by Mike Ripley
Those early Jenkins novels were ‘Adventures’ with a capital ‘A’, the characters being explorers into strange and dangerous environments rather than soldiers or secret agents on a mission. Jenkins spiced his stories with the latest scientific discoveries as well as traditional explorer’s folklore as it surrounded the bizarre landscapes (and seascapes) he described. It was perfectly possible in a Jenkins novel to find the wreck of a top secret Nazi U-boat, a fifteenth-century Portuguese sailing ship stranded in the middle of a desert, blind scarab beetles, a mysterious island seen only twice in a hundred years, the meteorological phenomenon of ‘two suns’, strandlopers – rather unpleasant seashore hyenas, very big and very deadly composite jelly fish (imagine a long string of Portuguese man-of-wars joined together to increase their voltage), and, even, in the Indian Ocean, a giant ‘Devil Fish’ – a manta ray large enough to attack a submarine.
His 1964 novel The River of Diamonds had all his trademark ingredients and then some. This updated pirate tale set on the desolate Sperrgebiet coast of modern-day Namibia, centres on an expedition to mine diamonds from the sea-bed where they were deposited by a prehistoric river – or is that merely a cover to find the hidden treasure, diamonds again, of Heinrich Göring (Hermann’s father) the colonial governor when Namibia was an Imperial German protectorate? As the Daily Telegraph reviewer noted, there are also ‘killer deserts, grizzled prospectors, mass (animal) suicides, savage nomads and a vanished U-boat patrol’ to which could be added some powerful and very deadly natural phenomenon, quicksands, oxygen-less sea, and an attack by Russian torpedo boats. The American magazine Kirkus Reviews called it ‘Good Hollywood’.10
The River of Diamonds, Fontana, 1966
If there had been a prize for the most convoluted journey taken by a hero in an adventure thriller published in 1962, then A Captive in the Land by James Aldridge would surely have been in the running. The story opens with the rather uptight British meteorologist hero Rupert Royce on a flight back from the Canadian Arctic when a crashed Russian plane, with a stranded sole survivor, is spotted on the ice below them. Royce hastily grabs some survival gear and parachutes down to the ice whilst his plane goes off to get help, but then it too crashes, leaving Royce and a badly-injured Russian pilot stranded, 300 miles from the US base at Thule in Greenland. After months of hardship surviving the weather and fighting off polar bears waiting for a rescue that isn’t coming, Royce decides to walk off the ice, grimly dragging the injured Russian with him. Amazingly they survive the gruelling trek and are eventually rescued by Eskimo seal-hunters. Royce returns to England to find himself – embarrassingly – a hero of the Soviet Union and after some rather tedious soul-searching, agrees to accept the offer of Russian hospitality and embarks with his family on a journey to Leningrad, then Moscow, then down to the Crimea where he has expressed a desire to scuba-dive in the Black Sea on the archaeological ruins of the Ancient Greek settlement of Phanagoria.11 With his status as a Soviet Hero and seemingly unlimited access to Russia, Royce has naturally been recruited by British Naval Intelligence to do a bit of spying whilst there, but his heart isn’t in it and in the end he throws away unused his fountain-pen full of invisible ink!
It seemed that James Aldridge, a respected war correspondent in WWII and author of numerous novels, children’s books and non-fiction, started A Captive in the Land as an adventure story. He toyed with the idea of a spy novel, and then almost moved into a man-alone-in-a-foreign-land thriller, but somewhere along the line, in a very long book, lost any sense of making it thrilling. Even the sub-texts of his hero’s Russian love affair and his sympathetic observations of day-to-day Russian life, about which little was known in the West, fail to generate much excitement or suspense and absolutely no tension (the dramatic highlight is when Royce is robbed and his trousers stolen!). You can’t help thinking that an Alistair MacLean hero under the same circumstances would have managed to blow up the Soviet Black Sea Fleet in half the number of pages.
A Captive in the Land, whatever merits it may have had as a ‘straight’ or ‘literary’ novel, failed as a thriller because it simply wasn’t exciting enough and proved that unusual or unfamiliar locations were not in themselves a guarantee of success. To corrupt one of the favourite phrases of reviewers of the day, there was little blood and hardly any thunder (although there is a scene in a lightning storm over the Crimea) and the novel had, in Rupert Royce, a man of extensive private wealth, an unsympathetic, stubbornly unworldly, hero who acts on the pace of the narrative like a sea-anchor.
This was the Sixties and new sorts of hero were needed: confident guys who could survive on their wits in exotic and dangerous foreign environments and who knew about guy stuff, such as guns, aeroplanes and engines. In 1961, there was one such guy waiting, quite literally, in the wings.
I hadn’t been in Athens for at least three months and hadn’t reckoned on being there for another three months, but there I was standing breathing the good fresh petrol fumes of Elliniko Airport and waiting for the starboard engine to get cool enough for me to start an appendectomy on its magneto.
Thus did Gavin Lyall introduce the first of his buccaneering heroes, freelance pilot Jack Clay, in his debut novel The Wrong Side of the Sky and we soon, from Clay’s rather cynical perspective, get a view of the overnight accommodation provided for air cargo personnel in the parts of Athens tourists were probably wise to avoid:
We got a couple of rooms in a small hotel just off Omonia Square … The sheets were patched, the windows gave a good view of the vegetable shop across the street and the doors were the sort that any policeman could knock down with a good sneeze – and probably had. But the place was a lot cleaner than a lot of hotels around there, and it cost us five whole drachmas a night more than the neighbourhood rate.
Here was a hero, British to be sure, but blessed with Raymond Chandler-sharp dialogue, who not only had an interesting way of making a (mostly) legal living, flying cargo planes around the Mediterranean, but who also fitted into the foreign setting with streetwise ease. Here was a first-person narrator who was not lecturing the reader, just telling it as he had experienced it, and so when the hero finds himself in danger – as of course he does – the reader is confident he will get out of that particular scrape by virtue of his wits alone.
In 1964, Lyall repeated his winning formula with an even more suspenseful plot and a setting well off the (then) tourist track: Lapland and northern Finland. The resourceful hero was again a pilot-for-hire, this time called Bill Cary, and at the opening of The Most Dangerous Game he tells the reader:
They were ripping up Rovaniemi airport, as they were almost every airport in Finland that summer, into big piles of rock and sandy soil. It was all part of some grand rebuilding design ready for the day when they had enough tourist traffic to justify putting the jets on to the internal air routes. In the meantime, it was just turning perfectly good airports into sand-pits.
Lyall’s early adventurers may have had military experience and certainly had some special, though not outlandish, skills in that they could drive expertly and could usually pilot an aircraft. They were not masters of disguise, almost certainly not versed in any martial art and relied on gadgets and secret equipment only to the extent that they knew how to use a spanner on a recalcitrant engine. They were the sort of guys other guys wouldn’t mind standing at a bar with, especially if those bars were abroad because Lyall’s heroes fitted in whether in Greece, Finland, France or the Caribbean, and would drink and eat what a regular guy would.
Fictional spies, of course, were on expenses when abroad and usually travelled first class, especially if they belonged to the Bond school of spy-fantasy. They tended to stay in five-star hotels, had limousines and drivers to meet them at the airport, drank the finest alcohol, ate in the finest restaurants – and could not resist giving the reader pointers on the art of foreign travel with style.
The Most Dangerous Game, Pan, 1966
James Bond was the first jet set secret agent
– his early appearances in print coinciding with the establishment of commercial jet airline travel – and had seemed happiest when operating abroad. His missions had taken him to America, the Caribbean, Turkey, France, Switzerland and even Japan, with only one of his adventures – Moonraker – being set on home soil. The many candidates to replace Bond in the nation’s affections were just as keen to add to the collection of stamps and visas in their well-worn passports.
One of the leading pretenders to Bond’s throne was the extraordinary Dr Jason Love, who apart from being a country doctor in general practice, was skilled in martial arts and an authority on vintage cars – and he was always willing to help out British Intelligence at a moment’s notice, whenever or wherever needed. Created by James Leasor, Dr Love’s first outing was in Passport to Oblivion in 1964 and the action spread from Tehran and Rome to the wilds of northern Canada.12 Further novels, usually with ‘passport’ in the title offering the prospect of foreign locales, followed with settings from Switzerland to the Himalayas, and the Bahamas to Damascus.
Hot on the heels of Dr Jason Love, 1964 also saw the arrival of Charles Hood, created by James Mayo, who was a clone of James Bond in in his love of the high-life but differed intellectually in that he was a connoisseur of, and dealer in, fine art. With such a day job, or perhaps cover story to maintain, it is of course necessary for Hood to spend quite a bit of time hanging around art galleries in Paris, though he does find time for excursions to the Windward Isles, Nicaragua and Iran in his 1968 adventure Once in a Lifetime, which was re-titled Sergeant Death when it appeared in paperback the following year.
Another 1964 alumnus of the academy of 007 substitutes was ‘barrister by profession, adventurer by choice’ Hugo Baron, created by John Michael Brett, who had a short fictional career working for an organisation known as DIECAST, which believed in violent means to achieve world peace and the elimination of espionage! Hugo Baron was clearly good at his job and duly found himself unemployed after three novels, though not before an adventurous jaunt to Egypt and Kenya in A Plague of Dragons in 1965.
Also making his debut in 1964 was John Craig, a distinctly working-class hero compared to most would-be Bond replacements. Created by James Munro (a pen-name of James Mitchell, who was to go on to invent the more famous David Callan) and appearing first in The Man Who Sold Death, Craig’s early adventures centred on the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Morocco but by The Innocent Bystanders in 1969 he was a paid-up member of the jet-set, zipping between New York, Miami, Turkey, and Cyprus.
Modesty Blaise, one of the few female not-so-secret agents created in the 1960s (or since) already had a cosmopolitan personal background when she first appeared in a newspaper comic strip in 1963 and then a series of novels (and one unlamented feature film) from 1965. Created by Peter O’Donnell, the independently wealthy Ms Blaise not only owns a villa in Tangiers but travels easily through Africa and the Middle East, and in Sabre-Tooth (1966) comes up against an army of terrorists training in Afghanistan in order to ferment revolt in Kuwait – a prescient, though twisted, mirror image of a very modern scenario.
Johnny Fedora, whose career timeline mirrored that of Bond, had already done his fair share of globe-trotting but by the 1960s, author Desmond Cory had settled him into a series of interwoven missions against his KGB nemesis based mostly in Spain.
Without doubt, though, the most popular foreign destination for British spies – though only the reader could be said to be the tourist – was Berlin.
A focal point of diplomatic tension between capitalist West and communist East since the 1940s, the isolated city of Berlin became the espionage hub of the Cold War when the ‘Anti-Fascist Protective Wall’ went up virtually overnight in 1961. A barrier dividing two opposing political systems, complete with armed guards, minefields, and checkpoints in the middle of a city already heavy with history and recent memories of a world war, it was a barrier that could only be crossed in secret ways and on pain of death, or in dramatic rituals of prisoner exchanges or spy ‘swaps’.
Walter Ulbricht, Head of State of East Germany, had created the ideal backdrop and sound stage for spy fiction and four bestselling novels in four years (1963–6) ensured that Berlin would become a film set as familiar to fans of spy stories as Monument Valley had been in the classic westerns of John Ford.
Although the bulk of the action takes place outside Berlin, the key opening and closing scenes of John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) take place around the Wall.
The tragic hero of the story, Alec Leamas, on his fateful mission into East Germany passes through one of the checkpoints in the Wall, under the watchful eyes of the ‘Vopos’ (Volkspolizei); the Mercedes he is riding in already being followed by a DKW.13 The crossing is suspiciously incident-free.
As they crossed the fifty yards which separated the two checkpoints, Leamas was dimly aware of the new fortifications on the eastern side of the wall – dragon’s teeth, observation towers and double aprons of barbed wire. Things had tightened up.
The Mercedes didn’t stop at the second checkpoint; the booms were already lifted and they drove straight through, the Vopos just watching them through binoculars. The DKW had disappeared, and when Leamas sighted it ten minutes later it was behind them again. They were driving fast now – Leamas had thought they would stop in East Berlin, change cars perhaps, and congratulate one another on a successful operation, but they drove on eastwards through the city.
Getting in to East Berlin might have been easy for Alec Leamas, but leaving it, along with the girl he is rescuing, forms the excruciatingly tense and ultimately doomed finale to the novel. Leamas and Liz, the girl, are forced down the only escape route open to them: going over the Wall in the middle of the night, at a place swept by a searchlight where the guards have orders to shoot on sight. The last briefing from their contact arranging the escape is suitably grim.
‘Drive at thirty kilometres,’ the man said. His voice was taut, frightened. ‘I’ll tell you the way. When we reach the place you must get out and run to the wall. The searchlight will be shining at the point where you must climb. Stand in the beam of the searchlight. When the beam moves away begin to climb. You will have ninety seconds to get over. You go first,’ he said to Leamas; ‘and the girl follows. There are iron rungs in the lower part – after that you must pull yourself up as best you can. You’ll have to sit on the top and pull the girl up. Do you understand?’
‘We understand,’ said Leamas. ‘How long have we got?’
‘If you drive at thirty kilometres we shall be there in about nine minutes. The searchlight will be on the wall at five past one exactly. They can give you ninety seconds. Not more.’
‘What happens after ninety seconds?’ Leamas asked.
‘They can only give you ninety seconds,’ the man repeated.
In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John Le Carré was brilliantly describing the bleak topography of Cold War espionage, not a particular city. It was left to Len Deighton to give us the spy’s-eye view as his anonymous hero (‘Harry Palmer’ in the films) arrives for a Funeral in Berlin in 1964.
The parade ground of Europe has always been that vast area of scrub and lonely villages that stretches eastward from the Elbe – some say as far as the Urals. But halfway between the Elbe and the Oder, sitting at attention upon Brandenburg, is Prussia’s major town – Berlin.
From two thousand feet the Soviet Army War Memorial in Treptower Park is the first thing you notice. It’s in the Russian sector. In a space like a dozen football pitches a cast of a Red Army soldier makes the Statue of Liberty look like it’s standing in a hole. Over Marx-Engels Platz the plane banked steeply south towards Tempelhof and the thin veins of water shone in the bright sunshine. The Spree flows through Berlin as a spilt pail of water flows through a building site. The river and its canals are lean and hungry and they slink furtively under roads that do not acknowledge them by even the smallest hump. Nowhere does a grand bridge and a wide flow
of water divide the city into two halves. Instead it is bricked-up buildings and sections of breeze block that bisect the city, ending suddenly and unpredictably like the lava flow of a cold-war Pompeii.
If there was ever a need for a tourist audio-guide to coming in to land at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport (in 1964, that is), then surely Harry Palmer’s is the streetwise voice one would like to hear through the headphones. Over half-way through negotiating a labyrinthine plot of double- and triple-cross, our laid-back and very observant narrator still has time to add flashes of local colour, proving to the reader, thirsty for detail, that Palmer (and Deighton) had been there and seen that.
Funeral in Berlin, Penguin, 1966
The Quiller Memorandum, Fontana, 1967
Oddly enough, Berlin is one of the most relaxed big cities of the world and people were smiling and making ponderous Teutonic jokes about soldiers and weather and bowels and soldiers; for Berlin is the only city still officially living under the martial command of foreign armies and if they can’t make jokes about foreign soldiers no one can. Just ahead of me four English girls were adding up their holiday expenses, and deciding whether the budget would let them have lunch in a restaurant or if it was to be a Bockwurst sausage from a kiosk on the Ku-damm and eat it in the park. Beyond them were two nurses, dressed in a grey conventual uniform which made them look like extras from All Quiet on the Western Front.