by Mike Ripley
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’9 – 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 1967,10 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.11 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 Sandbostel12 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:
TINKERS, TAILORS, SOLDIERS, SPIES. BUT MOSTLY JOURNALISTS.
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 adventure1 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.2 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 o
r 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 risqué, 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 Carré were on the syllabus.
For male readers of all ages, Fleming, Deighton, Le Carré, 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,3 they had to appear plausible.