by Mike Ripley
And of course he does – twice. He is about to start Round Three when the realisation dawns on him: ‘She had given him an erotic drug’.
Ostensibly, Charles Hood is a sort of freelance secret agent working occasionally for British Intelligence but more often for ‘The Circle’, a syndicate of top London firms with fingers in many a pie. As a hero, Hood is strangely colourless and can demand a woman hand over her wire-framed bra in order to fashion a lock pick from its wiring without a wisecrack or a double-entendre other than the sexist matter-of-fact statement that she looks ‘better without it’. His cover is as an art dealer and connoisseur, which allows him frequent trips to Paris and New York and he has a track-record as a sportsman, having competed as a boxer, part of a two-man bobsleigh team, and as a pentathlete. But, let us face it, these books, with titles such as Let Sleeping Girls Lie and Shamelady were not read for their insights into the art world or sporting expertise.
They did sell, however, especially when, in 1966, they began to appear as Pan paperbacks with an easily recognisable Charles Hood trademark icon of a hand emerging from a cuff-linked shirt sleeve holding a snub-nosed revolver. The Pan edition of Hammerhead was reprinted twice in 1966, twice in 1968, and then again in 1969 and 1971.
They were of their time and, one suspects, entirely read by men suffering withdrawal symptoms from the lack of an annual Bond book. When Mayo’s 1968 novel Once in a Lifetime appeared in paperback it was re-titled as Sergeant Death – presumably to give it a more masculine, rather than Shakespearean, feel – and the cover featured a supine blonde woman in a white bikini. The publishers even thought it worth inserting a credit: ‘front cover bikini by Nolbarden, Morny House, Regent Street, London W.1’ but it is doubtful that the typical purchaser of the book was looking for fashion tips.
Hammerhead was filmed, somewhat half-heartedly, in 1968 with American Vince Edwards as Charles Hood, Judy Geeson and Diana Dors, but Charles Hood’s fictional career was in effect over by 1969 and Coulter abandoned the James Mayo name for his later thrillers.
BOYSIE OAKES
According to Donald McCormick’s Who’s Who in Spy Fiction, John Gardner ‘detested the character of James Bond’ and suggests that a general feeling of ‘anti-Bondism’ prompted many a would-be writer in the Sixties. Whatever his motives, when Gardner created the character of Brian Ian ‘Boysie’ Oakes, he appeared to give him all the well-known Bond traits: he was a ruthless assassin, fond of the high life, and not averse to dropping the names of branded luxury goods. He travelled in style in a E-Type Jaguar, was paid the outrageous salary of £4,000 a year, and was, it goes without saying, extremely successful with the ladies to the extent that he has the ‘De Luxe’ edition of the Kama Sutra permanently at his bedside.
Except that Boysie Oakes was a fraud and he knew it; and so did the reader. Making his first appearance in The Liquidator in that spy-crowded month of December 1964, Boysie Oakes was not so much a clone of James Bond, but rather an antidote to him. He even takes a perverse pride that his initials ‘BO’ – the popular shorthand for ‘body odour’ – are monogrammed on various personal items.
After accidentally rescuing a British agent in wartime Paris by killing two assassins, Oakes is tagged as a stone-cold killer so when the rescued agent becomes a post-war spymaster in the Department of Special Security and is himself in need of a tame assassin, who does he remember but the army sergeant who saved his life in Paris? Broke, and at a loose end, Boysie takes on the job of official Liquidator, code-named ‘L’, in return for a slice of the high-flying secret agent life. The only problem is he has a terrible fear of flying, or killing anyone, and of being found out as, basically, the womanising coward he is. To get round the main obstacle – that he can afford the luxury lifestyle only if he assassinates people – he hires a personal hitman called Griffin to do the dirty work, having found him in a Soho club called, improbably, The Strangulated Tortoise.
The Liquidator, Corgi, 1970
With the killing end of things sorted out and his salary rolling in to his bank account, Boysie is all set for a dirty weekend on the French Riviera with his boss’s secretary, but of course gets involved in a life-and-death mission involving several willing females, a villain who admires John Buchan, an assassination attempt on a prominent member of the Royal Family and the hi-jacking of a top-secret RAF jet fighter.
From the start, it was clear that The Liquidator was not meant to be taken too seriously and it was welcomed as a breath of fresh air on the booming spy fantasy scene. The book was immediately filmed in 1965, with an Australian this time, Rod Taylor, playing Boysie Oakes and the splendidly lugubrious Eric Sykes as Griffin, the real professional killer. There was even a theme song sung by Shirley Bassey. The film’s release was heralded by posters which proclaimed: ‘Meet the Secret Service’s secret weapon. His lips are on fire. His gun’s not for hire. He fills girls with desire.’ In the film, Boysie’s E-Type Jaguar has the personalised number-plate BO 1.
The Evening Standard has reviewed the novel as ‘in the best James Bond tradition’ but it really was anything but. There were to be seven more Boysie Oakes books up to 1975, including Amber Nine which pitted Boysie against the sadistic headmistress of a Swiss girls’ finishing school called Klara Thirel (with her anagram surname).
In his own chauvinistic and pig-headed way, Boysie Oakes was a likeable misfit if not a total hero. He was cowardly, vain, lazy and greedy, and putty in the hands of any woman who flashed a garter belt or a stocking top at him, but the reader never wished him harm because he was a bit of an oaf who couldn’t help himself.
Many years later (in 2001), Gardner was to admit: ‘Oakes went on to be the lead character in eight books and though I have denied it many times – he was of course a complete piss-take of J. Bond.’
John Gardner went on to become one of the most prolific British thriller writers of the last quarter of the twentieth century and, for someone who supposedly only created Boysie Oakes out of a loathing of James Bond, he was later to become the official ‘continuation’ author for the Ian Fleming estate and ended up writing more James Bond novels than Fleming had.
QUILLER
Was Quiller (no first name) a natural successor to James Bond? He was certainly a rival and he had the staying power – there were to be 19 Quiller novels (the last appearing in 1996), a film and a BBC television series. He was no ersatz imitation of Bond, he was a new and startlingly original character when he made his debut in early 1965 in The Berlin Memorandum, a thriller which was not quite spy fantasy but something more than realistic spy fiction.
Under the pen-name Adam Hall, Elleston Trevor – itself a pen-name originally but one the author liked so much he adopted it legally – produced in The Berlin Memorandum ‘the best of the new-style spy thrillers’ according to Life Magazine. The reviews were ecstatic and celebrity endorsement came from such as Kingsley Amis – ‘The best espionage novel I have read in 1965’ – and that old master of the detective story John Dickson Carr – ‘One of the best spy novels I’ve ever read’.
Praise was not new to Elleston Trevor, he was a well-established adventure novelist and thriller writer, but as Adam Hall he certainly seemed to have hit the jackpot. The story was of a lone British agent thrown into a grim and gritty Berlin to root out a cell of neo-Nazis; movie rights were sold immediately and the film, written by Harold Pinter and starring George Segal and Alec Guinness, went on general release in the UK in January 1967 as The Quiller Memorandum. The Fontana paperback edition due out that year was similarly retitled to tie in with the film. The book was to be reissued (not just reprinted) at least nine times in the UK and the USA over the next thirty years.
The key to its success – and that of the eighteen volumes which followed – was the character of Quiller himself. Spy fiction (or spy fantasy) had seen nothing quite like him. He is a real lone wolf who neither drinks nor smokes, only works alone, and takes on the most dangerous missions for the Bureau, a very shadowy part of British Intel
ligence, confident that he has a security rating of ‘9’ meaning he is reliable under torture. He knows firearms and ballistics, though never carries a gun. He knows unarmed combat, but also sleep-mechanisms, psychotropic drugs, fast-driving techniques, G-forces in jet aircraft, and the personality patterns of suicides. He is also a very experienced agent; a professional. Quiller is no part-timer or unwilling recruit to espionage; Quiller doesn’t have a day-job, except as a cover, and apparently no private life. He is a high-tech spy who lives on his nerves and relies on his reflexes, both having been honed to perfection. The reader is never in doubt that Quiller is always in danger, never off-duty, and never relaxed. Quiller’s world is deadly, and Quiller would have it no other way.
It was a new departure for the spy thriller. There were the exotic foreign locations familiar from Fleming (Berlin to Bangkok, Poland, the Sahara, Hong Kong, China, Russia, Cambodia) and, like Bond, Quiller only occasionally worked in England. There was also the trade-craft of spying familiar from Deighton and Le Carré, plus Deighton’s love of technical information, including nuggets such as the fact that ‘The bullet from a small 8mm short-trigger Pelmann and Rosenthal Mk. IV spins in the region of two thousand revolutions per second and at very close range the flesh laceration is severe, due to heavy scoring by the large number of lands in the rifling.’
The average reader, almost certainly male, would be suitable convinced by this exposition of gun lore, even if an armourer or gunsmith would raise a quizzical eyebrow or two. In Quiller’s world, it did not really matter. Hall was a good enough thriller writer to keep the plot barrelling along, tightening the tension at every stage. The reader was willingly taken in because Quiller was clearly a survivor and the really intriguing thing was always: how was he going to survive this one?
There are still loyal Quiller fans out there, with their own favourite books, and The Quiller Memorandum is shown regularly on British television, although the 13-episode BBC series from 1975, starring Michael Jayston as Quiller, has never been repeated.
Quiller was a complex character but something of an iceberg, with the bulk of his personality hidden under the surface. His finely-tuned reflexes gave him at times the air of a dangerous automaton, a trait which had not been seen before, in spy fiction, or done so well again until the ‘Jason Bourne’ films forty years later.
MODESTY BLAISE
Invariably labelled ‘the female James Bond’, Modesty Blaise began life as a cartoon strip action heroine, written by Peter O’Donnell and drawn by artist Jim Holdaway. Modesty’s back story is as a young displaced person after WWII who forges a career in organised crime in Tangiers with the aid of her (platonic) partner Willie Garvin. Inevitably, such a self-reliant adventuress is called upon to help out the British security service in the shape of Sir Gerald Tarrant, who becomes almost a surrogate father figure.
Peter O’Donnell was an experienced writer of comic strips for Fleet Street newspapers by the time he was asked by the Daily Express in 1962 to come up with a new ‘strip’ – something the risqué Modesty was frequently accused of doing. The idea of a female action heroine seemed to have potential (Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale in The Avengers was blazing the trail on television) but Modesty’s criminal background was thought ‘unsuitable’ for readers of the Daily Express. The cartoon strip was quickly snapped up by the Evening Standard instead and first appeared on 13 May 1963. The strip was eventually to be syndicated in seventy-six newspapers in thirty-five countries and is still being reprinted in collections in the twenty-first century.
Modesty’s fondness for somewhat arcane hand-held weapons (including a Kung Fu-style ‘yawara stick’, an épée and a quarterstaff), and Willie Garvin’s proficiency with a throwing knife (he usually carried two) ensured there was plenty of violent action and Modesty may not have been as morally loose as the Express management had imagined, but she was certainly – as Jessica Rabbit was famously to attest much later – ‘drawn that way’.
To seriously compete with James Bond, however, there had to be a novel (preferably a long running series) and a film, and both arrived fairly quickly but not necessarily in the right order. Peter O’Donnell’s novel Modesty Blaise appeared in April 1965 and was based on the screenplay he had written for the film being directed by Joseph Losey. Unfortunately, little of O’Donnell’s work survived into the shooting script and when the film was released in May 1966 as a bizarre spoof of the whole spy genre, starring Monica Vitti, Terence Stamp and Dirk Bogarde, it infuriated fans, not to mention the author. Dedicated fans of Modesty maintain that the first ‘proper’ novel was Sabre-Tooth which was published shortly after the film came out and nine more plus two collections of short stories followed up to 1996.
The adventures of Modesty Blaise were later successfully adapted for radio but there were no more films. The debut Modesty Blaise was so bad that not even die-hard fans wanted more. The theme song contains the line: ‘She’ll turn your head, though she might use a judo hold’ and most critics agreed it was not Joseph Losey’s finest hour. It was a movie which would have gone straight to DVD, if only DVDs had been around in 1966.
ANNA ZORDAN
Of Hungarian–American parentage, but a cheerful recruit to ‘Britain’s most secret intelligence organisation’ (operating from Kent under the cover of a film production company and hence known as ‘The Studio’) where she quickly established her value to Britain as worth ‘one nuclear submarine’, Anna Zordan was a direct rival not to Bond, perhaps, so much as to Modesty Blaise, but who had the misfortune to appear in print at almost exactly the same time and Anna is sadly totally forgotten today. On her first appearance in 1965 in The Chinese Visitor by James Eastwood, she was greeted as ‘a new and exciting recruit’ (The Spectator) and ‘from the same dorm as Cathy Gale and Modesty Blaise but a shade more sexually precocious’ (New Statesman). Eastwood’s novel was ‘a spy thriller with a difference; a first novel of great power’ according to The Guardian and the Sunday Times found it ‘utterly expert and accomplished’.
It was indeed an impressive first novel (though Eastwood was an experienced TV and film scriptwriter) and fitted perfectly into the established spy fantasy template: an international conspiracy of mercenary spies backed by Red China from a base in Albania, a sequence of assassinations from Vienna to London to Thailand which could provoke a world war, clearly knowledgeable about European locations including Germany and Greece, ruthless use of violence, an obligatory though relatively mild torture scene, fast cars, aeroplanes, and a heroine who is quite willing to sleep with the enemy if that’s what gets the job done – in one adventure she is described (by the villain) as ‘a latter-day, mini-skirted, swinging Mata Hari’. Her cheerful acceptance of the role of ‘whore spy’, not to mention her unrequited love and lust for her father-figure spy boss, would, however, raise issues of Anna’s self-esteem among many a modern reader. At the time, though, it must have been seen as a clever female riposte to James Bond’s male chauvinism.
The Chinese Visitor, Pan, 1967
It was almost certainly Anna Zordan’s implied promiscuity – she admits to enjoying sex – that resulted, when The Chinese Visitor went into paperback in 1967, in the book having a cover showing a bikini-clad female form with a pistol suggestively holstered in the bikini briefs. When the second Anna Zordan adventure, originally entitled Little Dragon from Peking, came out in paperback in 1969, the cover was a female nude, holding a gun (of course) and for modesty a Chinese fan – and the title had been changed to the much more suggestive Seduce and Destroy. The third and final novel in the Zordan series was published first in America as Diamonds Are Deadly in 1969 but was retitled Come Die with Me for the UK. When that appeared as a Pan paperback in 1971, it had, inevitably, a cover featuring a young female with a gun, but this time fully clothed (almost) in a red satin hot pants outfit.
The paperback covers, so typical of the ‘kiss-kiss, bang-bang’ era, did the Anna Zordan books a disservice for they were far better written than much Sixties’ spy f
antasy fare. There was sex and violence but it was not overdone, nor too graphic; in fact, the heroine’s attitude to sex was remarkably adult. The books also contained some tongue-in-cheek observations on the boom in spy fiction, as when one character observes, ‘The profession was becoming too damned attractive, too many jobs chasing too many men and women, usually of the wrong type. They would be forming a spies union next, claiming minimum rates, unemployment benefit, pensions … They would even start putting in a man’s passport; profession – spy!’
If there had been even a half-decent film adaptation of The Chinese Visitor made in 1966, it might have given the disappointing Modesty Blaise a run for its money at the cinema box office and this interesting female character may just have survived into the next decade. She certainly deserved to.
JONAS WILDE
Although he could pass as a ‘gentleman yachtsman’ or a ‘slightly seedy playboy’, secret agent Jonas Wilde is a professional assassin with 32 confirmed kills to his credit by the time he decides to retire in, standard for spy fiction, his first adventure, The Eliminator, published in 1966.
Written by ‘Andrew York’ – one of at least a dozen pen-names used by the prolific Christopher Nicole, who was to author more than 200 books in his long career – Jonas Wilde was the ultimate blunt instrument, whose favoured modus operandi was to get up close and kill his victims with a lethal karate chop. Wilde has few flamboyant touches, apart from a weakness for ridiculous cocktails which involve white Crème de menthe, grenadine, dry vermouth, orange juice, and brandy. He plays chess, smokes a pipe, and is never happier than when on his yacht berthed in the Channel Islands. This is important as he uses the Channel Islands as part of ‘The Route’ by which he can travel abroad, kill whoever the secret service wants killing, and then return via Guernsey or Jersey, making it appear as if he had never left the UK.