by Mike Ripley
It was the decade of the Trimphone, platform heels, glam rock, soft rock, punk rock, 8-track cassette players in cars, Watneys Party Sevens, and the one which saw the first Pizza Hut (1973) and the first McDonald’s (1974) opening in the UK. When it ended, women were members of the Stock Exchange and even allowed in to some Cambridge colleges, although a certain woman had gone one better and become Prime Minister, pledging herself to wage war on inflation – among other things.
Inflation was a key issue in the Seventies, when the price of a pint of bitter in a pub rose from 11p in 1970 to 34p in 1979 and petrol from 32p to 98p a gallon; the inflation rate reaching a record level of 23% in 1976. Books were not immune and a paperback thriller which had retailed for 25p (five shillings) in 1970 cost 50p by 1975, 80p by 1978, and up to £1.25 by 1980. Similarly a new hardback thriller costing £1.50 in 1970 had risen incrementally to £4.95 by the end of the decade.
The book trade had not seen such rapid rises before, though of course retail prices had risen, just more gently. For example, a Hammond Innes paperback in 1957 would have a cover price of two shillings (10p), by 1965 it would have cost three shillings and sixpence (17.5p) and in 1972, just as inflation and decimal currency began to bite, it would have retailed at 30p.
Thrillers were still selling well, however, particularly paperbacks which had to all intents and purposes replaced the cheaper edition hardbacks of the Thriller Book Club and the Companion Book Club. The gap between hardback and paperback editions was also narrowing and by 1971, the avid fan had to wait no more than eighteen months for a more affordable version of their favourite author’s latest thriller.2
The Veterans
The real veterans of the thriller game, the authors who had enjoyed their first success before the Second World War – Eric Ambler, Hammond Innes and Victor Canning – all continued to produce notable and successful novels in the 1970s; Ambler’s The Levanter and Canning’s The Rainbird Pattern winning the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold and Silver daggers respectively in the same year, 1972.
Alistair MacLean, after an unbroken fifteen-year string of international bestsellers and some hugely successful films, could also by now be classed as a ‘veteran’ or at least the name on the cover that every other writer of adventure stories aspired to be. The Seventies, though, would see a marked decline in MacLean’s reputation, if not his fortunes.
At first, it seemed as if the old magic was still there, his 1971 thriller Bear Island opening sure-footedly in classic MacLean territory on board the steam trawler Morning Rose. It was three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, ploughing its way through a nightmarish storm although the grizzled sea-dog of a Captain doesn’t spill a drop of the malt whisky he is sipping as the ship pitches and rolls violently. (‘Storm?’ scoffs the Captain. ‘Did you say “storm”? A little blow like this?’)
The Morning Rose is transporting a film crew to the titular Bear Island, a desolate spot beyond Norway’s North Cape and once the haunt of Nazi U-boats. The film crew’s medical officer, Dr Christopher Marlowe(!), is, naturally, not at all what he seems, but an undercover agent for Her Majesty’s Treasury investigating embezzlement in the film production company and the legend of gold bullion looted by the Nazis from Norway during the war. Already stricken with sea-sickness, the passengers on board the Morning Rose begin to die from food poisoning and our doctor hero and narrator is called into action to find a murderer. In essence the book develops as a traditional murder mystery in two ‘locked room’ settings – on board ship and then on the isolated Bear Island itself – rather than an action-driven thriller. The dubious doctor, the poisonings, and the ‘lethal dose of morphine’ all give a strong Agatha Christie feel to the book3 and when the film version arrived, right at the end of 1979, its all-star cast (Donald Sutherland, Richard Widmark, Vanessa Redgrave, Lloyd Bridges, Christopher Lee) suggested a flavour of the 1974 film of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.4
The Christmas Companion, The Companion Book Club, December 1961
There is no doubt that Bear Island has its moments, especially when the author was describing a ship at sea in fierce, icy waters or a desolate and hostile terrain, and indeed The Times’ review of the book confirmed that ‘Mr MacLean is back in the location he writes about best’. Given his experience of the movie business, placing a film crew central to the plot might have given MacLean the chance to settle a few scores or return imagined slights, but he seems to have resisted the temptation. (Several other thriller writers, whose work was filmed or adapted for television, did not.) Yet there was something not quite right about Bear Island, something which left the regular MacLean reader not quite satisfied; though MacLean had done nothing more than stick to the formula which had served him, and his readers, well for more than a dozen years – and seen millions of copies sold worldwide. Everyone knew MacLean was good at certain things – ships, the sea, freezing weather conditions, bitter Arctic winds and just about anything mechanical – and did not do other things, such as sex. In the main, his books (with the exception of HMS Ulysses) had violent scenes but were remarkably bloodless; in fact, MacLean’s thrillers were essentially very innocent. Perhaps then they were too innocent compared to the increasingly violent spate of controversial cinema releases.
In 1970 the British Board of Film Censors had increased the viewing age for an X-rated film to 18, clearly with some inkling of what was coming to a local Odeon or an ABC Cinema near you in the very near future. In 1971, when Bear Island was published, five films went on general release accompanied by a furore of press comment about the violence (and sex) portrayed in them. Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Ken Russell’s The Devils, Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, Mike Hodges’ Get Carter, and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (and also his 1969 western The Wild Bunch) were very different films but all were controversially uncompromising in their treatment of violence.
Attitudes were changing – something often attributed to the visceral images which accompanied the nightly television news for the war in Vietnam – and skins were thickening. Could it be that MacLean’s adventure thrillers were just a little bit too wholesome for the 1970s?
The thought never seemed to occur to MacLean, or if it did he dismissed it quickly. Critics called his writing formulaic or worse5 and, whether he recognised it or not, MacLean had certainly developed a formula for writing bestselling thrillers. Even the most uncritical and devoted fan had come to expect that a female character in a MacLean thriller was almost certainly going to be called Mary (in Bear Island there are two of them!) and that anyone called Smith or who was a doctor (shades of Agatha Christie) was probably not to be trusted. There would also be an ever increasing number of references to characters drinking large quantities of neat spirits. Yet the formula continued to sell and in the main he stuck to it throughout the Seventies, although he did switch stylistically to telling his stories in the third person.
If there was a niggling feeling that MacLean had somehow lost his edge, no one could doubt his productivity and between 1973 and 1977 he was to publish six new novels, all written with the omnipresent voice of third-person narration. His income for the decade averaged around £600,000 a year6, a healthy sum even with growing inflation.
The Way to Dusty Death was set in the world of Formula One motor racing (with a female character called Mary) and certainly inspired by MacLean’s friendship with fellow Scot and Grand Prix world champion driver Jackie Stewart. There was instant talk of a film version, rumoured to star Stewart himself, but the project fell through. The novel was eventually adapted for an American TV movie in 1996.
There was little doubt that MacLean’s next novel, his one and only western, Breakheart Pass (which had a doctor and a woman called Maricia) would be snapped up by Hollywood and indeed it was filmed within a year of publication in 1974, starring Charles Bronson. He returned to European locations for Circus in 1975 which had multi-talented circus performers as secret agents – plus a ‘Dr Harper’ and a woman called, this ti
me, Maria – on a mission behind the Iron Curtain to steal the secrets of the mandatory mad scientist’s ‘anti-matter machine’. Then it was back to America, though not the Wild West, for three novels in quick succession: The Golden Gate – a terrorist plot to hijack the US President on the famous, if disaster prone, bridge; Seawitch – a cabal of ruthless businessmen attack a rival’s flagship oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico with, perhaps, shades of his earlier Fear Is the Key; and Goodbye California – another mad scientist with access to a hydrogen bomb and a dastardly plan to alter real estate values in the golden state.
MacLean was always if not compared to, then certainly linked with, that other veteran of the adventure thriller, Hammond Innes although in writing style and plotting they were distinctly different writers. The one thing they did have in common was a knack of bringing exotic locations to life and they shared a close affinity with the sea and sailing (Innes was a noted yachtsman) and in the Seventies, a shared fascination for oil rigs. Ironically, it was Innes and not MacLean who chose the waters off Shetland for his adventure North Star in 1974.
Innes did not stick to home waters for long. He had already set Levkas Man among anthropologists working in the Aegean and was to take on Africa and big game conservation in The Big Footprints in 1977, but his most extensive research expedition was to the deserts of Western Australia for his mining adventure Golden Soak (1973). The American journal Kirkus Reviews summed up Hammond Innes’ particular brand of straight forward story telling in its review of Golden Soak: ‘It’s all as solid as oak even where the grain shows – you know him, you read him, you enjoy him.’
If Hammond Innes could still tell a solid story – although his books had begun to openly promote themes of environmental conservation rather than simply entertain – so could another veteran, Victor Canning, although his work took a radical departure in the decade.
The Golden Soak, Fontana, 1976
Amigo, Amigo, Coronet, 1975
Canning abandoned exotic foreign locations and the adventure thriller in favour of a subversive sort of spy fiction set almost entirely in the UK. The eight thrillers he produced, beginning with Firecrest in 1971, featured or at least involved the activities of a very shady ‘dirty tricks’ department of the British security services with its headquarters in Birdcage Walk in London. Initially called ‘The Department’ (to which passing references were made in Canning’s Rex Carver thrillers of the Sixties), this was a unit which often played the villain and for whom ‘murder, blackmail, fraud, theft and betrayal were the commonplaces’7 As Canning developed his theme, The Department became known as ‘Birdcage’, which he used as the title for a novel in 1978. Many regard the Birdcage books as Canning’s finest achievement and certainly they added a steely edge of ruthlessness and cynicism to his writing, which was the trend in spy fiction. In his award-winning The Rainbird Pattern, he used a twin-plot structure, one half seemingly a domestic mystery, the other a well-organised kidnap-and-ransom/terrorist plotline with the men from Birdcage emerging from the shadows to dispense a ruthless ‘justice’. The story was transposed to America and filmed by Alfred Hitchcock (his last film) as the black comedy Family Plot.
It was Canning’s wartime chum Eric Ambler who pipped him for the 1972 Gold Dagger with The Levanter, a thriller set in Syria and among the Palestinian liberation movements which sadly still has a resonance today. It showed the Old Master had not lost his touch and his contribution to the genre as a whole was recognised by his being made a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 1976, a year before Graham Greene was similarly honoured. In 1986 the Crime Writers’ Association in Britain awarded him the first Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement.
One accomplished thriller writer, Francis Clifford, sadly did not survive the Seventies although he produced three notable books of the decade before he died in 1975. The Blind Side (1971) was set against the horrors of the conflict in Biafra and Amigo Amigo in 1973 was Clifford’s considered take on that perennial favourite: hunting escaped Nazi war criminals in South America, but being Clifford he did it low-key and very thoughtfully with a flawed hero and an almost redeemed villain. The novel also contained a suspenseful, though not gruesome, scene involving an ex-Nazi performing dentistry three years before the film Marathon Man, based on William Goldman’s 1974 thriller, took a far more Gothic approach to Laurence Olivier torturing Dustin Hoffman in a dentist’s chair.
Francis Clifford’s really big seller, though, was set in London with the action taking place over a single day. Newspaper serialisation helped promote The Grosvenor Square Goodbye, about the siege of the American Embassy by a lone gunman, into one of the most talked-about thrillers of 1974 and it is still held up as a masterclass in tight plotting and controlled suspense today. It won Clifford his second Silver Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association.
The Sixties’ Graduates (Adventurers)
In the adventure thriller field, as opposed to the spy thriller, the most successful graduate of the 1960s was Harry Patterson, whose career – and fortunes – were to change dramatically in 1975. He had, thanks to his prolific output under numerous pen-names, been able to ‘give up the day job’ in 1970 and had adopted, more or less permanently, the pen-name Jack Higgins. Fortune had smiled when his 1972 novel (as James Graham) The Wrath of God, an adventure set in Central America in the 1920s, was filmed by Hollywood starring Robert Mitchum and, in her last screen role, Rita Hayworth. Higgins was to admit that the book was ‘not terribly successful’ 8 but the film – for which he wrote the screenplay – did well enough to make him financially secure. Another Higgins thriller with a reformed IRA gunman-on-the-run theme, the much underrated A Prayer for The Dying was published in 1973, though a film version, starring Mickey Rourke and Bob Hoskins, did not appear until 1987, by which time Harry Patterson/Jack Higgins was more than financially ‘secure’.
Such was the impact of The Eagle Has Landed that it was inevitable that publishing legends would spring up around it. When Higgins pitched the initial idea of German paratroopers attempting to kidnap Winston Churchill from a country house in Norfolk in 1943, it was initially dismissed as an unviable plot by an editor who asked ‘Where are the heroes?’, and another assumed it must be a book about birdwatching. There was the rather dubious claim by Higgins that the book ‘changed the war story for ever’ and the rumour that when he heard that Collins were planning an initial print run of ‘only’ 8,000 copies, he threatened to take the book elsewhere. Unofficial estimates of sales to date (the book is still in print) have ranged from 50 million to 250 million, that it has been translated into (at the last count) forty-three languages, including Welsh, and that Higgins’ accountant rang him to say he had made £1,000,000 in the first week of publication. There was even some confusion about how many books Higgins had written prior to Eagle. On his first appearance on Desert Island Discs in 1981 he claimed it was his twenty-seventh book, but examination of his rather complicated backlist would suggest it was more likely his thirty-fifth. And then there was the suggestion, made by Anthony Price in his review in the Oxford Mail, that the nub of the plot – German commandos landing in wartime England – was very similar to the famous morale-boosting wartime film Went the Day Well? from 1942, based on a story by Graham Greene, although Higgins denied ever having seen the film.9(And Price’s review concluded that such concerns should not ‘spoil a vintage Alistair MacLean-style thriller’.)
The Eagle Has Landed, Collins, 1975
Whatever the myths, the reality was that The Eagle Has Landed was a stunning success story. The American edition appeared first, on 28 May 1975, instantly hitting the New York Times bestseller list and staying there for thirty-five weeks. By the time the UK edition was launched, on 8 September, the book was already well-known and highly anticipated, as was the film version, already underway and starring Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and the two Donalds – Sutherland and Pleasence. A cheap hardback edition was published by Book Club Associates in early 1976 followed by the first of ma
ny, many paperback editions, but by then Jack Higgins was house-hunting in the Channel Islands to avoid the extreme 83 per cent rate of income tax then in force in Britain.
If The Eagle Has Landed propelled Jack Higgins into the same tax bracket (and tax exile) as Alistair MacLean, then his next novel, published in August 1976 even as the Eagle was flying off the shelves of bookshops, put him even more firmly in MacLean territory: on the high seas in wartime.
Storm Warning, set in 1944, was the story of an epic, 5,000-mile voyage by a vintage German ship – a three-mast ‘barquentine’ – from Brazil to the supposed safety of its home port of Kiel, which has, to add spice to the adventure, a party of nuns as passengers. The main twist here is that it is a German vessel trying to cross enemy-infested waters rather than the stock scenario of an Allied ship trying to evade a wolf pack of U-boats, and with a wartime setting and Higgins’ name on the cover so soon after The Eagle Has Landed, the book couldn’t avoid being a bestseller. Naturally, the film rights were snapped up, but oddly no blockbuster appeared and details of the proposed production are difficult to come by even, it seems, for the author. As Higgins himself recalled: ‘Storm Warning was a huge bestseller. It was going to be a film spectacular; big stars, incredible budget and all that. The project was about three weeks away [from principal photography] and then just like that, for any number of reasons, they completely dropped the whole idea! I still ended up with a small fortune from the cancelled project.’10