by Mike Ripley
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 spy thriller, albeit featuring a hero who did little actual spying and who acted more as a secret policeman,7 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 Carré, 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:
THE LAND BEFORE BOND
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.1
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).2 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.3
Unlike the grey and shady worlds created before the war by those masters of the more ‘realistic’ spy novel, Graham Gr
eene 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.4
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.5 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.6 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 world7 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 fiction8 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.9
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.