by Mike Ripley
The Spy Who Loved Me, Pan, 1967
This was a quite remarkable request for any author to make, then or indeed now and even more remarkably, his publisher seemed to go along with it, at least for a while, as the paperback edition of The Spy Who Loved Me did not appear until two years after Fleming’s death. Bond was, however, to bounce back with increased vigour in the following year with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and remarkable paperback sales generated by the blossoming film franchise.
In April 1962, Fleming wrote to his publishers, Michael Joseph, noting ruefully: ‘I had become increasingly surprised to find that my thrillers, which were designed for an adult audience, were being read in the schools.’
He was certainly right about that. Paperback editions of Bond books were in common, if covert, circulation in schools in the early Sixties, especially among teenage boys. So too were copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Fanny Hill and, also published in 1962, The Passion Flower Hotel, the naughty rather than erotic novel by ‘Rosalind Erskine’7 which was said to be equally popular among teenage girls.
Ian Fleming’s 1962 addition to the Bond canon may have fallen short of expectations – even his – but thriller fans were certainly not short of reading material that year. In fact, 1962 was certainly the ‘right’ year for a number of debutant thriller writers waiting (and writing) in the wings, and it was an outstanding year for several of the old masters. Hammond Innes, Francis Clifford, Desmond Cory and Victor Canning all had new novels out. Eric Ambler published possibly his most popular book (quickly made into a very popular film) and Alistair MacLean went one better than all of them to produce two outstanding thrillers, though only one was by Alistair MacLean …
Most authors, even highly successful ones, perhaps especially highly successful ones, have a love–hate relationship with their publisher. Becoming a published author can turn the most respectable, sane, mild-mannered human being into a paranoid egomaniac convinced that their books are not being printed in sufficient quantities, are inadequately promoted, and are marketed with dust-jackets or covers which a five-year-old with a set of crayons could have bettered. The publisher has to put up with the tantrums and unreasonable demands of this beast in author form, always conscious of the need to balance the books (for publishing is, after all, a business) whilst tip-toeing through the minefield of not offending the goose that lays the golden egg by having to suggest corrections to the goose’s plotting, characterisation and use of grammar.
By 1961, Alistair MacLean was the author of six international bestsellers, one of which, The Guns of Navarone, had earned him the title ‘successor to John Buchan’ and the enormously successful film version of it was to be released that year (as was the spy thriller The Secret Ways, based on his novel The Last Frontier). As a writer, MacLean had switched from a third-person to first-person narratives with his most recent thrillers, Night Without End and Fear Is the Key, and moved away from the World War II settings which had made his name.
Readers appear to have accepted, even approved of this seemingly smooth transition. In less than six years, Alistair MacLean had become a household name. Apart from huge sales in hardback and book club editions, his novels were now regularly appearing, and being rapidly reprinted, as Fontana paperbacks and he was establishing a reputation as a hot property in the movie business (the film rights to both HMS Ulysses and South by Java Head having been snapped up, though neither made the big screen). The ‘unknown Glasgow schoolteacher’ as he had been described in 1955, was now living in tax exile in Switzerland and the 1939 Hillman he had once driven had been replaced by the latest Mercedes.
But MacLean the writer was not a happy man. Whatever the root cause of his discomfort – and there have been many theories, from a dour Calvinist morality to his inability to take editorial criticism – relations with his London publisher, Collins, were fraught. He became convinced that ‘Alistair MacLean’ had become a brand name and that Collins felt it was his name which was selling the books, rather than the power of his stories or (a sensitive matter for all authors) the quality of his writing. The solution, to him, seemed obvious: change his name and prove to the doubters at Collins that he could write successful books without the weight of the ‘Alistair MacLean’ brand around his shoulders.
It was a response which must have seemed insane to any budding thriller writer who would have cheerfully swapped their precious Adler portable typewriters for ten percent of MacLean’s sales, and it certainly shocked Collins when they learned that one of their biggest assets had ‘gone rogue’, hired an agent, and was writing thrillers under the name ‘Ian Stuart’.
The dismay at Collins must have deepened when the editorial department received an early draft of the first ‘Stuart’ novel The Dark Crusader, and MacLean’s friend and mentor at the firm, Ian Chapman, had to pass on the publisher’s concerns about, as they saw it, the book’s complicated plot, flimsy characterisation, improbable action scenes and erratic pacing. According to his biographer, Jack Webster, MacLean’s rather churlish reaction to this criticism was: ‘Why then, in heaven’s name, do Collins want to publish this rubbish?’ And there then followed the thinly-veiled threat that perhaps another publisher could be found who would treat his manuscript ‘with a less biased and jaundiced eye’…
However it was done, feathers were unruffled and egos were soothed and Collins did publish The Dark Crusader by Ian Stuart in late 1961, its jacket blurb declaring that the author was ‘A new name among adventure novelists’ and that the book was ‘a thriller of unusual speed and excitement’. There was even a rather cheeky piece of advertising copy drawn up by Collins which announced: ‘There’s a new name in thriller writing – with that genuine Alistair MacLean magic’. One suspects, given his sensitivity at the editorial concerns over the first draft, that MacLean allowed himself a wry smile at the publisher’s attempts at promotion. The back of the jacket, usually reserved for glowing reviews of the author’s previous work, however, was given over to advertising another Collins title, Shipmaster by Gwyn Griffin, a sea-faring novel set aboard a troubled passenger liner with a mutinous crew. MacLean’s reaction to such promotion for a rival author is not recorded.
If sales of the first ‘Ian Stuart’ did not match those of an ‘Alistair MacLean’ thriller, well, that was surely to be expected. MacLean was an established brand – whether the author himself liked it or not – with two films of his books, both with established Hollywood stars, in the pipeline. And whatever the reservations of the editors at Collins, the newspaper reviewers, especially those who knew a thing or two about the genre, welcomed that first outing for ‘Ian Stuart’, though curiously, none seemed tempted to compare the new thriller writer – as many later reviewers would do almost automatically with any promising debutant – to Alistair MacLean.
Julian Symons, writing in the Sunday Times, thought it a ‘high-spirited adventure in which cleverly-prepared surprises follow one another like explosions in a high-grade firework’. Maurice Richardson in The Observer called it an ‘exciting secret service thriller [with] lots of unconventional twists’ and in the Oxford Mail, Anthony Price rated it ‘A fierce whodunit in the Ian Fleming tradition set on a rocket-proving island in the Pacific. Moves at jet pace … Watch Mr Stuart.’
In 1962, no-one was watching Mr Stuart’s progress more closely than his publisher as he had already delivered a new book for publication – as had his alter ego Alistair MacLean! Collins need not have worried unduly as Ian Stuart’s The Satan Bug and MacLean’s The Golden Rendezvous were both excellent thrillers. MacLean seemed to have proved whatever point he was trying to make and his ghost identity was laid to rest. There were no further Stuart books, although Collins did continue to publish hardback editions of The Satan Bug – and The Dark Crusader – as by Ian Stuart certainly up to 1969. From now on he would write only under the MacLean name and – though he would probably only have owned up to it through gritted teeth – the MacLean ‘brand’.
Perhaps they were hedging
their bets, but no mention of Ian Stuart’s books appeared in the next two MacLean hardbacks. It was only in 1967 (in Where Eagles Dare) that the ‘by the same author’ page listed The Dark Crusader and The Satan Bug among MacLean’s output, writing ‘as Ian Stuart’. However, the secret was known sooner and in South Africa, The Satan Bug was reviewed in November 1962 as MacLean ‘under his Stuart name’. When the Fontana paperback of The Dark Crusader appeared in 1963, about eighteen months after the hardback, the cover clearly announced that the book was by ‘Ian Stuart now known to be Alistair MacLean’ but the Fontana edition of The Satan Bug in early 1964, carried only ‘Alistair MacLean’ in large bold type on its cover, even though the title page was credited to Ian Stuart and in a line of small type on the back cover, there appeared the admission that the book ‘was originally published under Alistair MacLean’s pseudonym, Ian Stuart’. By then the movie rights had been sold and a film version directed by John Sturges (fresh from directing that classic British crowd-pleaser The Great Escape) was in production, albeit the action transposed to America.8
The Satan Bug, Fontana, 1964
If there was anything as, or perhaps even more, terrifying in 1962 than the threat of nuclear Armageddon (especially in October 1962), it was the fear of biological warfare. Everyone had a vague idea of what a guided missile looked like and was familiar with that awful iconic image of the twentieth-century, the ‘mushroom cloud’ which followed an atomic explosion. Biological weapons – ‘germ warfare’ – were an unknown, but equally horrific prospect to a population which, for the majority, had experience or at least shared social memories of the use of poison gas during World War I and the fear of gas as a weapon and the mass issuing of gas masks to the civilian population during World War II. After the war there had been rumours of captured poison gas stockpiled by the Nazis, and press conjecture throughout the Fifties of closer-to-home experiments in chemical weaponry and ‘disease warfare’ involving deserted Scottish islands infected with anthrax; even the use of British servicemen as human guinea pigs. The stories were not without foundation and often centred on the activities of the Ministry of Defence’s Science and Technological Laboratories at Porton Down in Wiltshire, where it was assumed Britain housed its arsenal of biological and chemical weapons including botulinum toxin (three decades before a much diluted and safer, user-friendly version was trade-marked as Botox).
It was Porton Down which clearly provided MacLean with the model for his Morden Research Centre, coincidentally also in Wiltshire, the hub of the plot in The Satan Bug where they have ‘succeeded’ (making Britain a world leader) in refining botulinum toxin ‘into a fantastic and shocking weapon compared to which even the mightiest hydrogen bomb is a child’s toy’. This advanced virus has been named unscientifically, but dramatically, the Satan Bug and ‘six ounces’ of it, distributed evenly throughout the world could ‘destroy every man, woman and child alive on this planet’.
The defences of Morden are described with typical MacLean relish, including the use of ‘Dobermann-Pinscher’ guard dogs, which were rapidly becoming a MacLean trade-mark.
The outer barbed-wire fence was fifteen feet high and sloped outwards at so sharp an angle that the top was four feet out of line with the foot. A similar fence, only sloping the other way, paralleled the outer for its entire perimeter at a distance of about twenty feet. The space between those fences was patrolled at night by Alsatians and Dobermann-Pinschers, trained man-hunters – and if need be, man-killers – answerable only to their own Army handlers. Three feet inside the second fence and actually below its overhang, was a two-strand trip-wire fence, of so fine a metal as to be normally almost invisible – and certainly would be invisible to anyone climbing down at night-time from the top of that second fence. And then, another ten feet away, was the last fence, each of its five strands running through insulators mounted on concrete posts. The electric current passing through those wires was supposed to be less than lethal if, that is, you were in good health.
The problem facing MacLean’s hero Pierre Cavell, is who could have breached such security precautions, supplemented by regular mobile patrols of armed guards, penetrated the research centre, and murdered the head of security and a research scientist? More importantly, what did they take with when they left? Of course Pierre Cavell, as the former security chief, is just the man to tackle the mystery and prevent the stolen samples of botulinum toxin and mega-lethal virus, the Satan Bug itself (to which there is no antidote) being used by the requisite megalomaniac aspiring to world domination.
Cavell has the advantage which MacLean allowed all his heroes – he can be just as cunning and devious as the villains he’s up against. In fact, in The Satan Bug he is specifically instructed by British Intelligence to use the weapons: ‘Secrecy, cunning, violence’ almost as a mantra. Where the police and the army have failed, it is Cavell who manages to unpick the mystery of how the Morden laboratories were penetrated – including a ruthless object lesson in how to deal with one of those silent but deadly (they are trained not to bark) Dobermann-Pinschers. So far, so suspenseful; and a gripping preamble to the frantic hunt for the missing toxin as the pace of the story ramps up into a series of action set-pieces including fantastic scenes where Cavell shoots his way out of PVC cable bondage and where he is attacked with botulinum toxin in a cider-mill (the cider is key to Cavell’s escape), finally culminating in a dramatic stand-off with the villain in a helicopter over London.
It was, said the Sunday Citizen, ‘One of the most exciting plots since the first James Bond novel’ and The Scotsman advised ‘You cannot discuss the current thriller wave until you have read this’. There was lavish praise too from fellow writers. Peter Dickinson, who was to go on to be an award-winning crime writer, called it ‘Utterly compelling’ in Punch magazine; the crime writer and long serving reviewer for The Tablet Anthony Lejeune liked the ‘cunningly laid minor surprises and a narrative sweep characteristic of this very professional and successful author’; and in The Guardian, ‘Francis Iles’ (Anthony Berkeley), the author of the classic crime novel Malice Aforethought, praised it highly, saying ‘This is that rare thing, a good thriller (and I mean thriller and a tough one at that) with really good detection’.
The Satan Bug, a forerunner of the ‘biotech/scientific thrillers’ later popularised by Michael Crichton and possibly an influence on Victor Canning’s 1976 thriller The Doomsday Carrier was a breathless, tightly-told adventure in fine Alistair MacLean tradition (never allowing sex to slow up the action) and would have pleased the most ardent reader. Only the truly pedantic fan would bemoan the absence from the story of those other regular ingredients of a MacLean adventure: a sea voyage and a battle against the natural elements. But in 1962 they got that as well.
By the time The Satan Bug was published in that very ‘right month’ of October, the ‘official’ MacLean’s The Golden Rendezvous had been selling well for more than six months, showing the author confidently in his element on the high seas, this time the Caribbean, and with the sort of adventure you felt he had been born to write: the pirate story.
The Golden Rendezvous, Collins, 1962, design by John Heseltine
The plot unfolds over five days, each chapter adopting a quite specific timeline (such as ‘Wednesday 7.45 p.m. – 8.15 p.m.’) which concentrates the action and ratchets up the tension and suspense, opening in the steamy, though only vaguely identified port of Caraccio, where some strange cargo is being loaded on board the SS Campari. Apart from cargo, the Campari also carries a number of very well-heeled passengers en route for New York, some of whom, as you might guess, are not what they seem.
Having finally set sail, the reader is quickly made familiar with MacLean’s solid hero, Chief Officer Johnny Carter and the beautiful female passenger he instinctively dislikes, but you know he’s going to fall for. Carter shows himself initially to be a pretty efficient detective when it comes to the disappearing crewmen, the minor sabotage, and the murders which soon blight the voyage. He then b
ecomes a more than competent action hero when the bad guys reveal themselves to be flying under the Jolly Roger and take over the ship.
In structure, there is something of the Agatha Christie ‘country-house’ type of mystery to the early part of The Golden Rendezvous, including a massive clue to the final, violent denouement placed in plain sight in Chapter One. This should not be surprising as a cruise liner at sea is, in effect, an isolated country house and the passengers and crew form a perfect ‘closed circle’ of suspects. How MacLean constructs his plot and how Johnny Carter – another first-person narrator, so the reader is treated to his thought processes – works things out is something of a tour de force.
It certainly went down well with the critics. In the Sunday Telegraph, Duff Hart-Davis9 wrote: ‘You cannot imagine until you start to read it, just how exciting this new book is. Mr MacLean’s grip on both his story and his characters is superb; he writes always within himself, and bubbles over with wit whenever there is time. His climax is murderous on the nerves.’ Whilst in the Daily Express, Robert Pitman thought it: ‘His latest and, in my opinion, best ever thriller. The pace is dazzling, the sea atmosphere superb. It is as if Edgar Wallace had collaborated with Conrad.’ Even the renowned Sunday Times critic Julian Symons10 gave it at least one cheer with: ‘Never a dull moment. Hurrah for Mr MacLean’.
Unlike The Satan Bug, Hollywood did not jump at the opportunity to film The Golden Rendezvous, although a workmanlike adaptation was eventually made by a South African production company. It was filmed in South Africa rather than the Caribbean in 1977, with Richard Harris as the hero Carter and a solid cast of supporting actors including Gordon Jackson, John Vernon (always a reliable villain), David Janssen and old stagers Burgess Meredith and John Carradine. The film is remembered, if at all, for its pounding sound track by Jeff Wayne.