Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  Whilst Philip Purser, in almost all his thrillers, took the rather gentle approach of the humble everyman stumbling into and through a mystery or conspiracy, another of the Class of ’62 debutants plunged a far more dissolute and cynical hero straight into a political hot spot, and then puts him in real harm’s way by sending him into the Sahara Desert.

  Alan Williams was already a seasoned foreign correspondent with experience of reporting from numerous war zones across the world when his first novel Long Run South ‘announced with a flourish that a major new thriller writer had arrived’.14

  Williams’ godfather, Noël Coward, seems to have agreed with that assessment and noted in his diary:15

  I have read a thriller by my godson Alan Williams and it is really very good indeed. He is an authentic writer. There is, as with all his generation, too much emphasis on sex, squalor and torture and horror, but it’s graphically and imaginatively written.

  Whether there was ‘too much’ emphasis on sex and violence for Mr Coward’s sensibilities in 1962 is debatable, but his young godson (Williams would have been twenty-six at the time he wrote his novel) certainly did not shirk from writing about sex and violence, and did so graphically. Long Run South features English journalist Rupert Quinn – young and educated, but bored and irresponsible – who escapes from a Northern provincial newspaper (but pretends he writes for The Times) and drifts in to Casablanca where he sees his meagre savings disappear on drink and young (very young) Moroccan prostitutes. It’s not long before Quinn finds himself in bad company and involved in gun-running across the border into an Algeria in the midst of a particularly nasty civil war. There is murder, torture, lust, a severe beating-up, and finally betrayal, leaving our dubious hero no richer and no wiser than he was before – which was to become a theme running throughout Williams’ fiction.

  It was tough, masculine stuff, but well-written and with a real feel for one of the world’s trouble spots as it was about to explode. Williams always said he enjoyed investigating volcanoes – actual, political or military ones – and indeed, Mt Etna features in the finale of Long Run South. Inevitably, Williams was trumpeted as the ‘natural successor’ to Ian Fleming and labelled ‘the master-creator of adult excitement’ and his early thrillers were indeed thrilling, but it was his work in the next decade which has come to be seen as a significant contribution to spy fiction and Donald McCormick in his 1977 study Who’s Who in Spy Fiction judged Williams as having ‘great talent as a spy-story teller’.

  Whilst Alan Williams’ fiction may have slipped, inexplicably, from memory, the same cannot be said of one of his fellow debutants from 1962, whose thrillers propelled him to the status of National Treasure, thanks in part to royal approval, and the ‘family business’ of writing bestsellers that he started continues to this day.

  Dick Francis’ first novel, Dead Cert, marked the start of the transformation of a well-known name in horse-racing circles to a household name synonymous with horse-racing (even in households not remotely interested in the sports of kings), though over a long career he was to write thrillers set well away from the turf. Dead Cert stood out from just about every other thriller published in that eventful year. It contains no spies, weapons of mass destruction, maniacs demanding world domination, storms at sea, icy wastes, daunting mountain peaks, or submarines and there is not a Nazi or ex-Nazi in sight. It is set in the dangerous terrain of Berkshire and the Cotswolds and around the highly dangerous, as it turns out, circuit of English race courses. It was a world relatively few would have known too much about in detail, even though a day at the races was a popular enough social pastime, with attendances at race meetings second only to football matches, and, since 1960, newly legalised betting shops had appeared on most urban High Streets.

  Dead Cert, Penguin, 1964, illustrated by Julian Allen

  What Dick Francis provided in 1962, and continued to do for another fifty years, was an insight into the nitty-gritty mechanics of being a jockey trying to control a mass of horseflesh jumping fences at 35 mph protected only by a crash helmet, a silk shirt and a pair of laddered nylon stockings. Life for a decent, sober, and moral amateur jockey (the hero, naturally) was seen to get even more dangerous once malcontents start to string wires behind the steeplechase fences with fatal consequences – for rider, not horse – and professional jockeys begin to talk openly about ‘stopping’ horses in order to fix races results. Dead Cert struck a chord as an adventure thriller set in a specific world of which the author had considerable experience and expertise and brought Dick Francis an immediate fan-base, including a high proportion of female readers, which was to stay with him for half a century.

  It had been a good year for British thrillers and it wasn’t over yet.

  Back in February, the Sunday Times had launched the first colour supplement, which featured the James Bond short story The Living Daylights by Ian Fleming – a tremendous appetizer, it was presumed, for The Spy Who Loved Me which was to appear in April. Some important Bond supporters, however, were very disappointed – and not by the new novel. For several years the Daily Express had run a regular comic-strip version of the Bond novels16 but when Fleming sold his Bond short story to their rivals at the Sunday Times, the hierarchy at the Express were furious (well, Lord Beaverbrook was) and the strip currently running was immediately dropped mid-story, which must have left Express readers who had not read the novel Thunderball rather confused at its abrupt ending.

  The expulsion of James Bond from the pages of the Express was a wound, but hardly a fatal one for the character. Filming had already started on Dr. No and his creator would have been busy enough polishing the final draft of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but it did leave a gap in what the Express offered its readers; an important gap because of the size of the Express’ circulation. In 1962, with daily sales of over 4.3 million copies (a circulation just behind that of the Daily Mirror), the Express was a hugely significant promotional tool and comic strips and cartoons were popular with readers. Surely, the Express would be looking to replace the Bond comic strip – and why not with a fresh, new take on spy fiction which might just give Bond a run for his money?

  Raymond Hawkey, the graphic designer (and influential designer of book jackets), then Design Director for the Express, suggested exactly such a replacement, a spy story, as yet unpublished, written by his friend and fellow design artist, Len Deighton.17

  The Express turned down the suggestion, but the Evening Standard was intrigued enough to buy the serial rights and to run the serial over two weeks rather than the customary one, prior to publication, the newspaper billing it as ‘Something entirely new in spy fiction’. The serialisation of a new type of spy novel was perfectly timed, coinciding as it did with the release of the film Dr. No and the Cuban Missile Crisis and there were early murmurings of approval from reviewers who had read advance proofs. Despite pleas from author and agent, however, the publisher Hodder refused to increase the scheduled printing beyond the planned 4,000 copies (the original print-run had been set at 2,500 copies but had been revised on the back of the serialisation in the Standard). As a result, the first edition of The Ipcress File, published on 12 November 1962, sold out within 24 hours.18

  It was a remarkable book in many ways and its impact on British thriller fiction has been described as seismic. Its very cover was enough to shake the perceived wisdom of the British publishing industry, not because it showed a pistol (plenty of thrillers had gunmen on the covers) juxtaposed with a dirty cup of coffee, some paper clips, and a stubbed-out cigarette, but because it was done using monochrome photographs and, most radical of all, was basically white – the one colour usually avoided on book jackets because it showed the dirt! The Ipcress File dust-jacket achieved almost instant iconic status and the book simply could not be mistaken for anything else, much as the later rather famous ‘white album’ by the Beatles was to stand out from the ranks of multi-coloured vinyl LPs. Hawkey’s design was said, perhaps unfairly, to have influenced the cove
rs of ‘airport thrillers’ for the next two decades.

  The Ipcress File, Panther, 1962

  Ironically for an author who was almost instantly promoted as a serious rival to Ian Fleming, Len Deighton had experienced the same sort of difficulties with his dust-jacket as Fleming had with The Spy Who Loved Me. A designer of numerous book jackets himself (including the British edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and a Penguin edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night), Deighton insisted that his friend Raymond Hawkey’s revolutionary ‘white’ design be adopted at a fee of 50 guineas. The publisher, probably worried about the extra cost of lamination to keep that white cover clean, refused to pay more than 15 guineas and so Deighton made up the difference, just as Fleming had to subsidise Richard Chopping’s fee.

  But The Ipcress File was more than just a book with a clever dust-jacket; it was a clever book – perhaps too clever for some people. In later years the critic Julian Symons recalled how, when offering to review the new novel, at least one literary editor had turned down the idea on the grounds that the book was ‘unbearably smart’. The reviews soon began to arrive, though, with the New Statesman declaring ‘there has been no brighter arrival on the shady scene since Greene started entertaining’ and it is difficult to understate just how bright its arrival was.19

  Thriller readers had certainly never read a spy story quite like it before. It had a first-person narrator who was never named (that had been done before, famously in Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male in 1939) but he was the sort of hero that hadn’t been seen before. Here was an anti-hero from the ‘lower ranks’ rather than the officer class, who bridled at virtually any sign of authority and had a healthy distrust of his War Office bosses and indeed a pretty cynical view of the whole spying business. For the hero of The Ipcress File, spying was certainly not an all-action duel with the spies of an enemy country; rather it was surviving the boardroom politics and in-fighting of his own side.

  The plot ostensibly concerns a 1960s hot topic, the ‘brain drain’ of scientific and technological talent away from Britain, although in this case, the scientists are being kidnapped rather than emigrating to Australia for the sunshine or America for the larger pay packet. Although there are diversions to Beirut (an exotic and unfamiliar place for the British at the time) and to an atoll in the Pacific, The Ipcress File is quintessentially a London novel and the narrator describes life in the city and its climate with an almost poetic eye:

  I could hear the rain even before I drew the curtain back. December in London – the soot-covered tree outside was whipping itself into a frenzy. I closed the curtains quickly, danced across the ice-cold lino, scooped up the morning’s post and sat down heavily to wait while the kettle boiled. I struggled into the dark worsted and my only establishment tie – that’s the red and blue silk with the square design – but had to wait forty minutes for a cab. They hate to come south of the Thames you see.

  And later:

  It was the sort of January morning that had enough sunshine to point up the dirt without raising the temperature.

  Yet the hero/narrator was no feckless pop poet (this was the Sixties, remember) or late-flowering beatnik, he was a sharp operator who gradually reveals a comprehensive knowledge of military history and equipment, an appreciation of classical music, a love of both the theory and practice of cooking, a familiarity with international air travel (and the drawbacks of in-flight catering), and a flair for wisecracking dialogue which his superior officers, never having read Raymond Chandler, regard as bloody-minded insubordination. In fact, the only thing which ‘Ipcress Man’ did not reveal was his name, though at one point he says quite categorically: ‘Now my name isn’t Harry, but in this business it’s hard to remember whether it ever had been.’

  In the confines of a novel, an anonymous narrator is perfectly acceptable, but when listing the cast of characters for the credits of a film, it could be a problem and so when the film rights were snapped up by Bond producer Harry Saltzman it was only a matter of time before an official christening would take place. Although Deighton’s spy hero remained anonymous in three (or arguably four) more novels, once Michael Caine portrayed him in the 1965 film, he became and remained ‘Harry Palmer’.

  It could be said that Harry Palmer and James Bond were the only two fictional spies to outlive the Sixties, given that George Smiley, though present, did not really come into his own until the Seventies. Certainly, Harry Palmer was a suitable hero for the socially mobile Sixties (the Grammar School lad outsmarting the public school establishment) – as indeed was Michael Caine – as was the James Bond of the blossoming film franchise, if not perhaps Fleming’s novels.

  Palmer was hip, cool, cheeky, and witty – one could almost be describing the four Beatles – and The Ipcress File for all its Byzantine plotting and breathless imparting of weird and wonderful information on subjects ranging from the price of drugs to mixing cocktails in footnotes and appendices (in a thriller!), even the most jaundiced reader recognised that here was something fresh and a story being told with infectious energy.

  Above all, The Ipcress File was something new, a spy novel which seemed to break the mould just when the mould needed breaking. This was a more realistic spy fiction as opposed to the spy fantasy of James Bond, though not all readers approved. The ‘additional information’ Deighton provides in copious notes and asides was seen by some as ‘showing off’20 and there was a perception that he was obsessed with technology, something which would surely have appealed to the younger reader in the 1960s. Over the years the legend grew that Deighton was the first novelist to write using a personal computer (possibly true) and that he only communicated with people via that cutting-edge piece of kit, the Telex machine. For all its ingenuity, however, the thing which seemed to most irritate the doubters was the humour – the book ‘groans with wisecracks’ moaned one, adding ‘wisecracks are not wit’. There were many who disagreed, realising that the cheekiness of the dialogue and the plotting, almost deliberately obfuscating and as confusing as spying for a living probably was, added a great swathe of energy to the book as well as reflecting the zeitgeist. Deighton’s readership was also clever enough to appreciate his audacity when he ‘broke the fourth wall’ and tipped a knowing wink to his audience. In the book’s (and film’s) most famous scene, which fellow debutant author Philip Purser later called a magnificent trompe l’oeil, Harry Palmer escapes from a prison only to find he is not where he thought he was. To open his cell door, Palmer steals a wooden HB pencil from an unconscious guard and uses it to unlock (and then lock) prison doors. The unsuspecting reader hardly has time to furrow a brow before Deighton adds a footnote, stating blandly, but with a wry smile: ‘This method of opening a lock with a pencil has been withdrawn from the Manuscript.’

  For Christmas, 1962, Ian Fleming generously picked The Ipcress File as a Sunday Times Book of the Year, though added the proviso that thrillers, in his opinion, should not really be humorous.

  It may have appeared that the established emperor of the espionage novel was graciously welcoming the young pretender, but it reality Deighton was not threatening Fleming’s throne however much the newspaper columnists built up their supposed rivalry. (Fleming and Deighton only ever met once, at a lunch organised by the Daily Express.)21 It would not, in 1963, be simply a question of whether one read The Ipcress File or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; readers could, and did, enjoy both though they were two very different thrillers, but there was, quite definitely, a sea change taking place in thrillers.

  The year 1963 would mark the supremacy of the spy story over the adventure thriller and though The Ipcress File was a key part of that movement, it was not the cause of it. At the start of 1962, Deighton recalls, publishers had ‘little appetite for another spy novel’ and two major publishing houses had turned down The Ipcress File, but by the following year it seemed that the appetite of readers was almost insatiable.

  What Ipcress did was provide a sound platform for a particul
ar type of spy story, a more believable, down-to-earth exposé of the murky war fought by, and often between, intelligence agencies, where blackmail and betrayal were the tools of the trade. It was the portrayal of espionage as spy fiction as opposed to the ‘bang-bang, kiss-kiss’ (as Fleming himself put it) school of spy fantasy where the head boy was indisputably James Bond.

  Spy fiction was to become a recognised, and very respectable, sub-set of the thriller and its best practitioners – Deighton, Le Carré, Ted Allbeury and Anthony Price – were very good indeed, their work standing the test of time and their influence on subsequent generations of British thriller writers visible well into the twenty-first century in, for example, the work of Charles Cumming and Mick Herron.

  It was to be the spy fantasy side of the equation, however, which was to explode in the coming years, with new writers, new heroes, new and fantastical plots (though usually the regular villains), and ever-more garish paperback covers appearing with frightening regularity. In the Sixties, the thriller reader was guaranteed to get more kiss-kiss and bang-bang for their 3/6d and the ‘super spies’, as one might call these clones of James Bond, were not confined to the library or the bookshop, they had also invaded television and the cinema.

  And it is to the cinema we must look for the spark which lit the fuse, for as Len Deighton put it: ‘It was Harry [Saltzman] and Cubby [Broccoli] who started the spy cult with the Dr. No film.’