Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  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 Carré, 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 café 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 boo
ks 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 thriller4, 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:

  END OF EMPIRE

  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 Pink1 – 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)2 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.3 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) Ri
chard 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.’4

  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.