by Otto Penzler
From his mother, the daughter of an architect and the granddaughter of a judge who was also an accomplished painter, he derived the cultural heritage of the English upper middle class, together with something else: an abstract notion of what was fair and what was unfair. It is a notion which is unfashionable in the materialistic win-at-any-price atmosphere of today. But curious that it should be sneered at when one considers the state in which the world now finds itself.
A Spanish temper and an English sense of equity. Such dangerous opposites were capable, from time to time, of combining into an explosive mixture capable of blowing Patrick Petrella clean out of the carefully regulated ranks of the Metropolitan Police.
At the moment of writing he is a detective chief inspector, in charge of one of the three stations in a rowdy but colorful South London Division.
His position dictates both the types of wrongdoing he will encounter and the general method of their solution. (Incidentally, it also overcomes an initial difficulty. A purely amateur detective who is also a series character has somehow to account plausibly for the extraordinary sequence of crimes with which he becomes involved. If a corpse is found in the library every time he happens to visit a country house, people will soon stop asking him down for the weekend.)
To a member of the C.I.D. crime is his daily portion. It will certainly not be an undiluted diet of murder. The crimes which come his way will cover innumerable variations on the general themes of theft and violence, of arson, blackmail, intimidation, forgery and fraud.
For the most part such crimes will be solved by the well-tried methods of the police. The asking of questions; the taking of statements; the analysis of physical evidence; the use of the Criminal Record Office, the Fingerprint Bank, and the Forensic Science Laboratory. It is routine stuff for the most part, more perspiration than inspiration, but maybe none the less intriguing for that.
Petrella has the good fortune to belong, at a particular stage in its development, to what is, without question, the finest police force in the world. Whether he will rise any higher in it depends in part on his own efforts, in part on whether he can get along without unduly upsetting the top brass, and in part on a number of imponderables about which it is pointless to conjecture.
I can only wish him well.
Superintendent Pibble
Peter Dickinson
IT WAS SURELY AS happy a circumstance for the criminal element of London as it was melancholy for Scotland Yard when Superintendent Pibble was forced to retire in 1970. Although not without a dossier of unsolved cases, Pibble was a dogged and generally successful policeman, especially if one considers the difficult and thankless investigations with which he somehow managed to saddle himself. The loss of his crafty mind and determined energy in solving exotic crimes was a blow to readers, too. For Pibble’s exploits are set down in but five books, in the last two of which he is already retired but nonetheless rendering invaluable service.
Peter Dickinson almost resumed writing about Pibble in 1976, after an abstinence of several years. “But,” says Dickinson, “Pibble’s getting on, you see. I’d have to check, but I think he’s sixty-four. I can’t say definitely that I shan’t write about him again, but if I had to bet on it, I would say it wasn’t likely.”
It is disappointing to think that we may hear no more of the rather ordinary fellow who has enjoyed so much success as a detective, both in his own profession and in print. (The first two adventures of the already-aging Pibble, The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest and The Old English Peep Show, won the Gold Dagger Award for best novel, presented by the British Crime Writers’ Association in 1968 and 1969.) Born in Zambia, educated in England, Peter Dickinson was for seventeen years an editor of Punch. At 50, acclaimed for his children’s stories as well as his mysteries, he lives with his family in London.
Superintendent Pibble
by Peter Dickinson
PIBBLE, JAMES WILLOUGHBY. B. 1915. Educated Clapham Academy and Hendon Police College. Joined Metropolitan Police Force 1933. Served with Hammersmith Division until outbreak of war. War Service in Intelligence. Reached rank of Major. Returned to Metropolitan Police 1946, Vice Squad, New Scotland Yard. Chief Prosecution Witness in Smith Machine case, 1948, in which Chief Superintendent Richard Foyle was convicted on corruption charges. Retired as Detective Superintendent 1970.
MC WRITES: I worked with Jimmy Pibble for three years in the late sixties. In some ways I’d have liked to stay with him longer, but in other ways it was a bit of a relief when he had to “retire” after the Francis Francis affair in 1970. He was a copper’s copper all right, and a cracking good one, but there wasn’t much chance of early promotion if I hitched myself on to Jimmy too firmly. From the point of view of an ambitious sergeant, he was a walking dead end. He always got himself landed with the wrong jobs, the ones that were likely to turn out messy if they went wrong but where there wasn’t much by way of kudos if they went right. Like a lot of us he’d really have been happier working in a much smaller machine.
I don’t know much about his early career. His father had been a lab assistant to Francis Francis at the Cavendish Laboratory before the First World War, and I gather had done a lot of the work building the gadgets with which FF won his first Nobel Prize. Jimmy Pibble was born while his dad was in the trenches—invalided out, gassed, in 1917. Pibble Senior never went back to lab work, but worked for Southern Railways until his death in the mid-twenties. Jimmy’s early life was spent in Clapham. His mother had been something of a beauty, but later became a stalwart of a body called the Revised Chapter of Saints. Jimmy himself was never very religious when I knew him.
His war service was much less romantic than it looks, mainly concerned with the investigation of enemy alien internees prior to their release. At some point during the war he met his wife, Mary, socially a cut or two above him, I think. Though unfailingly loyal, he often gave the impression that life with her was a strain, though on the few occasions I met her I found her a lovely lady, very intelligent and sprightly.
To my mind the turning point of Jimmy’s career came, not as some of his friends will tell you with the Herryngs scandal, but with a funny little case in the Shepherds Bush area of London about a year earlier. This happened on the fringes of the great Furlough case in which Jimmy’s friend Ned Rickard was killed, but typically Jimmy didn’t get any of the credit for providing the piece of gen which enabled us to bust the Furlough gang. Instead he finished up with a complicated little affair involving a weird New Guinea tribe and, in the end, two corpses. I had flu at the time and so only heard about it all fifth hand. Jimmy wouldn’t tell me a thing. He was very shaken up about Rickard, but I have always thought he knew exactly what had happened and for some reason wasn’t letting on.
The big schemozzle came with the case at Herryngs, in which the Clavering Brothers, heroes of the St. Quentin Raid, both managed to get killed. Jimmy too was almost for it once or twice, but he sorted it out in the end. You would have thought no one could ask for better publicity than that, but of course it didn’t come Jimmy’s way. Instead A. N. Other was sent barging in when it was all over, picked up all the medals and at the same time managed to make it seem as though Jimmy had caused the whole mess.
After that he only had to put a foot wrong and he’d be for it. And being Jimmy, he did. I’ve met one or two of his friends who say that but for him Sir Francis Francis would have been a dead man seven years ago, instead of all of us sitting round waiting to toast the old villain’s hundredth birthday, and from what I know of Jimmy that’s probably right. He certainly exposed a pretty scary religious setup out on that Hebridean isle. But in the process—he was supposed to be on leave, but he overstayed it—he broke pretty well every rule in the book, and a lot of sacred cows came home to roost on him. So, from a police point of view, curtains for Jimmy.
Naturally after that I rather lost touch with him. He got, somehow, into the ambit of the shipping millionaire Athanasius Thanatos, and was even present at the assassin
ation attempt that so nearly succeeded on Hyos. Before that there’d been something about a rum little charity hospital in South East London. I didn’t hear much about that, but I rather gather that Jimmy managed to tread on a lot of toes at the time. If I know him, he finished up knowing quite a lot more about what had happened than went into the official reports.
What was he like? I don’t know why I say “was,” because he’s still going strong, last I heard. But it’s “was” as far as work is concerned.
Well, I’ve said he was a copper’s copper, and that’s almost true. He was very good at his paperwork, for instance. He had a darn quick memory, especially for faces and places. He had a nose, too—I don’t mean he was an intuitive copper—there wasn’t much of the Maigret about him—but he was especially good about which areas of a case to bear down on. He didn’t neglect the others, and he was damn quick to change his tack if something new cropped up to shed a fresh light on things; in fact the best part about working with him was that he had no vanity at all—he’d never impose his own view on a case because it was his. For himself, he was a worrier, but he was easygoing about other people. One or two of his colleagues put his back up for no reason that I could see, but on the whole practically everybody liked him.
So what went wrong? Was it just a case of his being unlucky, a sort of Jonah? No, I don’t think so. In fact, if you compared his record of cleared cases with those of some of the prima donnas I think you’d find he had a surprisingly good average. But there was something else. To my mind Jimmy lacked … I don’t know the right word … he had plenty of character in his quiet way. He had fiber, if that means sticking to your guns against odds. But he did allow himself to be done down. In a way he almost asked for it. I sometimes used to think that he got a weird satisfaction out of being bullied or used, as if he was continually needing to prove to himself that he was so dead honest and incorruptible that even when he was being cheated he wasn’t going to cheat back.
Come to think of it, that Foyle affair, back in the forties, must have been a bit of a shaker for a copper trying to settle back into business after the war. From all I hear Foyle was a pretty charismatic figure, and the Smith machine was quite as nasty as anything that we’ve come up with since. When something like that happens to you, when you’re actually in the middle of it, having to say, “Yes, my boss whom I thought was some kind of God turns out to have been a villain too, and I’m the only one who can prove it,” then you’re going to be a bit obsessive about honesty for the rest of your days.
It seems funny to be writing about him like this. I suppose I’m lucky to have begun with Jimmy, and not with Foyle. He taught me a lot, so good luck to him, wherever he is now.
PETER DICKINSON WRITES: That was Mike Crewe, Pibble’s missing sergeant in The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest. It seems funny to me, too, to be writing about old Pibble like this, as if he were real. I don’t think many writers—perhaps only the great ones—start with totally solid characters in their heads. Usually, with a major character, you have certain ideas about him/her which you embody in characteristics. Then you find yourself adding twiddly bits, sometimes for fun, sometimes for plot, judging what to say by a vague notion of “rightness” for that particular person. If your invention is of a piece you finish up with a real-seeming character. That’s how Pibble evolved. I simply wanted a detective who was not at all James Bondish, was unsexy, easily browbeaten, intelligent, fallible. Then he became real-seeming. That, I suppose, is why I stopped writing about him. You can’t go on creating somebody when he’s already created. Five books is a lot to live through. If he wasn’t solid by then he never would be.
Quiller
Adam Hall
MYSTERY, DETECTIVE, AND ESPIONAGE stories have changed a good deal since their initial popularity. The day of the eccentric genius, quietly solving puzzles from his armchair, has passed. No longer can Hercule Poirot point to his “little grey cells” as the ultimate crime-solving device. The technocrat, the faceless operative employed by a great corporation, institution, or government, is the new hero of mystery novels. The villain is no longer a simple murderer or thief but often another faceless operative, or his employer.
The quintessential corporate operator, the best-known and most professional of them all, is Quiller. In Quiller’s world events unfold with a chilling efficiency, as colorless as a corpse and as inexorable as death
Adam Hall is a pseudonym of Elleston Trevor, a prolific writer of novels, adventure tales, and espionage stories. The best known of his many books is The Quiller Memorandum, which introduced his distinguished agent. It won the coveted Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America, the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and was made into a memorable motion picture starring George Segal. The Quiller character served as the basis for a British television series in 1975.
Trevor, a former RAF pilot, began writing after his World War II service. The English-born author was described by Time magazine as “the most successful literary double agent now in the business.” The 57-year-old novelist and screenwriter lives in Fountain Hills, Arizona, with his wife, Jonquil Trevor.
Quiller
by Adam Hall
IN LONDON, THERE IS a Bureau, notable mainly for its lack of features. It doesn’t exist, officially, because it is empowered to do things that couldn’t be countenanced by any other government department. Nobody among the shadow executives of the Bureau has ever heard of the man who runs it; he is nameless. It is known only that he is directly responsible to the prime minister. No mission is ever set up by the Bureau at lower than prime minister level; if other departments like Scotland Yard, Special Branch, or M.I.5 could handle the operation, it wouldn’t be sent to the Bureau.
There have to be names for people at the Bureau so that they can be identified, but nobody on the staff has anything but a code name. Their real names are known only to the hierarchy (whoever the hierarchy may be) and their personal dossiers are held in files with autodestruct mechanisms, so that any attempt at unauthorized opening will result in the automatic obliteration of the material inside.
The work of the Bureau is not espionage, nor is it counterespionage, otherwise it would be done by D.I.6 and M.I.5, respectively. Sometimes a mission will overlap the work of these and other branches, but when it does it is because they’ve elected not to do it or because the operation is too sensitive, or too specialized, or too hazardous. In a less physical sense, the executives of the Bureau can be likened to the commandos of an army at war: dedicated men, self-committed to tasks that are more exacting than normal. There is no political aspect to a mission. An executive normally has a single simple job to do and he does it without consideration of the consequences.
One of these executives is Quiller. That, of course, is his code name; his real name is unknown.
About his past there are various rumors: that he was someone in the professional category of lawyer or doctor, denied his license; that he once served a prison term, undeservedly (hence his bitterness, which is never far below the skin); that he is a man on the run who has found a perfect cover in the Bureau.
In his forties, he is as fit as an alley cat and his whole makeup is tense, edgy and bitten-eared. Without the imagination to see that life is wide open to any man’s need for self-expression, Quiller seems to have to synthesize drama for himself, to invite danger and privation and bitter challenge so that his life can have significance. He needs to live close to the crunch. Like bullfighters and racing drivers, he is a professional neurotic, half in love with death.
Obviously antisocial, shy of people and human contact, he is wary of giving anything of himself to others. But, on rare occasions when the pressures of a mission have forced him into a position where he must consider other people—sometimes a deadly opponent—he reveals compassion, surprising himself.
His last will and testament is revealing: “Nothing of value, no dependents, next of kin unknown.” This nihilistic aspect of his character, his isolationis
m, suits perfectly the atmosphere of the Bureau, where anonymity and facelessness are virtues. If all the requirements of the Bureau were put through a computer to synthesize the ideal executive, they would result in Quiller.
Fiercely professional, he is contemptuous of the amateur and of people who refuse to take things to the limit before they give up. This critical attitude extends to the Bureau itself. Like many a competent ship’s officer with ambition and talent, he thinks he could run things better than the skipper. As a mission heats up, he begins to curse “London” for what they’re doing to him. Still, he respects the Bureau and its hierarchy. In talking of the executive-Bureau relationship, he says, “Sometimes I suppose we’d get the hell out of this trade if it wasn’t for the bruised, lopsided sense of loyalty to the Bureau that’s always there in front of us like a scarecrow wherever we go.” At other times, other thoughts come to his mind: “Those bloody people in London won’t ever give you a break. They’d grind a blind dog into the ground; they’ll drive you till you drop and then step on your face.”
Quiller has completed thirty-five missions—a tribute to his professionalism in a trade where life is cheap. He doesn’t drink because it would affect his reaction time, and for the same reason he doesn’t smoke. He refuses to carry a gun. Ever. He puts his reasons this way: “If a man has to carry a gun it means he’s got no better resources. A gun can be more dangerous to you than to the other man, if you carry one. It gives you a false feeling of power, superiority, and you get the fatal idea that, with this thing in your hand, you don’t have to make any effort because the conflict’s already been won. And for Christ’s sake watch it if you find you’ve left the safety catch on or forgot to load or there’s a dud in the clip or the other man gets time to kick the thing out of your hand—then you’ve really had it. Better to use your brain because your brain won’t stop working for you till you’re dead. Guns are for amateurs, and anyway … I don’t like the bang they make.”