Blue Noon
Page 29
Odile studied the handwriting for a long time. As the wintry sun dipped low in the sky, she couldn’t move and she began to shiver uncontrollably. She could not decide whether the letter was an A whose apex had failed to meet or a hastily scribbled H.
Author’s Note
THE BACKGROUND TO THE Blue Noon is based on real events. Harry Cole, Claude Dansey, Colonel Triffe, Kim Philby, Malcolm Muggeridge, Airey/Anthony Neave and Pat O’Leary are genuine historical characters, even if their actions here deviate from reality in places. Dansey’s Z Organisation, Room 900, and Operation Sherwood all existed. Harry’s improvisation with a melted chocolate bar, his burglary of apartments, his time with the US army, the two airmen singing with the Waffen-SS and Neave’s rescue of Chartres cathedral are also factual incidents. The Muggeridge/Philby episode outside the Soviet Embassy is described in the former’s autobiography. Other characters are fictitious or amalgamations of several people.
Claude Dansey, deputy head of wartime MI6, died in 1947, from heart failure.
Airey Neave, who really did use the name Anthony during the war years, later architect of Margaret Thatcher’s election victory, was blown up at the House of Commons by an INLA bomb in 1979. The relationship between him and Odile in this book is total fiction.
Suzanne Warren (the anglicised version of her real name, Warengham), the inspiration for the fictitious Odile and the woman who married Harry Cole and had his child, later married an American, living first in California, then in London.
Kim Philby defected to Russia in 1963; there is still much dispute over how many agents he betrayed in his career as a mole. He died in Moscow in 1988, shortly after a visit from Graham Greene, who remained a friend to the end.
Sergeant Harry Cole, trumpeter, swindler, con man, deserter, Resistance hero, resistance villain, really did sit down and write his side of events in the Paris Detention Centre before walking off into the night with the typewriter, and the document, under his arm, neither of which were ever found. The thought of what he might have written to justify the terrible deeds associated with him inspired this novel. As Harry would have, I have changed dates (including the boxing match at White Hart Lane, which took place earlier in the war), names and places, while keeping the arc of his journey from Hong Kong to Billy’s Bar (aka The Blue Noon) more or less intact.
It is, however, certain that the British Intelligence Services knew about Harry Cole’s dubious pre-war track record when he was working the escape lines: ‘We decided to give him a second chance’ was the rather glib reason given for not warning others. It is also true that doubts persist over whether he was, in fact, a double agent under British control for some of his time while he was helping the SS. There were even some who insisted that the man shot at Billy’s Bar was not Harold Cole at all, but part of an SIS cover-up.
My thanks go to film director Jack Bond, who first mentioned Harry to me. I am also grateful to David Miller and Martin Fletcher for seeing some spark of humanity in Harry, and for the latter’s brilliant work on the manuscript.
Thanks also to Guy Barker, Don Hawkins, Kim Hardie, Katie Haines, Christine Walker, Jonathan Futrell, Laurie Evans and Susan d’Arcy. Odile Triplet of the Columbus Hotel in Monaco kindly donated her name to the character.
I also owe a large debt of gratitude to Mark Seaman of the Imperial War Museum, who has done much research on the man’s career, uncovering his Hong Kong background, and who discussed Harry with me at length. This, however, is my (or rather, Harry’s own) interpretation of the story: Mark should not be in any way associated with my methods or flights of fancy.
There is also a diligently researched book called Turncoat by Brendan M. Murphy, now sadly out of print, which is a thorough investigation into the man he calls ‘the worst traitor of the war’. Murphy quotes Alfred Lanselle, one of those brave men who forwarded evaders to Cole in 1940, and who later ended up in Dachau, who said, ‘Harold Cole was not killed. It was staged by the Intelligence Service to get him out of the way, to bury the case.’ He was convinced Cole made it back to England.
Suzanne Warengham is the subject of In Trust and Treason by Gordon Young, which also tells the Cole story, or at least one version of it, in depth.
Other sources include Hong Kong Then by Brian Wilson; At The Peak by Paul Gillingham; Growing Up Poor in London by Louis Heren; The East End by Alan Palmer; The Quest for Graham Greene by W.J. West; Colonel Z by Anthony Read and David Fisher; Das Reich by Max Hastings; The Infernal Grove by Malcolm Muggeridge; War Games, The Story of Sport in WW2 by Tony McCarthy; MI9 by M.R.D. Foot and J.M. Langley; The Man The Nazis Couldn’t Catch by John Laffin; Airey Neave’s They Have Their Exits, Saturday at MI9, Little Cyclones, and Flames of Calais, plus Paul Routledge’s very readable biography of the man, Public Servant, Secret Agent; MI6 by Stephen Dorril; The Private Life of Kim Philby by Rufina Philby; Philby: The Hidden Years by Morris Riley; Anthony Blunt by Miranda Carter; Soldiers, Spies and the Rat Line by Col. James V. Milano and Patrick Brogan; An Uncertain Hour by Ted Morgan (a good source of information on Klaus Barbie); Paris After the Liberation by Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper; and Few Eggs and No Oranges, the war diaries of Vere Hodgson, 1940–45.
The whisky scene was inspired by an incident involving Harry and Nancy Wake. However, the character of Lucy Hodge is a fiction.
Harry’s files were originally sealed until 2010, but, as part of a policy of more open access, the Public Record Office at Kew released three files on Harry Cole, KV2/415, KV2/416 and KV2/417 in 2001. The SIS files, of course, remained sealed.
Robert Ryan
London
About the Author
Robert Ryan was born in Liverpool and has worked as a race car mechanic, journalist, jazz composer, university lecturer, and more. He has written many novels, including Early One Morning, a Sunday Times (UK) bestseller. He lives in North London with his wife, three children, a dog, and a deaf cat.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Robert Ryan
Cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4804-7760-5
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