by Mike Ripley
In the main, Wilde follows orders without question, even when it involves a dangerous mission behind the Iron Curtain into Poland and Russia, without speaking a word of Polish or Russian. He flits from country to country with remarkable ease, little emotion, and no humour. Wherever he is, whatever the setting, Wilde is simply biding his time before he can bludgeon his way to victory in books with punchy titles such as The Predator, The Expurgator, the slightly less punchy The Fascinator, and in The Captivator pays something of a homage to the classic spy story The Riddle of the Sands. For all the macho posturing and tough guy philosophy, however, the Wilde books do contain decent, or at least three-dimensional, female characters.
There were nine books in the series up to 1975 when the author tired of his creation. Hardback editions in the UK (now quite collectible) were distinguished by a gun logo – a silenced Luger pistol – but the Arrow paperback editions opted for standard girl-holding-a-gun illustrations, which made them almost indistinguishable from the general pack of crime thrillers of the period.
That first novel, The Eliminator, was filmed as Danger Route in 1967, starring Gordon Jackson, Sam Wanamaker and Diana Dors (again), with Richard Johnson as Jonas Wilde. Johnson, a respected Shakespearean actor, had been film director Terence Young’s recommendation for the role of James Bond when Dr. No was being planned and earlier in 1967 he had taken the role of an action hero from an earlier era, Bulldog Drummond in the updated version of Deadlier Than the Male.
MICHAEL JAGGER
Always ‘Michael’, never ‘Mike’ and certainly not ‘Mick’, Jagger was the secret agent created by William Garner in Overkill, published in March 1966, coincidentally the month when the Rolling Stones released their Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) album. Not that Garner’s Michael Jagger was ever likely to be mistaken for a member (or fan of) his namesake.
When we first meet Jagger, he is an agent in disgrace and looking for freelance work (through the personal columns of newspapers), ideally jobs with a fair amount of danger involved, for Jagger is something of an adrenalin-junkie. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a bruiser and he needs to be as he soon finds himself involved with mad scientists and a plot to sabotage the world’s food supplies with a manufactured strain of wheat rust. There are beatings-up and torture scenes in abundance, including one reminiscent of the laser-beam scene in the film of Goldfinger and one where Jagger’s fingernails are treated in a particularly nasty way whilst a gramophone at maximum volume plays the music of ‘a guitar group’ with a ‘fierce deafening beat’ to cover his screams. The assumption, which is spelled out, being ‘Scream your head off and everyone thinks you’re a teenager’; a common enough attitude in 1966 for a 45-year-old author.
Despite favourable reviews, Michael Jagger never really featured as a serious rival to James Bond despite paperback editions of his adventures (there were four) featuring the by now obligatory female-in-underwear-holding-a-pistol. In fact, Garner was attempting a sort of Fleming/Le Carré hybrid which did not quite come off and Jagger was side-lined by 1974. Garner’s later spy thrillers were much more considered and more successful, his characters less abrasive and, frankly, less obnoxious than Michael Jagger. That repository of all knowledge when it comes to fictional spy series, Randall Masteller, once described Michael Jagger as ‘a man who doesn’t suffer fools being put in a room full of them’.
PHILIP MCALPINE
The name Philip McAlpine may not be immediately recognisable as a Sixties’ secret agent, but the description – and title of the first novel in which he featured – The Dolly, Dolly Spy9 certainly is. A character who could only have been created in the Swinging Sixties, Philip McAlpine was the first ‘Mod’ spy, a young twenty-something who likes fast cars, flying, girls (‘dolly birds’) in mini-skirts, and marijuana. His creator, Adam Diment, was a young twenty-something with a flat in Chelsea, clearly a dedicated follower of fashion, and invariably photographed in the company of mini-skirted females. The newspapers and magazines loved him and so he was photographed quite a lot for an unknown debut author of a spy thriller published in January 1967.
McAlpine was another reluctant recruit to the British secret service, this time a department signified as CI-6, as a result of some judicious blackmail having been caught with a block of hashish. He was, of course, more than competent when it came to being a secret agent and the plot of The Dolly, Dolly Spy is solid, conventional thriller material, having nothing to do with Carnaby Street or ‘Swinging London’ per se, except for the attitude of the younger characters. McAlpine’s preference for a relaxing joint rather than a vodka Martini to mitigate the rigours of his existence as a spy, however, was the thing which intrigued the media and probably boosted sales. When the American paperback edition was published, McAlpine was labelled in no uncertain terms ‘England’s pro-hash anti-hero who outstrips all Bonds’ and when the follow up, the unsubtly titled The Bang Bang Birds, went into paperback in 1969, the year of Woodstock, it had a wonderfully camp psychedelic cartoon cover.
In fact there was actually very little drug-taking in the books and only the most hard-line disciple of moral crusader Mary Whitehouse would have regarded them as a threat to society, though they did contain a healthy streak of anti-establishment and anti-imperialist sentiment. The hype, however, tended to overshadow the content, but McAlpine was undoubtedly a character who certainly struck a chord with trendy male readers. One of the most successful British crime writers of recent years, Peter James, who was 19 when The Dolly, Dolly Spy came out, certainly remembers McAlpine: ‘I thought he was hugely cool. James Bond was a fantasy figure, remote … from a different world, almost a different planet. But somehow Philip McAlpine was more accessible’.10
The Bang Bang Birds, Pan, 1969
Diment may have been very serious about his hero’s trendy image, but he was not above slipping in the odd dig about the genre he was writing in. At one point in The Dolly, Dolly Spy, characters conclude that ‘the sexy spy is going out of vogue’ and that it was ‘all computers these days’, though thankfully ‘the Ruskies still appreciate the gentle arts of seduction’.
There were rumours of a six-book contract with a hefty advance, although only four books were delivered, and talk of a film version starring David Hemmings, then the darling of fashionable London, which came to nothing. And then, after the fourth book, Think Inc., published in 1971, the high profile and very photogenic author, Adam Diment, simply disappeared, dropping out of both the London and spy scenes completely, leaving behind the legend of The Missing, Missing Author.
The Man Himself
If none of these ‘rival’ Bonds, even with their eye-catchingly garish paperback covers and the occasional outing on the big screen, had the longevity to compete with the real James Bond, why not simply continue to support the one true original? Who else could replace James Bond, after his creator’s death, other than James Bond?
It was a question which was to sorely vex Glidrose Produc-tions, the family-run company which controlled Ian Fleming’s literary estate (now Ian Fleming Publications Ltd.) in the mid-Sixties as ‘Bond-mania’ took hold. In 1965, the year after Fleming’s death, 27 million copies of his books were sold in eighteen different languages11 but the all-important source material was running out, with only the short story volume Octopussy and The Living Daylights (plus the paperback edition of The Spy Who Loved Me delayed by Fleming in his lifetime) still to hit the bookshops, where the shelves were groaning with would-be-Bond replacements just as cinema screens across the country were offering double-bills of spy films.
It seemed likely that someone would write a new ‘James Bond’ novel which, as long as it was not ‘passed off’ as if written by Ian Fleming, however undesirable, would be perfectly legal. The better plan would surely be to select a trusted author who could continue the series with the blessing of Fleming’s literary executors. One of the first candidates was South African Geoffrey Jenkins, a journalist friend of Fleming and the bestselling autho
r of several adventure thrillers in the Alistair MacLean mould.
Jenkins is said to have been consulted by Fleming for background on diamond mining (and smuggling) in South Africa and in the course of their discussions had come up with a plot-line involving gold mining. In 1966, Jenkins, a writer much admired by Harry Saltzman, blew the dust (gold or otherwise) off the idea and produced a Bond novel under the title Per Fine Ounce, but the book did not find favour with Glidrose Productions and never saw the light of day. (At least not as a James Bond book. More than 40 years later, South African Peter Vollmer, working with the Jenkins estate, used the outline – the complete manuscript is thought lost – for his 2014 thriller Per Fine Ounce, featuring ‘Commander Geoffrey Peace’, a hero of Jenkins’ books rather than Commander James Bond.).
Geoffrey Jenkins may have been film producer Harry Saltzman’s first choice as a continuation author, but for Glidrose, the hot favourite was that English man-of-letters and Bond enthusiast, Kingsley Amis. In 1965, Amis had already produced The James Bond Dossier, now something of a collector’s item, which must have acted as the perfect job application. Glidrose commissioned Amis and the result, in 1968, was Colonel Sun written under the pen-name Robert Markham, and although commercially it did well enough, the critics received it with somewhat mixed reviews. Whatever the reason, there were no more ‘continuations’ until the franchise was offered to John Gardner in 1981.
Perhaps no one could actually replace James Bond, not even James Bond; not that that stopped writers trying.12
The Passengers
There were plenty of other passengers trying to board the spy fiction express as authors struggled to find a character with sex appeal, a scintilla of originality which would appeal to film producers, and, most important of all, longevity which could result in a long-running series. Between 1964 and 1969 – the period between the Bond films Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – there were at least thirty-two secret agent heroes and, to a lesser degree, heroines, launched into a market which showed no signs of bottoming out, on the promise of a long-running series.
However, who now remembers Kyle Brandeis, Giles Yeoman, Gerald Otley, Simon Larren, Nicholas Pym (a historical take on the Bond fever with a sexy spy working for Oliver Cromwell) or Eddie Brown? Or even Freya Matthews, Lady Jennifer Norrington or Katy Touchfeather? They all had their shot at spy immortality but few made it on to the big screen (Gerald Otley being the notable exception) and most of their careers, though not necessarily those of their authors, were over by 1970.
The problem was that the imitators of James Bond were, in the main, just imitators, and pale ones at that. Ian Fleming may have been a fantasist who had seen in James Bond a heroic version of the man-of-action he had never been, but at least he had the lifestyle and background (a privileged one) to create exotic characters and plots to fit his fantasies. Not all would-be thriller writers were so fortunate and their Bond-like heroes, usually the creations of middle-aged men, were sad pieces of wish-fulfilment at best and distinctly out of kilter with the increasing liberal values and conventions of the Sixties. Many a would-be thriller writer seemed to ignore the fact that Fleming had been writing (mostly) in the 1950s and times had changed, but the Fleming/Bond formula of sex, action, and exotic locations seemed well worth copying. The advent of the Bond films added more elements to the formula – more girls, usually with double-entendre names, and gadgets galore – and these too were avidly copied.
To take, perhaps unfairly, just one example of many: the adventures of Dr David Grant, ‘NATO’s most ruthless secret agent’ as created by Scottish author George B. Mair. Making his debut in 1963 David Grant was to appear in a new novel each year until 1973 and his exploits even earned him a silhouette pistol logo – suspiciously like the stylised one used on the posters for the Bond films – on the Arrow paperback editions. In Live, Love and Cry, his third outing in 1965 (with shades of Live and Let Die in the title), the exotic location was slightly less exotic than usual, with most of the action set in Scotland. David Grant’s evil opponents were, as usual, drawn from the international criminal organisation known by the acronym – wait for it – SATAN, standing for the Society for Activation of Terror, Anarchy, and Nihilism, a body somewhat reminiscent of SPECTRE. Leaving aside the philosophical conundrum of how such a body, assuming it ruled the world, would enforce anarchy and nihilism, SATAN is certainly on the ball by using one of the iconic symbols of the Sixties, the contraceptive pill, in its latest dastardly plot. Actually it involves a newly developed contraceptive drug known as PENTER-15 which, if introduced into the water supply of a city (for example, Edinburgh), would prompt a rapid decline in the birth rate, no doubt leading eventually to anarchy and nihilism. It is up to David Grant, the lead agent of NATO’s crack ASAD unit (the Administrative Department controlling Security measures relating to Attack and Defence, if you have to ask) to foil the plot and track down the leader of SATAN, who is code-named ‘Zero’.
The action scenes include an attack by helicopters using napalm on a Scottish hillside ordered by the British Prime Minister to flush out a pair of snipers, and then lots of close-quarter encounters where agent Grant gets to show off his personal armoury of gas bombs (secreted in the heels of his shoes) and a fountain pen which shoots anti-personnel rockets! Further similarities with recent Bond films, almost certainly coincidental, included a femme fatale called Titty Wise (rather than Pussy Galore), and a climactic fight on a jet airplane where Grant’s girlfriend, Deirdre, pulls the deadly Parker fountain pen from her stocking-top and fires a rocket at arch villain Zero. The rocket goes through the cockpit window and the fall in cabin pressure almost sucks him out of the plane, whilst Grant manfully wrestles with the controls.
Then there’s the sex – and the sexism. Grant duly does his heroic duty by the grateful Deirdre, who meekly espouses her own philosophy of life as: ‘A woman should be a companion, nurse, playmate and mistress. But if she slips up on one of them the man will find a bedworthy popsie elsewhere.’ Though the inevitable bedroom scene, when we get there, is actually quite tender, Grant spends an awful lot of time controlling the amount and type of alcohol Deirdre drinks, including a rather boorish lecture on why it was acceptable to drink white wine (a ‘good, honest’ Niersteiner) rather than red with steak and the advice that she should take ‘activated charcoal’ pills to soak up the alcohol.
Live, Love and Cry, Arrow, 1966
The Naked Runner, Coronet, 1966
Whilst treating Deirdre to a meal at the Savoy – smoked trout with a half-bottle of Montrachet, turtle soup ‘lightened by a glass of Musigny’, and steak washed down with a 1945 Chateau Margaux (the Savoy clearly not sharing the author’s views on white wine with red meat) – plus an apéritif of Champagne, Solera Malmsey with dessert, and a Green Chartreuse over coffee, Dr Grant scoffs at Deirdre’s question ‘Are you wanting to get me plastered?’ In fact he laughs at her for: ‘She had still to learn that good wine taken with a substantial and long-drawn-out meal was harmless as mother’s milk.’
The erotic set-piece of the book, however, comes when agent Grant has to infiltrate that other stalwart of Sixties’ decadence – the sex party. In this case he embarks on a game called ‘Prestwick Roulette’, described as ‘an orgiastic cross between strip-poker and the old-fashioned Paul Jones (dance)’. Now our hero shows far more modesty than James Bond would and has taken precautions to rig the odds by wearing, under his Harris wool suit ‘three singlets, four pairs of underpants, two pairs of socks and a jock-strap’. Not surprisingly, Grant is the last (clothed) man standing as the last round of striptease is – astonishingly – performed to music from a gramophone playing George Mitchell’s Black and White Minstrels singing Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey.
There was a more serious potential usurper for Bond’s throne, albeit briefly, from across the Channel. Between 1964 and 1966, eight novels by French bestselling author Jean Bruce appeared as Corgi paperbacks, with mostly white covers reminiscent of Ray Hawkey�
�s concept for The Ipcress File featuring a man, a gun, and a girl. Bruce’s hero, created as early as 1949, was the dashing Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, although far better known by his code name ‘OSS 117’ (as in Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA), and his adventures had regularly sold up to two million copies a year in France. Jean Bruce was at the height of his popularity domestically when he died in a 100 mph car crash in 1963, the same year that a series of OSS 117 films began, inspired by the French release of Dr. No. The OSS 117 books were written, after Bruce’s death, by his widow and then by his son and daughter, and an attempt, albeit a light-hearted one, was made to revive the film franchise in 2006.
The ultimate prize might well have been a long-running series of books, and hopefully films, but the spy craze also prompted some excellent ‘one-off’ thrillers which have stood the test of time if not public memory. Notable among these were The Naked Runner by Francis Clifford, which was published in 1966 and filmed starring Frank Sinatra in 1967, and, that same year, A Dandy in Aspic by Derek Marlowe, (also quickly filmed, starring Laurence Harvey). In 1968, that revolutionary year, the ultimate threat to national security was imagined in the disgracefully forgotten satirical thriller The Man Who Held the Queen to Ransom and Sent Parliament Packing by Peter Van Greenway, setting the standard for the British political conspiracy thrillers such as A Very British Coup and House of Cards which followed two decades later.