by Mike Ripley
Yet the novel is remembered, more than fifty years on, and not just by thriller readers but by fellow practitioners, including Lee Child, possibly the most globally successful thriller writer of the early twenty-first century.
In January 2016, in correspondence with this author, Child recalled MacLean as one of his formative influences:
As for The Golden Rendezvous – I remember being impressed by its structure – a closed environment (i.e. the ship at sea) and in particular the recurrent scene where protagonist John Carter (confined to the sick bay with a supposed broken leg) climbs out of the porthole on repeated occasions to investigate and disrupt. For some reason I found that scenario incredibly tense. So did MacLean, apparently, because he repeats it elsewhere – in Fear Is the Key the guy is confined to an office and forced to do some calculations, but leaves to investigate. Also very tense. And in both cases a sturdy minor cast member helps out in a crucial way – in Golden Rendezvous the ship’s doctor explains why Carter is wet, and in Fear Is the Key the chauffeur has scribbled some bogus equations so the guy’s absence goes unnoticed. All classic MacLean.
It was a good year for MacLean fans; and fans of adventure thrillers from veterans of the genre who, even if not on absolutely top form, still gave value for money.
MacLean’s stablemate at Collins, Hammond Innes, had also opted for a return to the high seas and a battle against the elements in his twenty-second thriller, Atlantic Fury. It contained some ‘classic’ Innes trademarks: a disaster at sea and a dramatic rescue from a dangerous location – a lonely island in the Outer Hebrides – coupled with a formal court of inquiry, an identity mystery, a disputed legacy and an underdog hero who will, you just know it, get to the truth despite (in this case) the personal cost. Thriller-addicts may have been less than satisfied with the structure and pacing of the story, but few who read Hammond Innes for his knowledge of the sea and seamanship would have been disappointed. It was a somewhat churlish American reviewer who thought the book’s ‘emphasis on navigational and meteorological elements will direct this primarily to the masculine market’ for this was just the sort of elemental setting at which Hammond Innes was so good.
Atlantic Fury, Fontana. 1979
The Light of Day, Fontana, 1972
The average American reader, or the average British one for that matter, might not have had too clear an idea where Innes’ fictional islands of Laerg were supposed to be. They were in fact closely based on the small archipelago of St Kilda which had been evacuated of civilians in 1930 and used only by the military since then. Within the first few pages of Atlantic Fury, Innes tells us all the reader – whether seaman or meteorologist – needs to know, whetting the appetite for the drama which is to come in this wild and lonely setting and reassuring them that they are in solid Hammond Innes territory.
Laerg isn’t the sort of place you can visit at will. It lies more than eighty miles west of the Outer Hebrides … Eighty sea miles is no great distance, but this is the North Atlantic and the seven islands of the Laerg group are a lonely cluster standing on the march of the great depressions that sweep up towards Iceland and the Barents Sea. Not only are sea conditions bad throughout the greater part of the year, but the islands, rising sheer out of the waves to a height of almost 1,400 feet, breed their own peculiar brand of weather,
Hammond Innes’ most famous seafaring thriller The Wreck of the Mary Deare had been filmed in 1959. The screenplay had been written by one of the godfathers of the British thriller, Eric Ambler, and in 1962 he too returned to what many readers thought his most fertile hunting grounds: the fleshpots of Istanbul.
The Light of Day, after two novels set in contemporary trouble-spots in Asia, saw Ambler at his impish best in the creation of the Anglo-Egyptian small-time crook Arthur Abdel Simpson, who opens the novel with a sigh, bemoaning his lot in a life where everyone and everything seems to be against him, and probably is.
It came down to this: if I had not been arrested by the Turkish police, I would have been arrested by the Greek police. I had no choice but to do as this man Harper told me. He was entirely responsible for what happened to me.
The man ‘Harper’ recruits the reluctant Simpson to help transport a car full of weaponry from Greece to Turkey, where he is, in fairly short order, recruited by the Turkish security forces (headed by Colonel Haki, a character invented by Ambler twenty years before) to spy on Harper and his gang. As a consequence, the cowardly Simpson finds himself taking part in – and betraying – the spectacular robbery of the Topkapi museum in Istanbul’s Seraglio Palace. The actual robbery, carried out over the roof-tops of Istanbul is planned with immaculate precision – Ambler cheekily includes maps and floor plans in the book – and its execution cried out for the big screen treatment, which it very quickly got.
The film version, Topkapi, appeared in 1964 and won an Oscar for Peter Ustinov as Simpson, though it is probably most fondly remembered for the lascivious performance by Greek actress (and later, politician) Melina Mercouri. The mechanics of the robbery, where the thief is lowered on to his target from above, were subsequently spoofed by British television comedians and echoed more than thirty years later in the first Mission Impossible film.
The Companion leaflet, The Companion Book Club, January 1962
With exotic foreign locations very much in vogue among adventurer-thriller writers and colonial influence (on the part of France and Belgium this time) on the wane, leading to confused and possibly violent politics, Central Africa seemed a very tempting location and it is surprising that more authors did not opt for it. The veteran Victor Canning did, using the Congo as the setting for his novel Black Flamingo, although there is no evidence to suggest that he ever went there. It is a solid tale of a footloose loner who adopts the identity of a dead pilot only to discover the pilot was involved in smuggling diamonds in order to finance a private army planning a coup d’état. Black Flamingo shows Canning’s skill at describing a jungle environment and, as always, emphasising the bird life – a common theme with him. It was to be one of Canning’s last ‘outdoors’ adventure thrillers where the action takes place in far-flung, unexplored territory as his output from 1962 onwards concentrated on crime and espionage themes with European or English settings.
Francis Clifford, who had already used Asian, Caribbean and South American locations for his novels, opted for Spain in his 1962 suspense thriller Time is an Ambush. Despite, or perhaps because of, the undemocratic Franco regime, Spain was a popular destination for British writers no doubt drawn to a warm and sunny climate and the availability of cheaper alcohol where they could avoid currency regulations by putting a visit down to ‘research’. Certainly Desmond Cory, Stephen (‘Hank Janson’) Frances and James (‘Callan’) Mitchell had visited or lived in Spain by 1962, well in advance of the invasion of the bulk of British holidaymakers, but there is nothing to suggest they chose Spain because they approved of the political system there.
No doubt it was the place to go if you were a would-be novelist who liked sun and sangria, just as Bohemian Paris had once attracted artists and poets. Certainly Francis Clifford used exactly that scenario, making his innocent ‘Englishman abroad’ hero, Stephen Tyler, a struggling novelist living in a sleepy Spanish town near Barcelona bashing out the required ‘thousand words a day’. Until, that is, a murdered body is discovered on the nearby beach – that of another foreigner, a German, with whose wife Tyler has established a suspiciously close relationship. Tyler has to prove his innocence without incriminating his lover, whilst constantly under the eye of the suspicious Spanish police and in doing so discovers that the answers he seeks are to be found almost thirty years in the past as he opens old wounds caused by the Spanish Civil War.
Desmond Cory’s secret agent series hero Johnny Fedora, being half-Spanish anyway, was naturally very comfortable operating in Spain. Which was just as well, as in Undertow, he is called upon to foil a KGB plot fronted by a psychopathic Spanish killer, which revolves around documents needing
to be salvaged from a Nazi U-boat sunk between Spain and Gibraltar at the end of World War II. Undertow was a significant book for Cory/Fedora fans as it not only contained the (by now) essential thriller elements of a foreign location, scuba-diving, beautiful women, a Nazi legacy, and some ruthless violence, but also the debut of a KGB mastermind called Feramontov. The duel between Fedora and Feramontov was to continue over another four novels to 1971, which became known as the Feramontov Quintet.
Three thriller-writers eschewed the sunnier climes and went for far harsher, colder climates – the Arctic, the South Atlantic, and the Himalayas. One was by a writer not best remembered for his thrillers, one by a particular favourite of Ian Fleming, and one by a novice who was to go on to produce thrillers still held up as amongst the best of the genre half a century later.
To be accurate, only the first third of James Aldridge’s A Captive in the Land is set inside the Arctic Circle, and involves the heroic rescue by a lone Englishman of the sole survivor of a crashed Russian aircraft, which may, or may not, have been spying on America’s early-warning radar defence line. It is more a novel of morality and politics rather than a thriller for, in truth, after the gruelling initial scenes within the Arctic Circle, the plot meanders and the book makes little effort to sustain any tension or suspense. There is a curious interlude, however, when the hero is approached by Naval Intelligence to do a bit of spying for Britain whilst in Russia. Royce dismisses the idea, saying he wouldn’t ‘be much good at it’ but his would-be recruiter insists, saying: ‘This isn’t MI5 stuff. This is Navy. Oh, balls to MI5. They’re just a sort of jumped-up gendarmerie.’ It was an interesting observation, which suggests that though our policemen may still have been wonderful, by 1962 the reputation of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, was somewhat open to question.
South African Geoffrey Jenkins had received stunning reviews for his debut adventure thriller A Twist of Sand in 1959, not the least from his fellow journalist Ian Fleming in the Sunday Times – ‘Imaginative, original’ – and the magazine Books and Bookmen called it ‘the best since The Cruel Sea’. His second, the slightly mystical The Watering Place of Good Peace, had not fared as well, but his third in 1962, A Grue of Ice, put him firmly back in the public eye as serious competition for Alistair MacLean and Hammond Innes.
The title was inspired by a quote from John Buchan’s Prester John – ‘the cold grue of terror’. A Grue of Ice is a rip-roaring sea-faring adventure set in the ferocious South Atlantic and Antarctic seas centred around the search for a ‘missing’ island which might just be a source of a rare element useful in the manufacture of rocket fuel – and therefore valuable and worth killing for. The novel’s detailed description of commercial whaling may make uncomfortable reading for a modern audience, as it does with some vintage Hammond Innes thrillers, but there was no denying the excitement Jenkins could generate when describing scenes of man- (and occasionally woman-) versus-the-natural-elements.
A Captive in the Land, Hamish Hamilton, 1962
A Murder of Quality, Penguin, 1971
Having shown a healthy, tongue-in-cheek disregard for spying behind the Iron Curtain in his debut The Night of Wenceslas, which had won him the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 1960, ‘novice’ writer Lionel Davidson put real chills into his second novel The Rose of Tibet, in 1962. It is an adventure story set on the roof of the world as London artist Charles Houston travels to Tibet to find a missing brother, falls in love with the Abbess of the remote (and naturally, forbidden) monastery of Yamdring, finds a fortune in gemstones, and to secure a happy ending, has to avoid an invading Chinese army.
It was a startling follow up to his prize-winning debut, drawing gasps of admiration from such as Daphne du Maurier – ‘Is Lionel Davidson today’s Rider Haggard?’ – and Graham Greene – ‘I hadn’t realised how much I had missed the genuine adventure story … until I read The Rose of Tibet.’ It was indeed a fine piece of story-telling, though the dramatic scene where Houston and his lover (plus treasure) escape from a Chinese ambush in a snowstorm by riding their horse over a cliff, probably won few fans amongst animal lovers. Remarkably, when a new edition of the novel was published some fifty-four years later, it immediately topped the paperback fiction bestseller list.11
The other ‘novice’ publishing his second novel in 1962 was known (then) only by his pen-name, John Le Carré, probably for reasons of national security as he was still a serving Intelligence officer in MI6. It would not be long before Le Carré was outed as David Cornwell, though it was as Le Carré that he was to become one of the world’s most famous authors of spy fiction. That second novel, A Murder of Quality, was actually more of a traditional murder mystery than a novel of espionage, though it did feature ‘the cleverest and most self-effacing man in Security’ George Smiley investigating a murder in an English public school. Even if it did not feature the nail-biting tension he was to become so good at, A Murder of Quality showed that Le Carré was a writer to be reckoned with and one who, when in a satirical mood, could be incredibly funny, as can be read in the dialogue he attributes to the ‘hideous’ Mrs Shane Hecht, a ‘massive and enveloping (woman), like a faded Valkyrie’.
It is Shane Hecht whom Le Carré allows to describe another female character with weapons-grade bitchiness:
So sweet … and such simple taste, don’t you think? I mean, whoever would have dreamed of putting those china ducks on the wall? Big ones at the front and little ones at the back. Charming, don’t you think? Like one of those teashops. I wonder where she bought them. I must ask her. I’m told her father lives near Bournemouth. It must be so lonely for him, don’t you think? Such a vulgar place; no one to talk to.
A Murder of Quality was well-received by the newspaper critics; the Daily Telegraph calling it ‘Beautifully intelligent, satiric and witty’ and The Guardian declaring that Le Carré was ‘the equal of any novelist now writing in English.’12 When reissued in the twenty-first century, the novel was listed as a Penguin Modern Classic but a year after publication it would be totally overshadowed by Le Carré’s third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
For a dose of well-crafted, topical, Cold War spy fiction in 1962, then John Blackburn, an author better known for mixing Gothic, horror, and even science fiction elements into his thrillers, came up with the goods.
In The Gaunt Woman, Blackburn was, for him, in restrained mood, even though the book includes one certifiable psychopath and a rare and unpleasant medical disease. The basic plot, however, is a KGB operation to subvert the advice given by a prominent government economic advisor, the desired outcome being a manipulation of the exchange rate, putting the pound at a disadvantage against the dollar – a very real fiscal nightmare for British governments throughout the 1960s.
The central character in this pacey thriller – now almost totally forgotten – is the Russian agent, Peter Vanin, who is sent to England to oversee the operation right under the nose of Blackburn’s regular spymaster, General Kirk of Foreign Office Intelligence, who for once is well ahead of the game and tracking Vanin’s every move.13 For a Moscow-trained agent and proven killer, Vanin is a surprisingly sympathetic character and the reader sees 1962 London street life through his eyes, including his encounter with a female beatnik/early hippie protestor carrying a petition on behalf of CND – the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The petition is against American missile bases on British soil and for a moment Vanin is tempted to say that he is strongly against American rocket bases and to sign it ‘Peter Vanin, Department 5 of M.V.D., Central Intelligence Bureau of the USSR’. But he maintains his cover and resists.
Those were not, of course, the only thrillers published in 1962. Other familiar names were pleasing their fan bases, such as William Haggard with The Unquiet Sleep and Simon Harvester with Silk Road, though it is unlikely that James Hadley Chase’s A Coffin from Hong Kong repeated the success (or notoriety) of his famous 1939 debut No Orchids for Miss Blandish. It was also the year when Harry Patter
son’s fourth novel Comes the Dark Stranger appeared, though it was several more years before Patterson would also become far better known as Jack Higgins.
Apart from a disappointing James Bond novel, thriller readers were thus well-served in 1962 and few could have had many complaints. All the required ingredients had been thrown in to the mix: exotic foreign locations, valiant struggles against the elements, dastardly villains, suspicious police forces (foreign, obviously), weapons of mass destruction, spies, a Nazi U-boat, ships, planes, and helicopters. And hardly any sex scenes to slow up the action, certainly none that would raise an eyebrow even in 1962, apart from Ian Fleming’s rather ill-judged attempts to get into the female sexual psyche in The Spy Who Loved Me.
What more could British thriller addicts expect? Well, more of the same certainly, but also more thrills from new writers and in terms of debutant thriller-writers, 1962 did not disappoint.
Although he became far better known as the influential television critic for the Sunday Telegraph for more than 25 years, Philip Purser started his thriller-writing career in 1962 (with the same publisher as Ian Fleming) by using the popular elements of a cold, northerly location approached by sea, rumours of a U-boat, and some spectacularly gruesome relics of the Nazi era, in the unusually titled Peregrination 22, ironically in the year when Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 became a best seller in Britain.
Purser’s footloose hero, Colin Panton, is an unemployed scriptwriter and certainly no action hero, who takes a job with a small travel agency specialising in getting-away-from-it-all holidays, or ‘peregrinations’ (wanderings). Number ‘22’ on their menu of peregrinations is the island of Spitsbergen and offers ‘Fifteen Days of Adventure in the Arctic’ but Panton, acting as the reluctant tour guide, finds it a far from restful vacation venue when he discovers that his fellow German tourists have plans to turn the island into a European youth camp – a very well-organised, well-disciplined sort of youth organised on lines familiar to anyone who remembered the Thirties.