by Mike Ripley
In the book world, Deighton and Le Carré may have had few imitators but Ian Fleming, and James Bond, certainly did; an awful lot of them.
The heirs to James Bond
If the Fifties had been the decade of the war movie in British cinemas, then the Sixties was without doubt the decade of the spy film. Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli had certainly started something with Dr. No and it seemed as if they were raising the bar every year as their Bond films became annual events, each one bigger, brasher, and also cooler than the last, as From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball (following a temporary truce with rogue producer Kevin McClory), and then You Only Live Twice captivated audiences worldwide. Why should the British worry about double-agents within MI6 when we had James Bond flying the flag and fighting our corner?
The Bond films had it all: a dashing hero, beautiful women, dastardly villains (foreign, of course), gadgets, exotic locations, guns and explosions galore, witty one-liners, title songs which went straight into the Hit Parade, and an instantly-recognised signature theme. The films, from their innovative (and quite daring for the time) opening title sequences to the closing credit payoff that ‘James Bond will be back’, were such a success that they rapidly inspired imitators everywhere there was a film industry. In Europe, co-productions between studios in Italy, Spain, West Germany, and France produced a boom in what have subsequently become known as ‘Eurospy’ movies. Some of them were suspiciously close to the Bond films which inspired them in plot, gadgets, and locations, for example the 1965 Italian/German/Spanish production Our Man in Jamaica or the cheekily titled Italian/Spanish/French effort Agent 077: Mission Bloody Mary where the plot involves recovering nuclear weapons from the bottom of the sea and a radical crime syndicate (called the Black Lily rather than SPECTRE), which came out the same year as Thunderball.
There were spoofs of this blossoming cinematic genre too, one of the first examples being Carry On Spying. Even beloved British comedians Morecambe and Wise got in on the act, albeit rather limply, with The Intelligence Men in 1965, though the Americans did it best with another James – Coburn, that is – in Our Man Flint in 1966. The most elaborate spoof, which many thought over-elaborate, came in the 1967 version of Casino Royale which featured multiple ‘James Bonds’, one of them (‘Sir James Bond’) played by David Niven, an early favourite of Ian Fleming’s for the role. Fleming was spared that operatic send-up of his debut novel, with its irritatingly bouncy Herb Alpert theme tune, though he might well have approved of the tougher 2006 version with Daniel Craig.
Even before Ian Fleming died in August 1964, a host of thriller writers were loading paper into typewriters and keeping a spare ribbon within reach in order to meet deadlines set by enthusiastic publishers who saw a new market of hopefully insatiable readers out there. They were not wrong.
HUGO BARON
Possibly the first out of the starting gate was ‘Michael Brett’ who introduced ‘Man-about-danger’ Hugo Baron in Diecast, which was first published in America as a paperback original in 1963. When it was published in the UK in hardback the following year, ‘Michael Brett’ had become ‘John Michael Brett’, possibly to avoid confusion with the American author of private eye novels Michael Brett, but that was not the author’s name either.
The pseudonyms hid the identity of the well-regarded crime writer Miles Tripp, who was to be elected to the elite Detection Club and serve as Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association (and probably realised that his future was not in the spy fantasy genre).
Diecast, Pan, 1966
When Diecast came out in Pan paperbacks in 1966, its cover carried effusive quotes from the Daily Express (‘How like Bond and just as good’) and the Edinburgh Evening News (‘There is of course only one James Bond, but a new, very smooth, sophisticated rival has appeared’). Just in case the Bond connection had been missed by anyone, the Hugo Baron ‘logo’ featured a saturnine, dark-suited man holding a gun in a pose which could have come from the posters of a Bond film.
All the right elements seemed to be present. Baron had ‘the lean good looks of a man with a warrior ancestry’ and the only lines on his face ‘were the fine ones near the eyes which can come from scanning distances in bright sunlight’. Educated in Cambridge, Baron had travelled around the world (stopping off to study Yoga in India) and then become a barrister and also a journalist and a bit of a gambler on the side; all of which come in handy during Diecast. He also stands up well to torture when the villain places a razor blade in his mouth before interrogating him.
So far, the regular thriller-reader hardly needs to suspend disbelief. Hugo Baron sounds just the sort of chap you want in your secret service, protecting the nation’s secrets. Except – and here came the first jolt of disbelief – Baron isn’t a government agent, he is recruited to an international organisation dedicated to the Disorganization of International Espionage (DIE) and Counter Activities for Stability and Trust (CAST), a cabal of the rich and powerful who believe, with a straight face, in a policy of ‘peace through violence’. Credulity is stretched even further for the contemporary thriller-reader by making Baron’s boss in DIECAST a millionaire newspaper proprietor – just the sort of altruist who would be dedicated to world peace by putting all the spies out of business.
Hugo Baron did make two further appearances, in A Plague of Dragons in 1965 where he was up against a dastardly Chinese plot to use biological weapons, and A Cargo of Spent Evil in 1966 which had Baron infiltrating a group of those old standbys – resurgent Nazis. There were no films of the Hugo Baron books and Miles Tripp moved from international men of mystery to more conventional detectives.
JOHN CRAIG
One of the hottest favourites to claim the Bond throne is, strangely, virtually totally forgotten in his native Britain, though still remembered in America. The first appearance of John Craig in The Man Who Sold Death in October 1964 was greeted with almost universal acclaim by the critics. ‘A successor to Bond who is as tough and exciting to women as the original’ said the Daily Express of the new hero created by James Munro, the pen-name of novelist and (then) fledgling television dramatist James Mitchell.
John Craig was different from Bond in that he hailed from the north-east of England and a working-class background, as did his creator. Blessed with rugged good looks, an active war record, and a black belt in judo, we learn that Craig, working for a shipping company, has been involved in gun-running to the civil war in Algeria, a side-line which backfires on him quite violently. One thing leads to another and Craig finds himself recruited into Department K by the shady spy chief Loomis. The Man Who Sold Death was lauded by leading reviewers: Francis Iles as ‘breathlessly exciting from beginning to end’, Julian Symons claiming its author to be ‘intelligent, knowledgeable and convincing about the details of violence’ and Anthony Boucher in the New York Times elevating the book as ‘a notable example of the Le Carré thriller-plus’.
Even die-hard fans of John Craig would have been hesitant to describe his adventures as anything likely to be found in a John Le Carré spy novel, for the Bond books of Ian Fleming were surely the measure here. John Craig was not just a tough guy, he was hard-as-nails; a ruthless operator disposing of enemies and treacherous friends without a flicker of emotion, and treating the many women who fell for him in a similar manner. As was customary by 1964, there were torture scenes to be endured by the hero as well as the reader and John Craig bore up better than most, though by his fourth and final mission in print, he was a believably damaged character.
That final adventure, The Innocent Bystanders, was published in 1969, by which time James Munro was far better known as James Mitchell, the creator of the hit television spy drama Callan. It was the only Craig book to be filmed, in 1972, when it was too late to challenge Bond or develop as a franchise as tastes in spy fiction were changing – indeed, Callan was part of that change. The film, advertised with a poster shouting ‘They set him up, he shot them down!’, starred the reliably tough Stanley Baker as C
raig and the excellent Donald Pleasence as his odious boss Loomis. It was directed by Peter Collinson, the director of The Italian Job, but never reached those exuberant heights, despite, rather cheekily, having the scriptwriting credit ‘by James Mitchell, from the novel by James Munro’.
DR JASON LOVE
The first hero to be designated ‘heir apparent to the golden throne of Bond’ – at least by the Sunday Times – was not a spy at all, or not a full-time one, but rather a doctor in general practice in rural Somerset; a scenario which strikes something of a discordant note sixty years on in an era of headlines about a National Health Service under threat, and over-worked and under-paid junior doctors.
Dr Jason Love, as created by journalist and novelist James Leasor, undoubtedly did sterling work treating coughs, colds, pains, and strains in his surgery down in Bishop’s Combe near Taunton, but the reader was not remotely interested in that and fortunately the author certainly did not dwell on that routine and unglamorous aspect of his hero’s life. In fact, it was hardly mentioned as Dr Love’s life became far more interesting when he hired a locum and left his practice behind to pursue his other life as a part-time secret agent for MI6; a life few country GPs even fantasised about between patients.
Love’s background is quickly established in his first fictional outing, Passport to Oblivion, published in 1964, less than six months after the death of Ian Fleming. He is unmarried, his parents deceased, and he served during WWII in India and Burma, enlisting as a private soldier then gaining a commission and the Military Cross. After the war he studied medicine at Oriel College, Oxford and St Bart’s in London, then became a GP, but it is his wartime record which brings him to the attention of intelligence chief Douglas MacGillivray, who decides that being a doctor attending a malaria conference in Tehran is the ideal cover for a bit of espionage. (MacGillivray even gives orders to his ‘Quartermaster’ to ‘fix up a few medical gadgets – hypodermics that shoot gramophone needles … stuff a doctor could conceal in what he usually carries in his bag’.)
Naturally, Love is a willing recruit and is soon off to sultry Persia (Iran) on a mission which ends in the frozen north of Canada, although throughout his adventures, he remains the likeable amateur rather than the hardened, dedicated agent. At first sight, Dr Jason Love seems more of a clone of John Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay than of James Bond. Like Hannay, Love is a member of several gentlemen’s clubs in St James’s and the books contain many Buchan references, emphasising the hero’s amateur status. At one point Love even thinks: ‘The trouble with espionage … was that there were no supermen’.
But Bond-like trademarks are everywhere. His name has been carefully chosen (‘The name’s Love. Jason Love’); he has a favourite drink – Bacardi and lime (quite an exotic mixture in 1964); he is well versed in unarmed combat (a Brown Belt in judo); is happily single considering that having a wife results in ‘strangling individuality’ in both parties and thus employs a housekeeper. Like Bond he enjoys big, powerful cars with thrusting pistons and booming exhausts, though not Bentleys, but rather supercharged American Cord roadsters about which he is quite fanatical, as was author Leasor. Love also shared many of Bond’s attitudes to women, as in Passport to Peril in 1966: ‘She was not really pretty, but vivacious, cheerful, extrovert; a girl who would laugh easily, but possibly not a virgin. But then, what girl over seventeen was nowadays? His ideals were out of date.’
Whether Leasor’s determined bachelor hero really did see virginity as an ‘ideal’ or whether he was writing with tongue firmly in cheek is not quite clear. In other places, he is certainly writing with a cynical smile when describing some of the more ridiculous procedures and protocols of the spying trade, but if Leasor (and Love) do not always seem to be taking the trappings of the espionage thriller seriously, the plots were well-crafted enough once the reader accepted the regular coincidence that Love’s involvement invariably came when he was on holiday (skiing or relaxing in the Bahamas) or en route to a medical conference or a convention of enthusiasts of vintage automobiles in America. Or, indeed, that key characters in several books are murdered in front of Love’s very eyes in Chapter One, which must be doubly disheartening for a spy and a doctor.
And for a humble country GP, Love did get around quite a bit, finding the time – and enough available locums to cover his surgery – to have missions in Iran, the Himalayas, the Bahamas, Mexico, Syria, and Beirut. The ‘technicolour backgrounds’, as one critic described them, certainly fitted the Bond mould and were signposted by having the word ‘passport’ in four of the eight Love titles as they appeared in the UK (though not the USA). The ‘Passport’ brand could have indicated a long-running series and perhaps there were suggestions of a film franchise, but that hope may have disappeared when Passport to Oblivion was filmed, rather indifferently, in 1967 as Where the Spies Are, the film starring, perhaps inevitably, David Niven as Love. Soon afterwards, Leasor dropped the ‘Passport’ tag and for the first collection of Dr Love short stories in 1969 – seven of them – the anthology went under the all-too-obvious title of A Week of Love. Predictably, later adventures went under punning titles such as Love-All and Love and the Land Beyond, but in truth, Dr Jason Love’s heyday did not extend much beyond the 1960s and James Leasor turned his energies to (bestselling) historical novels and war stories, many set in India or the Far East.
Was Jason Love ‘the urbane man’s James Bond’ as the Daily Express proclaimed him? The truly urbane man would surely have favoured William Haggard’s Whitehall spymaster Charles Russell – and in the following decade, George Smiley. Love was not as tough as the Bond of Fleming’s books, nor as cool as the big screen Bond as played by Sean Connery.
For the younger thriller reader, Love came across as a spy of the Richard Hannay generation and Love’s obsession with vintage American roadsters, when their own ambitions were limited to a £600 Ford Cortina, seemed a disconnect, almost a mid-life crisis. You could allow James Bond an antique Bentley (or a well-armed Aston Martin in the films) because he was a professional special agent who went through hell, high water, and lots of women, all for Queen and country. Jason Love was a country doctor, for goodness’ sake, and one with lots of free time for very expensive holidays, who occasionally (actually quite regularly) stumbled into dangerous situations, though the reader was never fully convinced that Love was ever in mortal danger.
Perhaps the problem was that Dr Love was actually an unloveable character, not quite ruthless or dangerous enough to be envied by young males and nowhere near sexy enough to be lusted after by young females. Despite that single, lacklustre appearance on film, sales of the early Love thrillers were said to have topped four million copies and the books were translated into nineteen languages, but much of his success was down to the fact that he appeared within months of the death of Ian Fleming and avid readers were faced, or so they thought, with the prospect that there would be no more James Bond books.
CHARLES HOOD
At almost exactly the same time that Dr Jason Love made his debut, so too did Charles Hood, modestly billed by his publisher as ‘the toughest secret agent in the business’ and also the ‘slickest of the Super-Bonds’, a verdict which was to be supported by The Spectator who called his arrival, in Hammerhead in 1964, ‘far and away the toughest of post-Bond thrillers’. Tough Hood certainly was, and the five novels which featured him were full of what reviewers liked to call ‘red-blooded action’.
Hammerhead, Pan, 1966
Created by Stephen Coulter under the pen-name James Mayo, Charles Hood may have been closer to James Bond than casual readers at the time suspected. A journalist and foreign correspondent, Coulter was said to have served on General Eisenhower’s staff during WWII and had become a friend and colleague of Ian Fleming, even – perhaps – advising him on the casino scenes in Casino Royale, though evidence for this, or any other definitive background material on Coulter, is difficult to come by.8
What is certain is that, by 1964, he was already a succe
ssful author under both names, having produced flamboyant fictional accounts of the lives of Dostoevsky (The Devil Inside) and Guy de Maupassant (Damned Shall Be Desire) as Coulter and what one reviewer called ‘the best thriller since Brighton Rock’ in The Quickness of the Hand in 1952, as James Mayo. In the mid-Sixties he began to write adventure thrillers as Coulter and used the Mayo name for his attempt to crack the post-Fleming Bond market.0i Critic Barry Forshaw has described Mayo’s Charles Hood novels as ‘Fleming with the volume turned up’ and the frequent violence is certainly as brutal as anything in the Bond books, if not more so. There are knives, guns, hypodermics, heads bashed in (frequently), being lashed with barbed wire, acid throwing, stuffing ash and dirt down an assailant’s throat (after ripping off his bushy moustache!), assault with a nail-studded club and on one occasion, finding himself without a gun, Hood resorts to stabbing an opponent under the chin with a ballpoint pen (a silver Parker, naturally). The sex scenes were also pretty brutal, the norm seemingly to be casual rape even though the female may, on occasion, be a willing participant. One famous scene in Hammerhead, probably quite daring in its day but uncomfortably risible now, is where Charles Hood and one of the standard femmes fatales found in this sort of novel, seem to be hitting it off – or getting it on – having discovered a mutual attraction. Suddenly, though, ‘Hood threw off restraint. He was rampant. He saw nothing, thought of nothing but the raging desire in him to have her with force, with infinite urgency, with utmost erotic appetite.’