad undulating mass of copper-red helmets, each the size of a soup-plate, moving slowly towards them like a battalion of surrealist troops without heads or bodies. There must have been more than fifty of them, stretching back under the trees, creeping round the roots in several streams; and along the front ranks, where the faces should have been, there were hundreds of thin white legs like macaroni, treading the mud in a steady rhythmic motion … Ryderbeit studied them for a moment, then frowned. ‘We’d better get out o’here. Swamp crabs – can paralyse you in a few seconds’. As Ryderbeit is a leathery, not-to-be-trusted, hard-nosed character (and one of Williams’ finest creations), the South American wildlife, once again, does not come off well. South America proved a happy hunting ground for several thriller writers, just as Africa had for Rider Haggard and Edgar Wallace, and previous generations of adventure-seekers. With its jungles, high mountains, lost cities, and, indeed, lost civilisations, as well as extremely exotic (and dangerous) local inhabitants – piranhas, anacondas, native Indians with blowpipes and curare-tipped darts, not to mention ex-Nazis – it is rather surprising that it was not the setting for more tales of high adventure. In the same year that Snake Water was published, however, Desmond Bagley produced another top-notch one in High Citadel, a rip-roaring thriller set in the High Andes where the survivors of a plane crash not only have to contend with the inhospitable terrain, but are pursued by an army of rebel soldiers. Fortunately, among the ranks of the survivors are a couple of medieval historians who are able to construct medieval weapons to fight off their attackers. Then John Blackburn – who specialised in exotic, sometimes downright Gothic, scenarios – in The Young Man from Lima (1968) had his ageing spymaster hero General Charles Kirk endure a Heart of Darkness journey up a jungle river to a ghost town guarded by an army of very protective soldier ants. In the same year, the veteran Geoffrey Household produced a spooky slice of the picaresque in Dance of the Dwarfs, featuring a lone hero (as usual) manning an experimental agricultural station on the edge of the Colombian jungle. One of Household’s strangest offerings (the first-person narrator is dead before the book starts and the ‘dwarfs’ of the title are not human) the novel is ripe with the author’s obvious closeness to the landscape and the local population, whether human or animal, which is hardly surprising given that Household knew South America from his pre-war days as an importer of bananas into Europe, and then as a travelling salesman selling printer’s inks there, before turning to fiction. Running Blind, The Companion Book Club, 1971 High Citadel, Fontana, 1967 A less frenetic use of South American settings can be seen in the series of thrillers featuring Peter Craig, a special agent of the Diplomatic Service, which began in 1969 with Twenty-fourth Level by Kenneth Benton. A retired diplomat, Benton had served in the Diplomatic Corps for some 30 years (in fact he was an MI6 officer), including postings to Brazil and Peru, and his hero, Peter Craig (not to be confused with James Munro’s John Craig, a much rougher beast) is a specialist overseas police advisor on security matters who follows in the footsteps of his creator’s diplomatic postings. Craig is, in essence, a consultant who lectures foreign police forces on counter-insurgency strategies and anti-terrorism, often finding he has to leave the lecture theatre and take to the battlefield to prove that the sword is mightier than the whiteboard marker. After his Brazilian baptism of fire, Craig’s assignments took him to Europe and then back to South America, to the High Andes in Peru in Craig and the Jaguar in 1973, which reads in part like a textbook on agricultural economics. The detailed topography may be absolutely accurate, but the reason Peter Craig (and Kenneth Benton) did not become better-known was because Craig was simply not exciting enough a character. There was little, if any, mystery about him and he was rather staid, calmly smoking his pipe while machine guns rattled all around him. You got the feeling that if he wore a jacket with leather elbow patches he would easily be mistaken for a geography teacher. No such mistake would be made over the adventurers in the distinctly harsh environments provided by South African author Geoffrey Jenkins. His heroes are usually grizzled sea-dogs with wartime experiences they would rather forget, even if the reader is anxious to know more (although in one case the central character is a research scientist dedicated to electrocuting sharks after losing his legs in a shark attack). However fanciful his plots, Jenkins was the master of his Southern Hemisphere locations, especially the ‘Skeleton Coast’ and the notorious Namib, ‘the desert of diamonds and death’ in south-west Africa, the Mozambique Channel and the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic and Antarctica. In A Grue of Ice in 1962, he also set a thriller in the world of commercial whaling (although the nub of the plot is the hunt for something much more rare and more valuable than whale meat), possibly the first, and perhaps the last, thriller writer to do so after Hammond Innes in those Greenpeace-free days. Those early Jenkins novels were ‘Adventures’ with a capital ‘A’, the characters being explorers into strange and dangerous environments rather than soldiers or secret agents on a mission. Jenkins spiced his stories with the latest scientific discoveries as well as traditional explorer’s folklore as it surrounded the bizarre landscapes (and seascapes) he described. It was perfectly possible in a Jenkins novel to find the wreck of a top secret Nazi U-boat, a fifteenth-century Portuguese sailing ship stranded in the middle of a desert, blind scarab beetles, a mysterious island seen only twice in a hundred years, the meteorological phenomenon of ‘two suns’, strandlopers – rather unpleasant seashore hyenas, very big and very deadly composite jelly fish (imagine a long string of Portuguese man-of-wars joined together to increase their voltage), and, even, in the Indian Ocean, a giant ‘Devil Fish’ – a manta ray large enough to attack a submarine. His 1964 novel The River of Diamonds had all his trademark ingredients and then some. This updated pirate tale set on the desolate Sperrgebiet coast of modern-day Namibia, centres on an expedition to mine diamonds from the sea-bed where they were deposited by a prehistoric river – or is that merely a cover to find the hidden treasure, diamonds again, of Heinrich G?ring (Hermann’s father) the colonial governor when Namibia was an Imperial German protectorate? As the Daily Telegraph reviewer noted, there are also ‘killer deserts, grizzled prospectors, mass (animal) suicides, savage nomads and a vanished U-boat patrol’ to which could be added some powerful and very deadly natural phenomenon, quicksands, oxygen-less sea, and an attack by Russian torpedo boats. The American magazine Kirkus Reviews called it ‘Good Hollywood’. The River of Diamonds, Fontana, 1966 If there had been a prize for the most convoluted journey taken by a hero in an adventure thriller published in 1962, then A Captive in the Land by James Aldridge would surely have been in the running. The story opens with the rather uptight British meteorologist hero Rupert Royce on a flight back from the Canadian Arctic when a crashed Russian plane, with a stranded sole survivor, is spotted on the ice below them. Royce hastily grabs some survival gear and parachutes down to the ice whilst his plane goes off to get help, but then it too crashes, leaving Royce and a badly-injured Russian pilot stranded, 300 miles from the US base at Thule in Greenland. After months of hardship surviving the weather and fighting off polar bears waiting for a rescue that isn’t coming, Royce decides to walk off the ice, grimly dragging the injured Russian with him. Amazingly they survive the gruelling trek and are eventually rescued by Eskimo seal-hunters. Royce returns to England to find himself – embarrassingly – a hero of the Soviet Union and after some rather tedious soul-searching, agrees to accept the offer of Russian hospitality and embarks with his family on a journey to Leningrad, then Moscow, then down to the Crimea where he has expressed a desire to scuba-dive in the Black Sea on the archaeological ruins of the Ancient Greek settlement of Phanagoria. With his status as a Soviet Hero and seemingly unlimited access to Russia, Royce has naturally been recruited by British Naval Intelligence to do a bit of spying whilst there, but his heart isn’t in it and in the end he throws away unused his fountain-pen full of invisible ink! It seemed that James Aldridge, a respected war correspondent in WWII and author of numerous novels, children’s books and non-fiction, started A Captive in the Land as an adventure story. He toyed with the idea of a spy novel, and then almost moved into a man-alone-in-a-foreign-land thriller, but somewhere along the line, in a very long book, lost any sense of making it thrilling. Even the sub-texts of his hero’s Russian love affair and his sympathetic observations of day-to-day Russian life, about which little was known in the West, fail to generate much excitement or suspense and absolutely no tension (the dramatic highlight is when Royce is robbed and his trousers stolen!). You can’t help thinking that an Alistair MacLean hero under the same circumstances would have managed to blow up the Soviet Black Sea Fleet in half the number of pages. A Captive in the Land, whatever merits it may have had as a ‘straight’ or ‘literary’ novel, failed as a thriller because it simply wasn’t exciting enough and proved that unusual or unfamiliar locations were not in themselves a guarantee of success. To corrupt one of the favourite phrases of reviewers of the day, there was little blood and hardly any thunder (although there is a scene in a lightning storm over the Crimea) and the novel had, in Rupert Royce, a man of extensive private wealth, an unsympathetic, stubbornly unworldly, hero who acts on the pace of the narrative like a sea-anchor. This was the Sixties and new sorts of hero were needed: confident guys who could survive on their wits in exotic and dangerous foreign environments and who knew about guy stuff, such as guns, aeroplanes and engines. In 1961, there was one such guy waiting, quite literally, in the wings. I hadn’t been in Athens for at least three months and hadn’t reckoned on being there for another three months, but there I was standing breathing the good fresh petrol fumes of Elliniko Airport and waiting for the starboard engine to get cool enough for me to start an appendectomy on its magneto. Thus did Gavin Lyall introduce the first of his buccaneering heroes, freelance pilot Jack Clay, in his debut novel The Wrong Side of the Sky and we soon, from Clay’s rather cynical perspective, get a view of the overnight accommodation provided for air cargo personnel in the parts of Athens tourists were probably wise to avoid: We got a couple of rooms in a small hotel just off Omonia Square … The sheets were patched, the windows gave a good view of the vegetable shop across the street and the doors were the sort that any policeman could knock down with a good sneeze – and probably had. But the place was a lot cleaner than a lot of hotels around there, and it cost us five whole drachmas a night more than the neighbourhood rate. Here was a hero, British to be sure, but blessed with Raymond Chandler-sharp dialogue, who not only had an interesting way of making a (mostly) legal living, flying cargo planes around the Mediterranean, but who also fitted into the foreign setting with streetwise ease. Here was a first-person narrator who was not lecturing the reader, just telling it as he had experienced it, and so when the hero finds himself in danger – as of course he does – the reader is confident he will get out of that particular scrape by virtue of his wits alone. In 1964, Lyall repeated his winning formula with an even more suspenseful plot and a setting well off the (then) tourist track: Lapland and northern Finland. The resourceful hero was again a pilot-for-hire, this time called Bill Cary, and at the opening of The Most Dangerous Game he tells the reader: They were ripping up Rovaniemi airport, as they were almost every airport in Finland that summer, into big piles of rock and sandy soil. It was all part of some grand rebuilding design ready for the day when they had enough tourist traffic to justify putting the jets on to the internal air routes. In the meantime, it was just turning perfectly good airports into sand-pits. Lyall’s early adventurers may have had military experience and certainly had some special, though not outlandish, skills in that they could drive expertly and could usually pilot an aircraft. They were not masters of disguise, almost certainly not versed in any martial art and relied on gadgets and secret equipment only to the extent that they knew how to use a spanner on a recalcitrant engine. They were the sort of guys other guys wouldn’t mind standing at a bar with, especially if those bars were abroad because Lyall’s heroes fitted in whether in Greece, Finland, France or the Caribbean, and would drink and eat what a regular guy would. Fictional spies, of course, were on expenses when abroad and usually travelled first class, especially if they belonged to the Bond school of spy-fantasy. They tended to stay in five-star hotels, had limousines and drivers to meet them at the airport, drank the finest alcohol, ate in the finest restaurants – and could not resist giving the reader pointers on the art of foreign travel with style. The Most Dangerous Game, Pan, 1966 James Bond was the first jet set secret agent – his early appearances in print coinciding with the establishment of commercial jet airline travel – and had seemed happiest when operating abroad. His missions had taken him to America, the Caribbean, Turkey, France, Switzerland and even Japan, with only one of his adventures – Moonraker – being set on home soil. The many candidates to replace Bond in the nation’s affections were just as keen to add to the collection of stamps and visas in their well-worn passports. One of the leading pretenders to Bond’s throne was the extraordinary Dr Jason Love, who apart from being a country doctor in general practice, was skilled in martial arts and an authority on vintage cars – and he was always willing to help out British Intelligence at a moment’s notice, whenever or wherever needed. Created by James Leasor, Dr Love’s first outing was in Passport to Oblivion in 1964 and the action spread from Tehran and Rome to the wilds of northern Canada. Further novels, usually with ‘passport’ in the title offering the prospect of foreign locales, followed with settings from Switzerland to the Himalayas, and the Bahamas to Damascus. Hot on the heels of Dr Jason Love, 1964 also saw the arrival of Charles Hood, created by James Mayo, who was a clone of James Bond in in his love of the high-life but differed intellectually in that he was a connoisseur of, and dealer in, fine art. With such a day job, or perhaps cover story to maintain, it is of course necessary for Hood to spend quite a bit of time hanging around art galleries in Paris, though he does find time for excursions to the Windward Isles, Nicaragua and Iran in his 1968 adventure Once in a Lifetime, which was re-titled Sergeant Death when it appeared in paperback the following year. Another 1964 alumnus of the academy of 007 substitutes was ‘barrister by profession, adventurer by choice’ Hugo Baron, created by John Michael Brett, who had a short fictional career working for an organisation known as DIECAST, which believed in violent means to achieve world peace and the elimination of espionage! Hugo Baron was clearly good at his job and duly found himself unemployed after three novels, though not before an adventurous jaunt to Egypt and Kenya in A Plague of Dragons in 1965. Also making his debut in 1964 was John Craig, a distinctly working-class hero compared to most would-be Bond replacements. Created by James Munro (a pen-name of James Mitchell, who was to go on to invent the more famous David Callan) and appearing first in The Man Who Sold Death, Craig’s early adventures centred on the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Morocco but by The Innocent Bystanders in 1969 he was a paid-up member of the jet-set, zipping between New York, Miami, Turkey, and Cyprus. Modesty Blaise, one of the few female not-so-secret agents created in the 1960s (or since) already had a cosmopolitan personal background when she first appeared in a newspaper comic strip in 1963 and then a series of novels (and one unlamented feature film) from 1965. Created by Peter O’Donnell, the independently wealthy Ms Blaise not only owns a villa in Tangiers but travels easily through Africa and the Middle East, and in Sabre-Tooth (1966) comes up against an army of terrorists training in Afghanistan in order to ferment revolt in Kuwait – a prescient, though twisted, mirror image of a very modern scenario. Johnny Fedora, whose career timeline mirrored that of Bond, had already done his fair share of globe-trotting but by the 1960s, author Desmond Cory had settled him into a series of interwoven missions against his KGB nemesis based mostly in Spain. Without doubt, though, the most popular foreign destination for British spies – though only the reader could be said to be the tourist – was Berlin. A focal point of diplomatic tension between capitalist West and communist East since the 1940s, the isolated city of Berlin became the espionage hub of the Cold War when the ‘Anti-Fascist Protective Wall’ went up virtually overnight in 1961. A barrier dividing two opposing political systems, complete with armed guards, minefields, and checkpoints in the middle of a city already heavy with history and recent memories of a world war, it was a barrier that could only be crossed in secret ways and on pain of death, or in dramatic rituals of prisoner exchanges or spy ‘swaps’. Walter Ulbricht, Head of State of East Germany, had created the ideal backdrop and sound stage for spy fiction and four bestselling novels in four years (1963–6) ensured that Berlin would become a film set as familiar to fans of spy stories as Monument Valley had been in the classic westerns of John Ford. Although the bulk of the action takes place outside Berlin, the key opening and closing scenes of John Le Carr?’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) take place around the Wall. The tragic hero of the story, Alec Leamas, on his fateful mission into East Germany passes through one of the checkpoints in the Wall, under the watchful eyes of the ‘Vopos’ (Volkspolizei); the Mercedes he is riding in already being followed by a DKW. The crossing is suspiciously incident-free. As they crossed the fifty yards which separated the two checkpoints, Leamas was dimly aware of the new fortifications on the eastern side of the wall – dragon’s teeth, observation towers and double aprons of barbed wire. Things had tightened up. The Mercedes didn’t stop at the second checkpoint; the booms were already lifted and they drove straight through, the Vopos just watching them through binoculars. The DKW had disappeared, and when Leamas sighted it ten minutes later it was behind them again. They were driving fast now – Leamas had thought they would stop in East Berlin, change cars perhaps, and congratulate one another on a successful operation, but they drove on eastwards through the city. Getting in to East Berlin might have been easy for Alec Leamas, but leaving it, along with the girl he is rescuing, forms the excruciatingly tense and ultimately doomed finale to the novel. Leamas and Liz, the girl, are forced down the only escape route open to them: going over the Wall in the middle of the night, at a place swept by a searchlight where the guards have orders to shoot on sight. The last briefing from their contact arranging the escape is suitably grim. ‘Drive at thirty kilometres,’ the man said. His voice was taut, frightened. ‘I’ll tell you the way. When we reach the place you must get out and run to the wall. The searchlight will be shining at the point where you must climb. Stand in the beam of the searchlight. When the beam moves away begin to climb. You will have ninety seconds to get over. You go first,’ he said to Leamas; ‘and the girl follows. There are iron rungs in the lower part – after that you must pull yourself up as best you can. You’ll have to sit on the top and pull the girl up. Do you understand?’ ‘We understand,’ said Leamas. ‘How long have we got?’ ‘If you drive at thirty kilometres we shall be there in about nine minutes. The searchlight will be on the wall at five past one exactly. They can give you ninety seconds. Not more.’ ‘What happens after ninety seconds?’ Leamas asked. ‘They can only give you ninety seconds,’ the man repeated. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John Le Carr? was brilliantly describing the bleak topography of Cold War espionage, not a particular city. It was left to Len Deighton to give us the spy’s-eye view as his anonymous hero (‘Harry Palmer’ in the films) arrives for a Funeral in Berlin in 1964. The parade ground of Europe has always been that vast area of scrub and lonely villages that stretches eastward from the Elbe – some say as far as the Urals. But halfway between the Elbe and the Oder, sitting at attention upon Brandenburg, is Prussia’s major town – Berlin. From two thousand feet the Soviet Army War Memorial in Treptower Park is the first thing you notice. It’s in the Russian sector. In a space like a dozen football pitches a cast of a Red Army soldier makes the Statue of Liberty look like it’s standing in a hole. Over Marx-Engels Platz the plane banked steeply south towards Tempelhof and the thin veins of water shone in the bright sunshine. The Spree flows through Berlin as a spilt pail of water flows through a building site. The river and its canals are lean and hungry and they slink furtively under roads that do not acknowledge them by even the smallest hump. Nowhere does a grand bridge and a wide flow of water divide the city into two halves. Instead it is bricked-up buildings and sections of breeze block that bisect the city, ending suddenly and unpredictably like the lava flow of a cold-war Pompeii. If there was ever a need for a tourist audio-guide to coming in to land at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport (in 1964, that is), then surely Harry Palmer’s is the streetwise voice one would like to hear through the headphones. Over half-way through negotiating a labyrinthine plot of double- and triple-cross, our laid-back and very observant narrator still has time to add flashes of local colour, proving to the reader, thirsty for detail, that Palmer (and Deighton) had been there and seen that. Funeral in Berlin, Penguin, 1966 The Quiller Memorandum, Fontana, 1967 Oddly enough, Berlin is one of the most relaxed big cities of the world and people were smiling and making ponderous Teutonic jokes about soldiers and weather and bowels and soldiers; for Berlin is the only city still officially living under the martial command of foreign armies and if they can’t make jokes about foreign soldiers no one can. Just ahead of me four English girls were adding up their holiday expenses, and deciding whether the budget would let them have lunch in a restaurant or if it was to be a Bockwurst sausage from a kiosk on the Ku-damm and eat it in the park. Beyond them were two nurses, dressed in a grey conventual uniform which made them look like extras from All Quiet on the Western Front. Deighton was clearly at home in Berlin and it was to be a happy hunting ground for him – if not his characters – in the following decade. For Adam Hall’s finely-tuned secret agent Quiller, who made his debut in The Berlin Memorandum (retitled The Quiller Memorandum when the film came out), the city was a very dangerous place, from its wintry streets, smoky bars, and seedy hotels and cafes to its lock-up garages (especially its lock-up garages!). Almost as soon as the super-tough Quiller arrives in Berlin to hunt neo-Nazis, he finds himself being hunted, on foot and by car. At one point he decides to give his pursuers a run for their money indulging, as Quiller himself puts it, in ‘a bit of healthy-schoolboy action’. Slush was coming on to the windscreen and the wipers knocked it away. We made a straight run through Steglitz and Sudende because I wanted to know if they’d now make any attempt to close up and ram. They didn’t. They just wanted to know where I was going. I’d have to think of somewhere. Their sidelamps were steady in the mirror, a pair of pale fireflies floating along the perspective of the streets. We crossed the Attila-strasse and I made a dive into Ring-strasse going south-east, then braked to bring them right up behind me and make them slow. As soon as they had I whipped through the gears and increased the gap to half a block before swinging sharp left into the Mariendorfdamm and heading north-east towards Tempelhof. Then a series of dives through back streets that got them going in earnest. The speeds were high now and I had the advantage because I could go where I liked, whereas they had to think out my moves before I made them, and couldn’t, because I didn’t know them myself until the last second. Clearly, in those far-off days before cars had sat navs, Quiller was the man to have behind the wheel when being tailed by the bad guys in Berlin. It could be a pretty hostile place even if you were a Soviet double-agent trying to escape from the Western half to find sanctuary in the East, a clever inversion of the usual plot-line but exactly the scenario facing the character Alexander Eberlin in Derek Marlowe’s A Dandy in Aspic. Eberlin got out with the other few tourists and curiosity seekers, and stood on the platform a moment taking stock. The blue-coated railway guards checked the compartments, and glancing up Eberlin could see, framed high on the metal catwalks of the roof, the silhouettes of two Vopos, immobile, machine guns resting on their hips. He had known of an East German youth who had tried to escape by clutching onto the roof of a train, and of another who had hid in the engine of a locomotive. Both had died on the journey. One shot from above, here, the other, untouched, unnoticed by the Vopos, entering the safety of the west as a charred, burnt-out body. But that was of no consequence to Eberlin. His journey was the other way, crossing the Wall as a mere tourist. A simple procedure. By 1966 when A Dandy in Aspic was published and 1968 when the film came out there would have been thousands of British thriller-readers who knew, quite confidently, that Eberlin’s journey would be far from simple. Fans of spy fiction, even those who had never been to Germany, knew all about Vopos, checkpoints, Tempelhof, ‘death strips’ around the Wall and the Ku-damm. They were well aware that everyone reading a newspaper on the street was a spy and every tobacconist’s kiosk was a dead letter drop. There were many spy films in that peak period around 1966 and there would be many more thrillers set in Berlin both contemporary and historical, in the years to follow, but those four novels in quick succession by Le Carr?, Deighton, Hall and Marlowe – all distinctively different in style – firmly established Berlin as the spy capital of the thriller world. Berlin’s reputation as a sort of espionage Camelot, where anything could happen and probably did, lasted until November 1989 when the Cold War began to thaw rapidly by popular demand with hardly a spy or a secret agent in sight. 1970s As the 1970s dawned, it seemed that British thriller writers, albeit with some new faces joining the ranks of the bestselling, would continue to offer more of the same when it came to using foreign locations. For the writer of detective stories, particularly ‘police procedurals’, a familiar British (usually English) setting was thought necessary for realism. There were, back then, very few crime novels set abroad featuring local policemen, available either in translation or, daringly, written by British authors with specific knowledge of the country featured. For the thriller writer, however, ‘abroad’ still meant ‘exciting’, even though British readers were availing themselves of cheap travel abroad and seeing more of the world via television and, more worryingly for the British writer’s sales figures, through the eyes of a new breed of American thriller writers. (Ironically perhaps, British thriller readers who liked their fictional thrills in foreign locations were introduced to American thriller writers through airport bookshops whilst waiting for their holiday flights.) Both Graham Greene and Eric Ambler continued to offer foreign backdrops with customary professionalism and fluency; Greene setting The Honorary Consul (1973) in South America and Ambler again used the troubled Middle East for The Levanter, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 1972. There was little sign, initially, that the two leading lights of the adventure thriller were running out of steam. Hammond Innes had been a published author since 1937 and Alistair MacLean since 1955, and neither seemed to have run out of new locations for their books. MacLean donned his fur-lined parka once more and took us to the Barents Sea north of Norway and to Bear Island in 1971 and then switched to the sunny, though not safer, west coast of America for The Golden Gate Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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