by Mike Ripley
Deighton was clearly at home in Berlin and it was to be a happy hunting ground for him – if not his characters – in the following decade.
For Adam Hall’s finely-tuned secret agent Quiller, who made his debut in The Berlin Memorandum (retitled The Quiller Memorandum when the film came out), the city was a very dangerous place, from its wintry streets, smoky bars, and seedy hotels and cafes to its lock-up garages (especially its lock-up garages!). Almost as soon as the super-tough Quiller arrives in Berlin to hunt neo-Nazis, he finds himself being hunted, on foot and by car. At one point he decides to give his pursuers a run for their money indulging, as Quiller himself puts it, in ‘a bit of healthy-schoolboy action’.
Slush was coming on to the windscreen and the wipers knocked it away. We made a straight run through Steglitz and Sudende because I wanted to know if they’d now make any attempt to close up and ram. They didn’t. They just wanted to know where I was going. I’d have to think of somewhere. Their sidelamps were steady in the mirror, a pair of pale fireflies floating along the perspective of the streets. We crossed the Attila-strasse and I made a dive into Ring-strasse going south-east, then braked to bring them right up behind me and make them slow. As soon as they had I whipped through the gears and increased the gap to half a block before swinging sharp left into the Mariendorfdamm and heading north-east towards Tempelhof. Then a series of dives through back streets that got them going in earnest. The speeds were high now and I had the advantage because I could go where I liked, whereas they had to think out my moves before I made them, and couldn’t, because I didn’t know them myself until the last second.
Clearly, in those far-off days before cars had sat navs, Quiller was the man to have behind the wheel when being tailed by the bad guys in Berlin.
It could be a pretty hostile place even if you were a Soviet double-agent trying to escape from the Western half to find sanctuary in the East, a clever inversion of the usual plot-line but exactly the scenario facing the character Alexander Eberlin in Derek Marlowe’s A Dandy in Aspic.
Eberlin got out with the other few tourists and curiosity seekers, and stood on the platform a moment taking stock. The blue-coated railway guards checked the compartments, and glancing up Eberlin could see, framed high on the metal catwalks of the roof, the silhouettes of two Vopos, immobile, machine guns resting on their hips. He had known of an East German youth who had tried to escape by clutching onto the roof of a train, and of another who had hid in the engine of a locomotive. Both had died on the journey. One shot from above, here, the other, untouched, unnoticed by the Vopos, entering the safety of the west as a charred, burnt-out body. But that was of no consequence to Eberlin. His journey was the other way, crossing the Wall as a mere tourist. A simple procedure.
By 1966 when A Dandy in Aspic was published and 1968 when the film came out14 there would have been thousands of British thriller-readers who knew, quite confidently, that Eberlin’s journey would be far from simple. Fans of spy fiction, even those who had never been to Germany, knew all about Vopos, checkpoints, Tempelhof, ‘death strips’ around the Wall and the Ku-damm. They were well aware that everyone reading a newspaper on the street was a spy and every tobacconist’s kiosk was a dead letter drop.
There were many spy films in that peak period around 1966 and there would be many more thrillers set in Berlin both contemporary and historical, in the years to follow, but those four novels in quick succession by Le Carré, Deighton, Hall and Marlowe – all distinctively different in style – firmly established Berlin as the spy capital of the thriller world. Berlin’s reputation as a sort of espionage Camelot, where anything could happen and probably did, lasted until November 1989 when the Cold War began to thaw rapidly by popular demand with hardly a spy or a secret agent in sight.
1970s
As the 1970s dawned, it seemed that British thriller writers, albeit with some new faces joining the ranks of the bestselling, would continue to offer more of the same when it came to using foreign locations. For the writer of detective stories, particularly ‘police procedurals’, a familiar British (usually English) setting was thought necessary for realism. There were, back then, very few crime novels set abroad featuring local policemen, available either in translation or, daringly, written by British authors with specific knowledge of the country featured.15
For the thriller writer, however, ‘abroad’ still meant ‘exciting’, even though British readers were availing themselves of cheap travel abroad and seeing more of the world via television and, more worryingly for the British writer’s sales figures, through the eyes of a new breed of American thriller writers. (Ironically perhaps, British thriller readers who liked their fictional thrills in foreign locations were introduced to American thriller writers through airport bookshops whilst waiting for their holiday flights.)
Both Graham Greene and Eric Ambler continued to offer foreign backdrops with customary professionalism and fluency; Greene setting The Honorary Consul (1973) in South America and Ambler again used the troubled Middle East for The Levanter, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 1972.16
There was little sign, initially, that the two leading lights of the adventure thriller were running out of steam. Hammond Innes had been a published author since 1937 and Alistair MacLean since 1955, and neither seemed to have run out of new locations for their books.
MacLean donned his fur-lined parka once more and took us to the Barents Sea north of Norway and to Bear Island in 1971 and then switched to the sunny, though not safer, west coast of America for The Golden Gate (1976) and Goodbye California (1977). When Hammond Innes put his name to a non-fiction guidebook – Hammond Innes Introduces Australia – in 1971, fans knew what was coming and it did, when Golden Soak appeared in 1973. Innes was to stay in the Southern Hemisphere but switched continents to Africa for The Big Footprints in 1977.
With an apprenticeship of a couple of dozen adventure and spy thrillers behind him, but with his break-through book The Eagle Has Landed yet to come, the prolific Jack Higgins chose a Revolutionary Mexico setting for The Wrath of God (which was filmed starring Robert Mitchum) and then modern-day Libya for two thrillers in quick succession: The Khufra Run (1973) and The Run to Morning (re-titled Bloody Passage) in 1974. All three were published under the pen-name James Graham.17
The Levanter, Fontana, 1973
One spectacularly successful newcomer, who was to be elected chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association within six years, was Duncan Kyle with his debut A Cage of Ice in 1970 which proved that thriller fans had not lost their taste for bleak Arctic settings, and that Kyle could do them as well as Alistair MacLean. Duncan Kyle was to have more success with another icy setting, Greenland, in Whiteout! in 1976, but he was to spread his net with historical novels, wartime thrillers, spy, and adventure thrillers set in Sweden, the Shetlands, Canada, and, with Green River High in 1979, the jungles of Borneo.
Another newcomer, this time more in the school of Gavin Lyall rather than MacLean or Bagley, was Owen Sela whose The Bearer Plot in 1972 was a veritable Baedeker Guide to Central Europe (naturally including Berlin) and in The Portuguese Fragment (1973), the reader is treated to a whistle-stop treasure hunt from Spain to Morocco and then, via Geneva and Dubai, to Ceylon.
The Bearer Plot, Coronet, 1974
The Mandarin Cypher, Fontana, 1979
Adam Hall’s Quiller – the agent who worked for ‘the Bureau’ in London but who always operated alone and often as far away as possible – was never a tourist. In the Seventies, his solo and seemingly suicidal missions took him to Poland, the Sahara, Hong Kong and China; the locations tantalisingly trailed in titles such as The Warsaw Document, The Mandarin Cypher and The Sinkiang Executive.
But the adventure thriller was giving way to other sorts of thrillers, where conspiracies, often in a historical context, were more important than an exotic setting (though that sometimes helped). Even the spy-writers seemed content to stay nearer home – hunting moles perhaps – as p
ersonified by the flamboyantly named Marcus Aurelius Farrow, created by Angus Ross in a series of eighteen thick-eared spy thrillers from 1970 to 1990. Despite his name, Farrow is possibly the most unspectacular secret agent in spy fiction: he enjoys caravan holidays (in Cheshire), wears blazers, and smokes a pipe. As any enemy agent could obviously identify him as English from a mile away, his early missions were restricted to the UK, the north of England becoming a hot-bed of counter-espionage with titles such as The Manchester Thing, The Huddersfield Job, The Bradford Business and The Darlington Jaunt. On rare occasions, Farrow did venture abroad into Europe and was particularly impressed, in The Ampurias Exchange (1976), with two aspects of Spanish life: ‘Vandalism is rare in Spain. Youth is kept under control’.
The appeal of travelling to exotic locations vicariously through thrillers had certainly waned by the end of the Seventies, partly because readers were now more blasé about foreign travel and partly because thriller-writers were offering more variants to their plots and no longer opting for contemporary settings – two of the most successful thrillers of the Seventies, Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal and Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed were set respectively in 1963 and 1943. (The next novels by both authors – The Odessa File and Storm Warning were also ‘historical’ thrillers.) Even Alistair MacLean turned the clock back for his Western thriller Breakheart Pass, set in 1873.
For some authors, the exotic location was a particular trademark and writers such as Hammond Innes and Desmond Bagley took great pains to travel to and research foreign settings. For others, even those who had travelled widely, it was not a critical element of their craft. Francis Clifford, who had lived, worked and served as a soldier in the Far East and Burma, much preferred to write his thrillers – with settings ranging from Spain and East Germany to Guatemala and Paraguay – in the comfort of his Surrey home. In a magazine interview in 1974, he said: ‘I’m not a location man. You don’t have to know a place intimately to set a novel in it. It’s the characters, the situation, the story-line that matter – not the backdrop.’18
The most curious, some would say curmudgeonly, attitude by a writer was displayed by Alistair MacLean of all people. In 1981, in an article for the Glasgow Herald, he acknowledged that one of the great benefits of being a (very) successful author was ‘the freedom of travel’ but qualified this by writing:
I do not travel to broaden the mind or for the purposes of research. True, I have been to and written about the Arctic, the Aegean, Indonesia, Alaska, California, Yugoslavia, Holland, Brazil and diverse other places, but I never thought of writing about these locales until I had been there: on the obverse side of the coin, I have been to such disparate countries as Mexico and China, Peru and Kashmir, and very much doubt whether I shall write about them.
It seems a rather blasé thing to say for a writer who had taken his loyal fans from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, from San Francisco to somewhere just south of Java, who had himself lived in Scotland, England, Switzerland and Yugoslavia, and who had set only two of his twenty-seven novels in the UK.19
Travel may not have broadened MacLean’s mind, but the travels and adventures of his characters certainly widened the horizons of his readers.
Chapter 7:
CLASS OF ’62
Film director Terence Young called it ‘The Right Year’.
The director of Dr. No was referring to the timing of the first Bond film, which introduced Sean Connery as arguably the best cinematic 007. Shooting had begun in January 1962 but, five years on, Terence Young was still talking about the release of the film, which premiered on 5 October. It was, he said, ‘the most perfectly timed film ever made … I think we arrived [in] not only the right year, but the right week of the right month of the right year.’1
It was certainly an eventful year. It had seen regular, almost monthly, nuclear tests carried out by both the USA and the USSR; an iconic Cold War ‘spy swap’ as Gary Powers was exchanged for Rudolf Abel; American astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter orbiting the Earth; the first – but not the last – American military mission entered Viet Nam and there were also shooting wars on the Chinese/Indian border, in Indonesia and in Algeria; the first nuclear-warhead missiles were fired from a Polaris submarine; the Telstar communications satellite was launched (and became the inspiration for a hit record); and Nelson Mandela was arrested by the South African police.
For Britain, the year began with the Beatles failing an audition for a major record label, but ended with their first hit single Love Me Do; had seen the launch of a new family car, the Ford Cortina which retailed at £573; the debuts on television of both a gritty new police series called Z-Cars and Roger Moore as The Saint; an irreverent and controversial programme, That Was the Week That Was, becoming the standard bearer for the growing trend of satire and the debunking of ‘the Establishment’ following on from the launch of Private Eye in late 1961; independence had been granted to Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uganda; the Sunday Times had launched the first newspaper colour magazine (containing the James Bond story The Living Daylights); Embassy cigarettes and cheese-and-onion flavour crisps appeared in the shops; and the year closed with the announcement that Britain and France were to co-operate on the building of a supersonic aircraft called a Concorde, and the release, in time for the next Oscars, of David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia.
A busy year all round, but it was, as Terence Young identified, October which was the crucial month – in so many ways.
It was the month when the Cold War seemed likely to turn white hot, once American President John F. Kennedy, on 16 October, was informed that Russian ballistic missiles were being deployed on Cuba, some 90 miles from the Florida coastline. Kennedy imposed a US naval blockade of Cuba and the world watched the first televised diplomatic eyeball-to-eyeball stand-off between two superpowers with bated breath, waiting to see who would blink first.
World peace at stake, spies and secret agents (one assumed) working overtime, malevolent foreigners with their fingers on space-age weapons, mysterious tropical islands in the Caribbean … who could believe such an outlandish scenario? Well, anyone who had seen Dr. No, actually.
Ian Fleming’s sixth Bond novel, published in 1958,2 was the first to make it into the cinema, following the protracted legal disputes which surrounded Thunderball, the originally proposed vehicle for Bond’s big screen debut. Dr. No the novel had caused quite a stir on publication, attracting mixed reviews – Anthony Price3 in the Oxford Mail feeling that as a villain Dr No belonged to the era of Bulldog Drummond, although Fu Manchu might have been more accurate – and a vitriolic attack by Paul Johnson in the New Statesman under the title ‘Sex, Snobbery and Sadism’ which is still quoted to this day.
The film, with its modest-budget production (an estimated $1.1 million) compared to the epic Lawrence of Arabia ($15 million), was more favourably received by the critics. In the Sunday Times Dilys Powell wrote that ‘it has the air of knowing exactly what it is up to … all good and, I am glad to say, not quite clean fun’ and Variety thought it ‘an entertaining piece of tongue-in-cheek action hokum. Sean Connery excellently puts over a cool, fearless, on-the-ball, fictional Secret Service guy.’ When it was released in America the following May, the New York Times said that ‘this playful British film’ was not designed ‘to be taken seriously as realistic fiction or even art, any more than the works of Mr Fleming are to be taken as long-haired literature. It is strictly a tinseled action-thriller, spiked with a mystery of a sort. And, if you are clever, you will see it as a spoof of science-fiction and sex.’
Dr. No, Pan, 1962
From Russia, with Love, Panther, 1981
It was certainly enough of a hit with the cinema-going public for studio United Artists to give the go-ahead, with double the budget, to producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman for a second Bond film, From Russia with Love. After several false starts, not to mention litigation, it seemed that Ian Fleming’s dream of a long-running series of Bond films wa
s finally coming to pass, and it was a dream shared by producer Saltzman.4
If Bond on the screen was off to a flying start, Bond on the page was taking something of a rare stumble. After the success of Thunderball (which was still to appear in paperback with its iconic ‘bullet holes’ cover), the new Bond novel for 1962 was The Spy Who Loved Me. Even the author, in a letter to a close friend, said ‘the new Bond is very odd’, written as it was in the first person from the point of view of a young woman who has to be rescued from brutal gangsters (‘straight from central casting’ as one critic said) in the Canadian backwoods by the late-entry into the story of James Bond. Vivienne Michel – the ‘Me’ of the title – is, of course, suitably grateful. Perhaps, through Fleming’s eyes, far too ‘grateful’ for when Miss Michel finally succumbs to Bond’s charms, ‘she’ writes:
All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful.
That passage alone caused a stir among publishers, readers, and critics at the time – it still does. The book was not accepted as the noble experiment Fleming had envisaged, with one British magazine editor calling it ‘one of the worst, most boring, badly constructed novels we have read … the nastiest and most sadistic writing of our day’ and Fleming’s American publisher Viking complained, rather delicately, that it was ‘not quite top-grade Fleming’.5 Advance orders for the hardback were disappointing by Bond standards – 28,000 as opposed to 33,000 for the previous year’s Thunderball, despite Fleming having taken considerable trouble and expense over the design of the dust-jacket, painted by Richard Chopping.6 Readers too were not slow in showing their disappointment, writing to Fleming personally and their disapproval struck home. Fleming is said to have told his British publishers to abandon the schedule for the customary, if not by now automatic reprinting, and to cancel any plans for a paperback edition, hoping, presumably, that this radical departure from the Bond formula would soon be forgotten. (Although the publication of cheaper, hard-cover book club editions did go ahead.)