Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  And the flow of spy films in to British cinemas seemed inexhaustible. There were regular entries in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series based on the television show and four ‘Matt Helm’ films starring Dean Martin in weak, comic adaptations of the ‘American James Bond’ novels by Donald Hamilton, though both the epithet and the films did the novels a disservice. One British effort, also a spoof on Bond, featured Tom Adams as Charles Vine in Licensed To Kill (1965) and Where the Bullets Fly (1966) and though they had their charm, and a modicum of wit, when they were sold abroad they were marketed as the adventures of The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World, which in a way, says it all. There was even a weak third instalment in this creaking franchise, Somebody’s Stolen Our Russian Spy (also known as O.K. Yevtushenko) a Spanish film which struggled to find general release – even in Spain. There was an animal-lovers’ comedy, The Spy With A Cold Nose in 1966 and even a softcore ‘sexploitation’ take on the genre, cryptically titled The Spy Who Came in 1969.

  The peak year was 1966, with an estimated twenty-two spy films released in the UK but by 1967 – with the notable exception of those with Fleming or Deighton as their source material – it seemed to be a case of simply matching an established film or TV star (or one wanting to make a comeback) with a vaguely espionage-based plot vehicle and playing the whole thing as light comedy. How else can one explain Maroc 7 (Gene Barry), Caprice (Doris Day), Fathom (Raquel Welch), or even The Venetian Affair, from the novel by Helen MacInnes and starring Robert Vaughn (on leave from U.N.C.L.E.) and a 79-year-old Boris Karloff?

  The era of spy fantasy and the search for a substitute James Bond – on the page if not the screen – was fading. Many of the Bond clones created in the Sixties by thriller writers in search of the Holy Grail did stagger on into the Seventies but the trend was clearly towards the more realistic, some would say downbeat, school of spy fiction, a prime example being the huge success of the television series Callan in Britain with its dour, surly, and world-weary eponymous hero. On the printed page, good examples of the unglamorous approach to espionage could be found in All Men Are Lonely Now by veteran thriller writer Francis Clifford in 1967 and Drawn Blanc by debutant Reg Gadney in 1970.

  Gadney’s novel is interesting in several ways. It is set in a grimy London which seems exhausted by trying to maintain a ‘Swinging Sixties’ Carnaby Street reputation and within a British security service still reeling from betrayals and scandals in the post-Philby era. The plot involves a constant stream of betrayal and the tone is one of cynical disenchantment with the whole spying businesses. Unable to trust anyone, Britain’s paranoid spymasters resort to recruiting agents on a short-term freelance basis, making sure that each only ever gets to see a small jigsaw piece of the overall picture of any particular operation, which turns out to be a recipe for failure and often disaster. The feeling of deliberate obfuscation – the attempt to prevent any character from knowing what is going on and why – is enhanced by Gadney’s choice of hero, the enigmatic ‘O.B. Blanc’ a young Czech dissident. On the run, having fled Czechoslovakia during the ‘Prague Spring’ and the Soviet-led invasion of 196813 where he allegedly murdered a KGB officer, Blanc attempts to revive his academic studies in Cambridge only to have his visa refused by the Foreign Office unless he agrees to become an agent.

  Drawn Blanc was a spare, almost Kafka-esque novel presenting a fictional world of spies and spying as far away from ‘Bondmania’ as it was possible to get. James Bond’s career as the ultimate British hero would of course continue, something of a juggernaut in both print and on film, but by 1970 there seemed little profit in trying to copy or replace him.

  Ironically, the only substantial challengers to the legacy of Ian Fleming were the two who never set out to replicate Fleming’s fantasy hero: Len Deighton and John Le Carré. In their books, patriotic heroism was often the last quality attributed to the world of spying.

  True, both authors benefitted from the cinema’s insatiable appetite for spy fiction that had been wetted by Dr. No. Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from The Cold, with an Oscar-nominated performance from Richard Burton (yet another early suggestion for the film role of James Bond) was the first of his books to get the big screen treatment in 1965, followed the next year by The Deadly Affair from the novel Call for the Dead starring James Mason as George Smiley (inexplicably renamed Charles Dobbs in the film), and then The Looking Glass War in 1969. Three out of Deighton’s first four novels, all starring Michael Caine as ‘Harry Palmer’, were filmed in quick succession: The Ipcress File in 1965, Funeral in Berlin in 1966, and Billion Dollar Brain in 1967. All were produced by Harry Saltzman, the man Len Deighton has credited with starting ‘the spy craze’.

  The Sixties came to a close in a vivid confusion of peace, love, and music festivals; horrific newsreel footage of the war in Vietnam; British troops being sent to Northern Ireland; the Beatles giving us a final, roof-top live performance and a farewell LP; George Lazenby replacing Sean Connery as the cinematic Bond; clashes between Russian and Chinese border troops; student and anti-war protests across the globe; and, off the globe, a man walking on the moon. And to book-end the decade perfectly, there was another spy swap, when British teacher Gerald Brooke, arrested in Moscow in 1965 for distributing anti-Soviet literature, was exchanged for Peter and Helen Kroger, the Russian spies arrested as part of the Portland Spy Ring back in 1961.

  In the world of spy fantasy, no clear heir to the Bond’s throne had emerged and the two leading lights of spy fiction, Le Carré and Deighton seemed to be taking a break from the seedy world of espionage, Le Carré with A Small Town in Germany and then The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, and Deighton busy as the producer of the film version of Oh, What A Lovely War! (1969) and working on his war novel Bomber which was to be a huge success in 1970. Fortunately, both authors kept their holidays short and were soon to return, spectacularly, to spy fiction.

  At the very end of the decade two spy films, both based on novels, were released in Britain which should have been taken as a warning sign by British thriller writers. Topaz (1969) was a below-par Hitchcock film based on Leon Uris’ 1967 Cold War thriller about a ‘mole’ inside French Intelligence at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The novel had been a Number One bestseller in the US, was serialised in newspapers in the UK, and successful in paperback, but the rather woolly film was a critical and commercial failure. The Kremlin Letter (1970), based on Noel Behn’s utterly-gripping 1966 novel, was a far more harrowing experience, perhaps too harrowing for audiences at the time. This was Cold War espionage fiction at its most brutal and utterly cynical. As the book’s author once said, ‘In a detective story, the hero solves the crime. In a spy novel the hero commits the crime.’

  The writing that was on the Berlin Wall (so to speak) was that heroes did not have to be supermen, irresistible to the opposite sex or prepared to sacrifice all for Queen, Country and Empire. In fact, if the reader was looking for something new in the spy thriller, the hero did not, any longer, even have to be British. Leon Uris and Noel Behn were only the advance guard: the Americans were coming.

  Chapter 9

  THE ADVENTURERS, 1963–70

  The Sixties might have been the spying decade, but the adventure thriller was still popular, particularly among young male readers, as slick new paperback editions of favourite authors began to appear in greater quantities than ever before. Paperback editions were also beginning to appear sooner after the hardback, sometimes within months rather than years if there was the possibility of a film tie-in.

  The adventure thriller did not attract the swarm of new authors that the spy fantasy genre did. It seemed that whilst quite a lot of would-be authors (the vast majority of them journalists) fancied their chances at becoming the next Ian Fleming, very few wanted to take on the mantle of ‘the new Alistair MacLean’ or ‘the new Rider Haggard’.

  Not that Alistair MacLean had any intention of surrendering his title as the world’s top-selling adventure thriller writer, thoug
h for a brief period in the Sixties there was the distinct danger that MacLean would retire before he was deposed.

  After delivering the manuscript of his 1963 bestseller Ice Station Zebra to his publisher, Collins, MacLean announced that he was retiring from writing and going into the hotel business. He promptly proceeded to buy a small chain of hotels including the famous Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor, immortalised in the novel by Daphne Du Maurier, but, fortunately for his readers, MacLean was pretty useless as a hotelier. He was tempted back to the typewriter within three years and his hotel businesses were, in the main, sold off by 1969, which at least avoided any comparisons with the most famous hotelier of the Seventies, Basil Fawlty.

  Whilst MacLean was, effectively, playing at being a businessman, his novel of a nuclear submarine bursting its way through the North Polar ice-cap to reach a burnt-out weather station had been made a Book Society Choice – as had HMS Ulysses – and with its Cold War setting and slightly cynical hero, it seemed the perfect adventure thriller for the time. It was MacLean firmly in MacLean territory: a warship setting, albeit an American one; a secretive narrator hero who isn’t quite what he seems – but he is the hero, and he is British; the Arctic Ocean and the ice-cap as ever-present elemental opponents, not to mention the wind-chill factor. It was a murder mystery resolved almost as if it were a classic English detective story – but then, a submarine under the North Pole provided, if anything, a more perfect ‘closed circle of suspects’ setting than the hijacked ship in The Golden Rendezvous.

  The plot had all the usual MacLean twists and misdirections, which were not actually difficult to see coming but still managed to surprise, and in Ice Station Zebra had the added bonus of a patriotic British agent who managed to show the Americans a thing or two, even if he did have to borrow one of their submarines to transport him to his mission. One of the nicest touches is the exchange between the agent ‘Dr Carpenter’ and Swanson, the Captain of the USS Dolphin. When Swanson demands an explanation of what had really been going on at the wrecked weather station, Carpenter gives yet another cover story (his third or fourth) and pleads with the Captain to believe him until Swanson says, ‘This time I believe your story’.

  Dr Carpenter, as first-person narrator of the book, then winks blatantly at the reader and says: ‘I was pleased about that, I almost believed it myself.’

  In many ways, Ice Station Zebra was a quintessentially Sixties’ thriller. It had more than a whiff of espionage, the conviction that Britain could still punch above its weight on the international stage even if it had to rely on American technology and it tapped in to the fascination with nuclear power. Several American nuclear submarines had sailed under the North Pole between 1958 and 1962 or surfaced dramatically using polynya – slots of open water in the ice-cap, making headlines worldwide and introducing that Russian word to a generation of schoolboys doing O Level Geography. (Polynya had actually been an early suggestion as a title by the author.) In the novel, MacLean also references the nuclear-powered Soviet icebreaker Lenin, another marvel of the modern age, and with the Royal Navy’s first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, coming into service in April 1963, the subject matter of MacLean’s latest thriller was suddenly highly topical.

  Ice Staition Zebra, Collins, 1963, design by John Heseltine

  In at least two aspects, however, Ice Station Zebra clearly bucked the trend of the exploding market for thrillers. There was no sex for one thing, in fact there were no females at all – and any other form of sexual encounter would have been unthinkable. Sex, after all, simply got in the way of the action was always the author’s professional response, even in the sex-mad Sixties (though there is little doubt that MacLean, with his Calvinist background, regarded Ian Fleming’s books as close to pornography).

  The heroes in MacLean thrillers were also curiously moral or rather they lacked the amorality of the typical Sixties hero for whom the end always justified the most violent means possible. MacLean’s heroes, having survived terrible discomforting physical battles (against the wind, the cold, the sea and, of course, those ‘Dobermann-Pinscher’ dogs) always insisted on finding evidence and proof against the villain of the piece, or a confession, before arresting him – or in some cases allowing him to do the honourable thing and commit suicide. MacLean’s secret agents or sailors or soldiers did not dispense summary justice as a James Bond, or any of his many imitators, would have. A disabling bullet in the arm was usually the most they got before being led away for judicial punishment. Rarely was there a spectacular disposing of a baddie in the way Bond passed sentence on Dr No (burying him in bird dung) or Oddjob in Goldfinger (sucked, like toothpaste, out of a pressurised aeroplane cabin window).

  Nevertheless, Zebra was an exciting, Boy’s Own ‘ripping yarn’ and it was not long before Hollywood came calling, though a film version ‘based on’ the book did not come out until 1968, by which time the Bond film franchise had raised the cinematic stakes considerably.

  The omens for the films were good. The director would be the reliable John Sturges, who had a track record in action films and had directed MacLean’s The Satan Bug. The cast would be mostly American – fair enough, it was an American submarine after all – Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine and American football star Jim Brown, but the central British hero remained even if the character’s name was changed to Jones. The even better news was that he was to be played by a charismatic actor who was already a cult Sixties secret agent hero: Patrick McGoohan (actually an Irishman, born in America). There is a scene where McGoohan smashes his fist into a table to make a forceful point to co-star Rock Hudson which would have been very familiar to anyone who had seen the opening credits sequence of The Prisoner on television.

  But in 1963 when the novel appeared, it was clearly timely. In that same year, Collins also published a first novel by former South African naval officer Antony Trew in which a British submarine carrying nuclear missiles, and with a captain near breaking point, threatens to start World War III. Two Hours to Darkness, which launched Trew’s career as a thriller writer, was a huge success, reputedly selling over three million copies and was to be republished in 1975, 1986, and 2000. And in 1964, after being serialised in the Sunday Express, another nuclear submarine-in-jeopardy thriller made the bestseller lists: Threshold, by Stephen Coulter, who was also doing rather well in the spy fantasy stakes with his ‘kiss-kiss, bang-bang’ Charles Hood thrillers under his pen-name James Mayo.

  If Ice Station Zebra kick-started a short-lived trend for thrillers set in nuclear submarines (though wrecked U-boats were actually far more popular), the author was not interested in claiming any credit; he was too busy being a businessman. MacLean’s ‘retirement’, however, was not permanent; far from it. Three years after telling his publisher he would not be writing any more bestsellers for them, he delivered When Eight Bells Toll, which Collins published in 1966, no doubt with a sigh of relief, when it became another Book Society Choice. It was Alistair MacLean’s eleventh novel in eleven years and genuinely could be said to be set in the Scottish author’s ‘back yard’ – the Western Isles and the seas around them.

  When Eight Bells Toll caused a frisson of excitement when it came out, partly because a new Alistair MacLean was an event but also because the dramatic opening of the story caused quite a stir. It was, essentially, a detailed lecture about a gun – the Colt .45 Peacemaker revolver made famous by a thousand Western films and television shows. The first MacLean twist comes when the narrator describing the gun lets it be known that he is actually staring down the barrel of it at very close quarters and is justifiably fearful of it going off. The second twist comes when our hero discovers that the hand pointing the pistol at him belongs to a dead man.

  That tense opening chapter achieved some excellent advance publicity for the book, though the rest of the novel was a somewhat soggy tale of the hi-jacking of gold bullion ships in the Irish Sea. Whilst MacLean’s love of ships large and small and the rugged Scottish coastline comes through, the villain
of the piece was no Goldfinger – which was exactly what the plot needed.

  When Eight Bells Toll, Fontana, 1980

  Puppet on a Chain, Collins, 1969

  In When Eight Bells Toll, MacLean’s detective was a Treasury investigator and, in similar crime-fighting mood, he made his hero an Interpol agent in his 1969 Puppet On a Chain, although neither character was totally convincing. In Puppet it was heroin rather than gold at the nub of the plot and the setting was Amsterdam, but there were signs that the MacLean formula was becoming – well, formulaic. Regular MacLean readers were learning not to trust any character called ‘Doctor’ and to despair of the way female characters (even if they were undercover agents) always tended to simpering and going doe-eyed whenever the hero gets hurt. In Puppet On a Chain, the hero does get hurt, captured and disarmed on several occasions, at one point using a gun to shoot through the ropes that bind him in a similar fashion to an escape by the hero of The Satan Bug, and the reader has to wonder – albeit disloyally – why the bad guys didn’t just kill him and be done with it. But then the villains were far too busy operating a ridiculously over-elaborate heroin-smuggling scheme involving puppets in Dutch national costume and fake Bibles to have time to tidy up loose ends.

  Both When Eight Bells Toll and Puppet On a Chain were filmed and the movies released within a few months of each other in 1971. When Eight Bells Toll was a curiously un-thrilling thriller movie, despite a young Anthony Hopkins doing his best as an action hero. Although the hero was turned into an American DEA agent and played by a Swedish actor, Puppet On a Chain made more of an impact, primarily due to a spectacular boat chase sequence along the canals of Amsterdam – an uncredited contribution by second-unit director Don Sharp. Anyone in search of a really thrilling film about drug smuggling in 1971, however, would have gone to see The French Connection.