by Mike Ripley
The ease with which MacLean’s novels transferred to the cinema screen would have been welcomed by his publishers. Films were international adverts for an author’s works and paperback ‘tie-in’ editions with covers featuring stills from the film were common and quick to appear. MacLean’s staggeringly successful hit rate must also have rankled with competing thriller writers envious of the seemingly unstoppable succession of titles getting the big screen treatment. Of the fourteen novels he had published between 1955 and 1969, ten would be filmed, albeit with varying degrees of success, and selling the film rights to every new novel seemed a foregone conclusion.
It had always been said that MacLean had a straightforward very ‘visual’ style of writing, easily adapted to film-making. His return from temporary retirement saw this taken to its logical conclusion when he was asked to write an original screenplay direct for the screen. For inspiration, MacLean returned to World War II and the result was Where Eagles Dare, which was published as a novel in 1967 with predicted paperback sales of two million copies,1 the famous film with Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood following a year later. By the time Where Eagles Dare hit the cinemas, MacLean had published another war adventure – and his only ‘sequel’ to a previous story – Force 10 From Navarone which duly made it to the big screen in 1978 with stars from two recent blockbusters, Robert Shaw (Jaws) and Harrison Ford (Star Wars).
MacLean, previously known as a writer of ‘cinematic’ thrillers, was turning into a writer of film treatments and screenplays, which admittedly were usually made into successful thrillers because of the Alistair MacLean brand name. When the film adaptation of Bear Island came out in 1979, the opening credits proclaimed proudly that the audience was about to see Alistair MacLean’s Bear Island and, significantly, the one major in-depth interview with the publicity-shy author in the 1970s was conducted by film critic Barry Norman.
Never one to mix professionally or socially with other writers – he was said to read Raymond Chandler and once predicted that Winston Graham (author of the Poldark novels) would become the bestselling author in Britain – MacLean seemed to drift away from the novel, to become almost synonymous with the film industry. He even had a go at that iconic cinematic genre, the Western, writing the book and then the screenplay of Alistair MacLean’s Breakheart Pass, released in 1975. The novel, set almost entirely on a train in classic Agatha Christie mode, has its admirers in America but is more remembered in Britain as a rather underwhelming cowboy film starring Charles Bronson. Indeed, the massive popularity, sustained to this day, of Where Eagles Dare is as a gung-ho war film, rather than the novel where the convoluted plot-twists strain credibility to the limit.
The Companion leaflet, The Companion Book Club, issue no. 192.
If MacLean’s reputation as a master thriller-writer was waning by the end of the Sixties, his sales figures were healthy enough and internationally, his was still the leading brand name, paperbacks of his titles outselling those of the late Ian Fleming. There had been no shortage of candidates jostling for Fleming’s throne, most of them fairly speedily forgotten, but now MacLean had rivals including some who would long outlast him.
From the very start of his thriller-writing career, Desmond Bagley knew exactly which market he was aiming for, pitching himself to Alistair MacLean’s publisher Collins as someone who ‘wrote stories like Alistair MacLean’. His confidence and Collins’ faith in it were both rewarded and when his first novel, The Golden Keel, appeared in 1963, the Sunday Times review said ‘It catapults him straight into the Alistair MacLean bracket’ – a review which featured prominently on the cover of the paperback edition in 1965.
Partly based, it is said, on a rumour from World War II heard by Bagley in a bar frequented by fellow journalists – the starting point for any number of thrillers of this era, if journalists are to be believed – the plot of The Golden Keel involves smuggling Mussolini’s private stash of looted gold in the keel of a yacht. The clue may well be in the title, but Bagley flags up that this is a sea-going tale for armchair treasure-seekers by invoking another famous name when he has a character, early in the story, remark that the plot sounds like something from ‘a Hammond Innes thriller’.
If that suggests that Bagley was derivative or a pale imitation of MacLean or Innes, then it does him a disservice. He was certainly in their tradition of British adventure writers, having fairly wholesome heroes who avoided sex and who operated in well-researched foreign locations. Like Innes, Bagley was an inveterate traveller and his first six novels, published in the Sixties, had settings ranging from the High Andes to British Columbia, and Mexico to the Middle East. He also, like Innes, took an interest in the preservation of natural environments and, like MacLean, always included elements of man-versus-the-elements, whether hurricanes, jungles, deserts, or mountain landslides. Around these standard thriller elements, Bagley wove straightforward plots peopled by rounded, believable characters, never stretching the reader’s suspension of disbelief too much. His descriptions of far-off landscapes (Yucatan, New Zealand, and, later, the legendary Timbuctoo) clearly appealed to female readers as much as the well-researched detail he provided on things like aeroplanes, guns, and vehicles (he was particularly fond of Land Rovers) appealed to males. Bagley’s adventure thrillers were eventually to be published in twenty-two languages and his sales counted in millions, although only one novel, The Freedom Trap, was filmed during his lifetime (as The Mackintosh Man starring Paul Newman).2
The most prolific thriller writer of the 1960s, with something like twenty-eight novels to his credit since his debut in 1959, was far from a household name, mainly because he wrote under so many different ones. Though he was to become very well-known as Jack Higgins, in the Sixties Harry Patterson chose to write mostly under his real name or the pen-names Martin Fallon, Hugh Marlowe and, from 1970, James Graham, and the novels he turned out were a mixture of crime novels, adventure thrillers, several with historical settings, and spy stories. He introduced a spy hero, Paul Chavasse (a decent enough, if unmemorable, character), clearly with a view to a long-running series and varied his locations to include the Bahamas, Albania, Greece and Tibet.
It was in the mid-Sixties that Patterson also began to write thrillers with Irish settings, with characters who were, if not active members or victims of, then closely and perhaps sympathetically associated with the Irish Republican Army. Given the growing tensions in Northern Ireland and the ‘Troubles’ which erupted in 1969, this was a sensitive area and possibly a brave move on Patterson’s part, who was to go on in a long career to write many thrillers featuring good men fighting for bad causes. One of these, A Candle for the Dead, published in 1966 under the pen-name Hugh Marlowe, was filmed as The Violent Enemy in 1967 (the novel subsequently adopting that title). It was to be the first film of a Patterson/Higgins book and certainly not the last though it was to be the mid-1970s before the eagle landed to make Jack Higgins an international brand.
The Golden Keel, Fontana, 1965
A Long Way to Shiloh, Penguin, 1970
In comparison with the prolific Mr Patterson (Mr Higgins, Mr Marlowe, etc.), the output of Gavin Lyall in the 1960s seemed positively lazy. His first novel, The Wrong Side of the Sky, had been hailed as ‘A first-class adventure’ by the Sunday Times in 1961 and his second, The Most Dangerous Game in 1964 was hailed as ‘One of the best thrillers I have ever read’ by P. G. Wodehouse. The rave reviews continued for Midnight Plus One (1965), possibly Lyall’s best-known work and famous for its description of a car – a Citroën – being machine-gunned and ‘dying’ as its hydraulic suspension collapses and breathes its last.3
Two more adventure thrillers with trademark Lyall heroes – tough, intelligent individuals usually with technical expertise in flying and weaponry – followed: Shooting Script, set in the Caribbean, and Venus with Pistol, but Lyall was soon to switch tack and turn to the spy novel, both contemporary and historically, in a series charting the early days of MI5.
A similarly u
n-prolific thriller writer attracting rave reviews, and awards, was Lionel Davidson. His debut, the light-hearted spy romp The Night of Wenceslas won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger for best novel of 1960. His third, A Long Way to Shiloh, set among archaeologists in the Holy Land, took Gold again, for best novel of 1966.4 In a writing career which covered more than thirty years, Lionel Davidson published only eight thrillers, half of them in the 1960s, all individual, all superbly crafted. He remains one of Britain’s most revered thriller-writers.
One of the ‘Class of ’62’, Alan Williams enjoyed considerable success with paperback editions of his thrillers with their dramatic, stand-out photograph-on-white covers, often with scantily-dressed women, probably inspired by his rave reviews in Playboy magazine. He, like Gavin Lyall, was to turn away from the adventure thriller and more to the spy story, but he ended the decade with an absolute corker, The Tale of the Lazy Dog, describing an outrageous robbery set during the early days of the Vietnam war. Apart from its setting (very few British thrillers in the 1960s tackled the thorny question of Vietnam despite the pressure put on the government to send troops there), Lazy Dog confirmed Williams’ reputation as something of a rebel, by insisting not on a series hero, but a series villain, the overweight French gangster/spy/mercenary Charles Pol. Fans of Alan Williams’ thrillers still remember the ruthless Charles Pol, although the names of Williams’ ‘good guys’ – usually journalists who often come to a sticky end – have long ago faded from memory.
That other graduate of 1962 was positively cantering to success with eight novels in eight years (as well as an earlier autobiography) establishing him as a firm favourite among reviewers and readers alike, particularly, it was said, members of the Royal Family. Dick Francis did not ‘invent’ the horse-racing thriller – Edgar Wallace had written several four decades before – and by no means were all his novels set around race courses or stables, but that was certainly his area of special expertise. Although his output in the Sixties was primarily concerned with horses, betting and racing he was also beginning to show readers a glimpse of another of his passions, flying. He also introduced, in Odds Against (1965) the injured jockey-turned-private-eye Sid Halley, possibly his most popular fictional character (although he resisted the temptation to turn him into a series hero and fans had to wait until Whip Hand in 1979 for Halley’s return).
One other name which should have been better known then and, arguably, now, was Elleston Trevor, who had tremendous success with his ‘break-out book’ (as the publishers proudly called it) The Flight of the Phoenix in 1964. In fact, ‘Elleston Trevor’ had been a published author since 1945, and though the name originally masked the identity of Trevor Dudley-Smith, he adopted it legally whilst maintaining a string of other pseudonyms including Simon Rattray, Mansell Black, Roger Fitzalan and, most famously, Adam Hall. It was writing as Adam Hall, the creator of the indestructible super-spy Quiller, that was to occupy much of Trevor’s time for the second half of the Sixties and, indeed, into the 1990s. Yet his thrilling adventure of a plane crash in the Sahara, from the pieces of which the survivors cobble together a makeshift aeroplane – the ‘phoenix’ of the title – was a hugely popular book when it appeared and was quickly filmed with an all-star cast by Robert Aldrich in 1965 (and later remade in 2004), as a classic men-and-machine struggle against a harsh environment yarn, with not a female character in sight.
The Flight of the Pheonix, Mayflower, 1978
There were females – two of them – on the 1966 cover of the first paperback edition of a debut historical adventure thriller which introduced to a mass audience the work of Wilbur Smith, the man who would come closest to being the ‘new’ Rider Haggard. In fact, when it first caught the eye from a bookshop shelf, When the Lion Feeds could have been mistaken for a historical romantic saga, and it certainly did catch the eye for this was a book determined to stand out. It was huge in comparison to the bestselling paperback thrillers of the day, weighing in at over 400 pages, but there was something in particular about that cover which attracted the attention of the passing male reader. Behind the embracing couple and the wistful girl in Victorian costume, there was a small group of red-coated British soldiers huddled around a cannon. To anyone who had seen the film Zulu – and which red-blooded British, and especially Welsh, male had not? – those uniforms meant only one thing. And if the title was not clue enough, a quick read of the book’s cover blurb confirmed that this was a novel set in Africa at the time of the Zulu Wars and very much an adventure story rather than a romance.
When the Lion Feeds was first published in hardback in 1964, the year Zulu was released, and it rekindled an interest in the old school of ‘Dark Continent’ adventure story-telling synonymous with H. Rider Haggard whose novels King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, and She, had been standard schoolboy reading fare as well as being serialised in many boys’ comics and frequently filmed.5 Wilbur Smith, although setting his novel firmly in a Rider Haggard era and including all the popular Haggard African traits – long and arduous treks, jungles, wide open plains, wildlife in abundance, and big game hunting – had clearly upped the stakes when it came to the sex and violence. This was definitely a ‘man’s book’ rather a ‘woman’s romantic novel’ and subsequent paperback covers had more macho covers, but in whatever covers, Smith’s books sold by the million.
In the midst of a horde of James Bond imitators, the ‘kiss-kiss, bang-bang’ spy film craze and the emergence of a new, more noirish, more realistic school of spy fiction, When the Lion Feeds seemed an unlikely bestseller for the 1960s in mid-swing and possibly more suited, with the sex and violence toned down, to the 1860s. It was long, deliberately old-fashioned, centred on the adventures of twin brothers (in what was to become a long-running family saga), had no gadgets, gimmicks, or super-villains and was unlikely to make it to the big screen. Yet Wilbur Smith was no one-off, fly-by-night success. His second novel, The Dark of the Sun, in 1965, upped the violence quota in a contemporary(ish) thriller about mercenaries fighting a very bloody war in the real dark heart of Africa: the Congo. There was no doubt that this was a man’s book, and a hard man at that, and it became a very popular film among male cinema-goers in 1968 under the title The Mercenaries.
Smith’s next novels returned to Africa’s violent past, The Sound of Thunder (1966) bringing the family saga of his debut up to the Boer War, and Shout at the Devil in 1968, which was set in East Africa during World War I. All his novels became international bestsellers and of the three thriller writers who came out of southern Africa in the Sixties (Geoffrey Jenkins and Anthony Trew were the others), Smith was to be by far the most successful. In his use of African locations and his passion for historical settings, Wilbur Smith was to have no rivals and he had embarked on a career which was to last over half a century.
Chapter 10
THE STORM JACKAL HAS LANDED – THE SEVENTIES
After the highs and lows, but mainly highs, of the 1960s no one knew quite what to expect of the new decade, 1970 itself beginning with mixed messages. In the North Sea, oil was discovered and the first jumbo jet landed at Heathrow, both symbols of a modern technological Britain looking to a bright future. On the other hand, the Beatles splitting up and the fact that the first two Number One hits in the British pop charts were by The Marmalade and Edison Lighthouse probably turned out to be better indicators of the decade to come.
The Seventies began with Britain saying hello to a Conservative government and goodbye to shillings, half crowns and pennies in advance of the switch to decimal pounds and pence. The discovery of oil and gas under the sea gave the nation a powerful image of giant drilling-rigs floating majestically out at sea somewhere between Scotland and Norway, yet this tapping of a new source of fuel did nothing to prevent the lights going out during enforced power cuts during the notorious ‘Three-Day Week’ and the miners’ strike. (Those oil-rigs and drilling platforms did provide plots for several thrillers, though.)
The last outposts of t
he British Empire gained independence and after years of pleading, the UK joined the European Economic Community. Rioting and civil disturbance saw the British army on the streets of Northern Ireland and the words ‘internment’, ‘H-Block’ and ‘Long Kesh’ sadly became part of the nightly vocabulary of every television newsreader, along with filmed reports of the war in Vietnam now, for most of the population, in horrifying colour. There was another Arab-Israeli war, producing an oil crisis and a rapid onset of inflation, and a new type of war waged by ‘urban guerrillas’ such as the notorious Angry Brigade1, the terrorists who attacked the Munich Olympics in 1972, and the Palestinian hijackers who took a passenger aircraft hostage and flew it to Entebbe in Uganda in 1976, provoking a dramatic military rescue by Israel.
The decline in cinema-going continued from an estimated 200 million visits in 1970 to fewer than 100 million by 1980, as television tightened its grip offering escapist spy/thriller fantasy fare on a weekly basis, with popular (if often short-lived) series such as The Professionals, The Persuaders!, Department S, The Sandbaggers, The New Avengers, Jason King, and adding an element of cynical grit, at least until 1972, the immensely popular Callan. Whatever the merits of such dramas, they seemed more popular than the films on general release. The Bond juggernaut rumbled on of course, with Roger Moore replacing Sean Connery (after his brief return to the role in Diamonds Are Forever, where he played the part with one eyebrow raised as if saying to the audience this is getting rather silly, isn’t it?)
In the Fifties, British cinemas had rocked to the sound of naval guns and grenades in a flood of war films. In the Sixties, they echoed to the power ballads and car chases of dozens of spy films. In the Seventies, the dominant genre seemed to be either Hammer horror, the Carry On franchise, or a raft of big-screen adaptations of popular television comedy shows (although exceptional films did book-end the decade – Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in 1971 and Monty Python’s Life of Brian in 1979).