by Mike Ripley
The author probably shed few tears over the non-appearance of a film of Storm Warning; he was too busy fulfilling a two-book contract to another publisher and for both books he stayed in the arena of World War II. In The Valhalla Exchange (1977) the ‘good men fighting for a bad cause’ are Finnish ski-troops aiding Nazi bigwig Martin Bormann’s escape from Berlin in May 1945. To Catch A King (1979) revolved around Nazi plans to kidnap the Duke of Windsor for propaganda purposes, the role of the ‘good German’ being taken by SS Foreign Intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg. For contractual reasons, both books appeared under the name Harry Patterson rather than Jack Higgins, but readers were left in no doubt that this was the author of The Eagle Has Landed. Needless to say, both were bestsellers.
If Jack Higgins’ sales figures went through a quantum leap in the mid Seventies, those of Dick Francis rose inexorably throughout the decade. In 1971 he produced Bonecrack, one of his toughest racing thrillers which caused quite a stir at the time for its violence (though Francis had never shied away from the physical dangers of the horse racing world), and then regularly produced a bestseller each year, winning the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger for Whip Hand in 1979. He served as CWA chairman 1973–74, by which time ‘the annual Francis’ had become an event fixed in the diaries of booksellers, newspaper columnists (and not just the racing pages), and readers, including some very famous and loyal ones who lived at Balmoral and Sandringham. There was a film version of Francis’ debut novel Dead Cert, which provided an early big screen role for Judi Dench, and, in 1979, Yorkshire Television commissioned the series The Racing Game starring Mike Gwilym as Francis’ most popular hero, Sid Halley.
Another writer with a firm foothold on what was to become a career as long and as successful, if not more so, than that of Dick Francis – though he would never achieve National Treasure status – was Wilbur Smith. The nine chunky novels he published in the Seventies, some of them longer than 600 pages, ranged from a continuation of his Courtney family saga, contemporary thrillers set in the gold and diamond mining industries of South Africa, a treasure hunt in the Indian Ocean, one story set against the Arab-Israeli war, and another with the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia as a background. Possibly his most unlikely bestseller, though it certainly was one, was The Sunbird in 1972, an almost mystical tale merging a modern archaeological expedition in darkest Africa with a parallel narrative from the Carthaginian civilisation being excavated. Although the archaeological details may be somewhat sketchy, Smith spins his yarn with hypnotic conviction and his interest in ancient history was to fuel many more bestsellers in future years.
That ‘ruthless storyteller’ (Daily Telegraph), the author whose books grip ‘from the first page to last’ (Men Only), Alan Williams continued his thriller-writing career much as he had conducted his journalistic one – by courting controversy. A brace of novels in the early Seventies guaranteed not only sales but newspaper coverage due to plots which, as The Times said were ‘bound to cause a stir’. In a move away from adventure thrillers set in hostile foreign climes often featuring a footloose Englishman, frequently a journalist, Williams turned to the political/spy thriller.
In The Beria Papers in 1973, Williams has a trio of misfits (one, naturally, a rather insecure British journalist) forging the ‘secret papers’ of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s personal henchman and feared secret policeman. In order to justify a $3 million advance from an American publisher, the slightly inept con-artists have to ‘sex-up the dossier’ with sensational revelations about Beria’s predatory sexual preferences. But have they overdone it? Have they implicated too many of the present-day rulers of the Soviet Union, including the current head of the KGB? Once word of the publishing deal leaks out, the KGB certainly becomes interested, as does the CIA, and the conspirators find themselves cash rich but on the run and, as they are amateurs pitted against very ruthless professionals, it will not end well for them.
The Beria Papers, Panther, 1974
Although Lavrentiy Beria’s name may now have faded from memory, it was at one time as well known (and for many of the same reasons) as that of Heinrich Himmler. At the time Alan Williams was writing, senior members of the Soviet Union’s Politburo and the KGB would have had personal connections to Beria and would not have appreciated being publicly reminded of his notorious career. The Beria Papers caused a sensation when published, reviewers calling it ‘both exciting and really convincing’ and ‘intriguing and gripping’ whilst foreign correspondents wondered how much of the ‘Papers’ had a basis in truth and editors speculated on what the then hard-line head of the KGB, a certain Yuri Andropov, might think of it.
The most sensational thing about The Beria Papers, however, was the prescience of the plotline when, ten years later, two German ‘misfits’ (one of them a journalist) forged the so called ‘Hitler Diaries’ with a view to a lucrative publishing deal. Like Williams’ misfit protagonists, those German con artists did not enjoy a happy outcome, though the scandal they caused (which included cameo roles for a well-known newspaper proprietor and a very distinguished British historian) became an international news story in itself. Indeed the scandal became the subject of a bestselling book, Selling Hitler11 in 1986, written by a respected television and newspaper journalist who was to become quite a well-known thriller writer: Robert Harris.
After one headline-grabbing audacious thriller, Alan Williams seemed set to follow it with another, Gentleman Traitor, in 1974. In fact, it would have been difficult to think of anything more likely to cause apoplexy among Times readers, who still mourned the change from ‘Imperial’ to ‘Foreign and Commonwealth’ news reporting. To begin with, the plot involved that arch-traitor and Establishment hate figure Kim Philby, angling to return to England, ‘coming out of retirement’, and doing one last job for British Intelligence in, of all places, that sore-spot of imperial embarrassment, Rhodesia. Perhaps because Williams chose to set his plot in Rhodesia, whose Unilateral Declaration of Independence was still a political cause célèbre in England but of lesser interest to the rest of the world, the novel was not quite the international success of its predecessor. It has, however, gone down in the record books as the first fictional appearance, though not the last, of Kim Philby as a character in a thriller.
The biggest name in the adventure thriller field to emerge in the 1960s, Desmond Bagley, continued to cement his reputation for straight-forward, environmentally friendly thrillers, even though the natural environment in question was usually hostile and, often, an element of espionage crept into his story lines. The success of Running Blind and The Freedom Trap in 1970 and 1971 put him on the same level of popularity as Alistair MacLean and possibly even higher than that enjoyed by Hammond Innes. Two of his successes in the Seventies, The Snow Tiger and Flyaway, were straight out of the Innes school, with unusual locations and a decent man up against the elements. Reviewing Snow Tiger, set in New Zealand’s avalanche-prone mountains, in the Daily Mirror, George Thaw wrote ‘The detail is immaculately researched. The action has the skill to grab your heart or your bowels’, whilst Harry Keating in The Times gave perhaps the greatest compliment: ‘Bagley brings to his story the utter straight-forwardness that makes books accessible to the widest readership.’
Desmond Bagley’s appeal was international with his books translated into at least twenty-two languages and his sales, despite the lack of any big-screen film adaptations to promote them, ensured that he was destined to take up residency in the Channel Islands, like Jack Higgins.
Graduates of the Spy School(s)
Relatively few of the examples of spy fantasy fiction, which had produced thousands of lurid paperback covers and dozens of would-be James Bonds in the Swinging Sixties, survived into the less-wholesome Seventies.
Adam Hall continued to write one novel every two years featuring his enigmatic automaton agent Quiller, and Peter O’Donnell produced another four thrillers featuring Modesty Blaise. Both characters had had their shot in big screen adaptations
but, crucially unlike the Bond franchise, their film debuts were one-offs and no series materialised.
The much smaller school of comic spoofs of Bond fared even less well, as the Bond films were starting to do a first rate job of spoofing themselves. The best of the Bond spoofs, John Gardner’s Boysie Oakes ‘Liquidator’ series, managed two post-Sixties adventures (Traitor’s Exit (1970) and A Killer for a Song (1975)) but Gardner had had enough of his bumbling, pompous, sexist and cowardly although endearing hero. He diversified into well-received crime novels and a trilogy of books featuring Sherlock Holmes’ arch enemy, Professor Moriarty,12 and then, mid-decade, he discovered what many other thriller writers had come to realise: when it came to villains, you just couldn’t beat a good Nazi.
Certainly there was still a public thirst for stories about Nazis, even thirty years after the end of World War II. Whether they came in the form of fiction or in increasingly ridiculous ‘scoops’ in popular newspapers (though often there was little material distinction) the appetite for them seemed insatiable. In Britain one newspaper in particular, the Sunday Express13, seemed almost obsessed with the idea that hundreds of Nazis had escaped justice after the war, escaped from Europe – possibly with the help of the Vatican, and were alive and well and living in Argentina. From 1972, a series of lurid ‘investigations’ reported by the Express suggested that Hitler’s deputy Martin Bormann was running, essentially, a Nazi Fourth Reich in South America. The speculation reached fever pitch when the Hungarian–American military historian Ladislas Farago’s book Aftermath was published in Pan paperback in 1976, in which the author claimed to have actually seen ‘Martin Bormann’ in Argentina. Although much of the book was ridiculed by serious researchers and the fact that Bormann’s skeleton had been found in Berlin where it had lain for twenty-seven years, Aftermath was, of course, a bestseller.
With four novels in four years, 1975–9, Gardner successfully mined the history of the Nazi era for plots and in the first, The Werewolf Trace, managed to combine, as the review in The Guardian said, ‘spookery of both kinds – paranormal and Secret Service.’ In the under-rated To Run A Little Faster set in 1938, Gardner’s hero is not a spy but a Fleet Street journalist (who had covered the Spanish Civil War at the same time as a Times reporter called Philby) investigating the sudden disappearance of a Member of Parliament – an idea perhaps suggested by the ‘disappearance’ of the Labour MP and junior Cabinet Minister John Stonehouse in 1974.14 The setting being 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, the plot centres on a conspiracy which reaches beyond one single missing MP and into the British establishment. The background to the ‘Munich Crisis’ is skilfully done, as is the period detail and Gardner cannot resist having his newspaperman protagonist stealing an advance review copy of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock from the desk of the literary editor. The Dancing Dodo is set shortly after the heatwave summer of 1976 when the remains of a crashed Allied bomber (the Dodo of the title) emerges from Romney Marsh and the wreckage is found to contain details of a Nazi plot which may still come to fruition. And in The Nostradamus Traitor in 1979, Gardner’s present-day spy ‘Big Herbie’ Kruger revisits a wartime plot to influence the superstitious Nazi hierarchy with fake prophecies from the sixteenth-century mystic Nostradamus.
All four of Gardner’s Nazi-themed thrillers were well-received by the critics and successful enough to tempt Gardner to move to the more-friendly (for authors and artists) tax climate of Ireland.
The two leading lights in spy fiction, after flirting with other subjects, returned to espionage with a vengeance and a virgin thriller reader entering a book shop for the first time could have been forgiven for thinking that John Le Carré and Len Deighton had somehow trademarked the word ‘spy’ between them.
It was an indicator of how much had changed that if the ultimate British spy of the Fifties and also (thanks to the films) the Sixties was James Bond, the decade of the Seventies belonged not to a licensed-to-kíll ‘blunt instrument’ equally at home in the bedroom or the casino, but to the short, fat, quiet, self-effacing and deeply perceptive George Smiley.
John Le Carré’s ‘breathtakingly ordinary’ hero who ‘travelled without labels in the guard’s van of the social express’ had appeared in the author’s first four thrillers Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and The Looking Glass War but in 1974 Smiley was to come into his own and take centre stage as the spy-catcher supreme in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. It was – and is – an outstanding novel about friendship and betrayal among the British ruling elite as well as a tense, tightly-plotted thriller following the hunt for a traitor, a ‘mole’ planted deep inside the secret service by the Russian spy chief known as Karla. Hauled back from enforced retirement to uncover the mole, Smiley is the detective figure who conducts painstaking interviews with the likely suspects within the ‘Circus’ – Le Carré’s rather revealing code name for MI6 – and eventually traps the traitor. All this is done without explosions, car chases, explicit sex, or gun fights and believable ‘tradecraft’ replacing gadgets hidden in watches, briefcases, or shaving equipment.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Hodder, 1974
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a title which caught the imagination and quickly entered popular parlance as had From Russia, with Love and, indeed, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, as did the description ‘mole’ for anyone thought to be subverting or betraying a status quo. In the novel’s tense climax, the scope of the mole’s ‘appalling duplicity’ as a man who had betrayed ‘as a lover, a colleague, a friend’ becomes clear, his motivation having been a combination of disgust at the capitalist greed of the West, a specific hatred of America and the emasculation of Britain as a world power following the 1956 Suez debacle. The final irony is that the mole is a product of the very Establishment he has sought to subvert, the epitome of a charming, cultured, romantic Englishman who had been to the right schools and university and it is no coincidence that Le Carré gives his traitor characteristics which could in reality have been applied to Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, two real ‘moles’ whose cases would have been very familiar to the former intelligence officer turned author. Coincidentally, Philby had defected to Russia and Burgess had died in Moscow in 1963, the year The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was published.
Uncovering Karla’s mole was far from the end of the matter for George Smiley, for which readers and critics were extremely grateful, as it became clear that Le Carré had plans – big plans – for his hero. Smiley was to be involved in the counter-attack on Karla on a new battleground, China and East Asia, in The Honourable Schoolboy in 1977 and then plan the downfall of Karla himself by exploiting the one weakness of the Soviet masterspy previously thought of as a fanatic and ‘fireproof’, in Smiley’s People in 1979. The trilogy of Smiley novels, often referred to as The Quest for Karla, has been compared to post-war works of fiction on a similar scale by such as Paul Scott (The Raj Quartet) and Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet) as a pronounced reflection on the contemporary British character and imagination, noted for ‘the vast range of characters and scenes, the subtlety of social observation, the responsiveness to national character and national decline, the tortured unease of the relations between men and women’.15
George Smiley’s position in spy fiction and beyond was confirmed when Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy was made into an award-winning BBC television series in 1979 starring Alec Guinness (who was to reprise the role in the adaption of Smiley’s People in 1982). In 2011, Gary Oldman brought the character to a new generation with an Oscar-nominated performance in the film version.
After a successful diversification into a war novel (Bomber) and a behind-the-scenes of the film industry novel (Close-Up), that other leading light in the shadowy world of spy fiction, Len Deighton, returned to the fray with Spy Story (1974), Yesterday’s Spy (1975), and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (1976). He proved he had lost none of his skill at producing labyrinthine plots and Chandler-esque dialogue and thoug
h the settings vary from the Arctic to the North African desert, his characters battle it out among themselves as if around an espionage board room table. It was the story-telling technique Deighton had perfected in the Sixties with his first four ‘Harry Palmer’ novels and certain characters from those early books – particularly the wily Russian Colonel Stok – began to reappear, making many fans jump to the conclusion that the first-person narrator was in fact ‘Harry Palmer’ only ten years older, whatever name the character had been given. It was something the author strenuously denied in later years, claiming that the hero of Spy Story, Patrick Armstrong, was definitely ‘not Harry Palmer – but a close relative.’16
As Spy Story contained, it was assumed, those vital elements necessary for a blockbuster movie – submarines, Arctic ice and the threat of nuclear war – it was quickly filmed in 1976 with a script by Deighton, but it failed to set the box office alight and sank, as one wag said, like a submarine that’s left the hatch open. Bizarrely, it is remembered today among trivia buffs for the portrayal of a Tory MP by veteran entertainer and icon of BBC Radio 4’s long-running panel game Just a Minute, Nicholas Parsons.
After his trio of Cold War Spy novels, Deighton chose World War II for the setting of his next, but with a spectacular added twist. SS-GB is a remarkable thriller, set in 1941 in an England which has lost the war and is now occupied by the Nazis, but from the opening line of dialogue – ‘Himmler’s got the King locked up in the Tower of London’ – you know you are in classic Deighton territory.
The plot revolves around the murder of a scientist in a seedy back room in Shepherd’s Market and the detective work of the upright and honourable Douglas Archer, one of the Scotland Yard’s top cops. Archer has a shrewd idea ‘whodunit’ almost from the off, but that’s not the point, for the murder turns out to be only the tip of a serpentine trail of espionage, double-crossing, and triple-crossing which involves atomic research, the fate of the imprisoned King George VI, the neutrality of the United States and the deadly rivalry between various intelligence agencies as to who will be top dog.