Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  There are some marvellous set pieces in the wartime London which Deighton remembered as a boy: the chilling raid by the SS on the school of the widowed Archer’s son, the surreal escape of the King from the Tower which results in him being pushed in a wheelchair through fog-bound London, the blowing up of Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery during a celebration of Nazi–Soviet relations, and the sinister, quite chilling, appearance of a face at a train window which turns out to belong to Heinrich Himmler.

  The dark heart of the story, however, is what Deighton does best – the internecine political warfare between protagonists supposedly on the same side, although in this case they are not departments of British Intelligence units or civil servants but the occupying Nazis. In SS-GB, the power struggle is between the seemingly jovial Gruppenführer Kellerman of the SS and Standartenführer Huth of the SD (the SS’s intelligence service), which reprises the scenario of Dalby and Ross always jostling for position in The Ipcress File. In all such battles, of course, there is collateral damage which drives the tension and allows for some crucial observations of human nature.

  SS-GB, Jonathan Cape, 1978, design by Raymond Hawkey

  When it appeared in 1978, the dust-jacket of SS-GB caused almost as big a sensation as the book’s premise. Designed by Deighton’s old friend Raymond Hawkey, the stark white jacket featured a British postage stamp bearing the head not of a monarch, but Adolf Hitler, and on the reverse a black-and-white photograph (in the days long before Photoshop) of the Führer taking the salute from an SS Division marching down Whitehall, with Big Ben in the background. The photograph is captioned: ‘Victory Parade, London, April 20, 1941’.

  As well as being an imaginative and wonderfully atmospheric thriller, SS-GB became a landmark title in what became known as ‘alternative history’ school of fiction, and is often regarded as the first depiction of a Nazi-dominated England, though in fact it was not and never claimed to be.17

  By the 1970s the era of would-be James Bonds had passed and the Seventies would be the only decade without the publication of a new Bond ‘continuation’ novel, apart from a couple of film tie-ins. Heroes in British thrillers were coming down to Earth and it was not always clear who the heroes were.

  The dozens of would-be bestseller writers who had thought ‘I could do that’ in the early Sixties had taken their best shot. Some had enjoyed spectacular if short-lived success but the majority had not and had returned quietly to their day jobs.

  The writers who had never had any intention of trying to emulate the exploits of 007 and had added something new to the thriller – Le Carré, Deighton, Dick Francis – had become bestsellers and would continue to be into and beyond the Seventies. Others, such as Desmond Bagley and Wilbur Smith, consolidated their success in the tradition of earlier adventure thriller writers (Hammond Innes in the case of Bagley, Rider Haggard in the case of Smith). There were also thriller writers who successfully switched tack in the Seventies – such as Alan Williams and John Gardner.

  And, at least for the first half of the decade, British thriller writers continued to dominate bestseller lists internationally. Bookshops from Boston to Bradford would stock all the paperbacks of Alistair MacLean (almost as a matter of course), John Le Carré, Len Deighton, Dick Francis and Desmond Bagley. In translation, they extended over Europe and into the Far East – Wilbur Smith enjoying a huge readership in Italy and India.

  Yet veterans such as MacLean and Sixties’ graduates such as Desmond Bagley did not have it all their own way. Neither did the spy fiction pioneers such as Deighton and Le Carré, as the Seventies brought a second wave of British thriller writers to the bookshop shelves. It may have been the decade of the eagle landing, but it was also the decade of the jackal.

  Chapter 11

  THE NEW INTAKE

  An eagle landing wasn’t the only the only animal-related thriller sensation of the Seventies, there was also a jackal and, like all instantly huge bestsellers, it quickly created its own mythology.

  In his 2015 memoir The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, Frederick Forsyth maintains that ‘For the whole of the summer of 1970 I hawked the manuscript of Day of the Jackal around publishers’ only for it to be rejected outright by three publishing firms and the author withdrawing it from a fourth. Forsyth’s debut thriller about an anonymous British assassin hired to kill French President Charles de Gaulle in 1963 did find a publisher, however, and international paperback rights were said to have been sold for a record sum at the Frankfurt Book Fair even before the book had stormed the bestseller lists in 1971.

  So much is certainly true, but the probably apocryphal story circulated as the book became an international hit was that the chairman of a well-known publishing house called a Monday morning meeting of all staff on his return from Frankfurt and asked ‘Who turned down Day of the Jackal?’ When a naïve but honest junior editor raised a nervous hand they were told, legend has it, to collect their coat ‘on the way out’.

  There was no doubt that the book quickly entered folklore. In the 1970s the most hunted terrorist in the world was the Venezuelan Marxist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, who had been code-named ‘Carlos’ by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. When a copy of Forsyth’s novel was found in luggage thought to have been abandoned by him in 1975, The Guardian newspaper dubbed him ‘Carlos the Jackal’ and there was no need to explain the reference. The book was also to make repeated appearances in the news headlines every time (and there were several) a criminal made use of the Jackal’s technique of obtaining a British passport by using the birth certificate of a dead child, despite the outcry at the time that such a thing was possible and the subsequent attempts by successive governments to tighten up procedures.

  The core subject matter of the plot – the assassination of de Gaulle – was still topical enough to generate column inches. De Gaulle had died in 1970 but remained something of a bogeyman figure in Britain, having vetoed the UK’s membership of the European Economic Community, now the European Union, in those far-off days when Britain was keen to be part of Europe. The Day of the Jackal seemed to have everything going for it in terms of getting it talked about: it was a first novel by an unknown writer who claimed to have written it in only five weeks. It had earned millions (it was rumoured) in advance foreign sales, the film rights had been sold, it had a villain who was ruthless but facing seemingly impossible odds, and his mission was to eliminate a highly unpopular figure who was seen by many as a belligerent anti-British foreigner.

  Only two things could possibly boost its profile: rave reviews from the critics and it being a good book. It certainly got the reviews: ‘Virtually in a class by itself’ (Sunday Times), ‘Compelling, utterly enthralling’ (Daily Express), ‘Electrifying’ (Daily Telegraph), ‘Chilling, superbly researched’ (Guardian). It was also a very good book.

  The Day of the Jackal had a documentary feel to it that readers had not really experienced before, Forsyth using his reporting skills to add authenticity to every aspect of his story. The reader knew that if Forsyth said it was fifty yards from ‘a’ to ‘b’ then it probably was, as Forsyth would certainly have paced out the distance, and was convinced that if you should happen to need a collapsible sniper’s rifle – and somewhere to disguise it so that it can be carried in public – the method Forsyth gave to the Jackal was sure to work.

  Forsyth’s technique of incorporating real and authentic technical, political, and historical detail at every opportunity engaged millions of readers – most likely males – in his narratives although there was an air of disapproval about his entry in the 1982 Whodunit? Guide to Crime, Suspense and Spy Fiction which concluded: ‘Authenticity is to Forsyth what imagination is to many other writers’.1

  The critic Julian Symons was openly aloof, if not scathing, in the revised (third) edition of his Bloody Murder in 1992 – by which time Forsyth had written seven novels, all bestsellers:

  Forsyth has no pretension to anything more than journalistic expertise, and his books
tell you about things – making bombs, running guns, obtaining false passports – rather than about people. His first novel is, by general agreement, better than the others, but all are candidates for examination in that unwritten history of modern literary taste.

  At face value this does Forsyth – and his readers – a disservice, for The Day of the Jackal was a thriller of daring imagination and one which pulled off superbly the necessary trick of most thrillers: the suspension of disbelief by the reader. Even a cursory glance at the book’s cover tells the prospective reader that the subject matter is, basically, the assassination of General de Gaulle in 1963. Now the reader knows from the off that General de Gaulle was not assassinated in 1963 (the year another very famous President was), and yet the assassination plot is so well set up – and the Jackal such a hypnotically efficient operator that the reader, halfway through the book, begins to ask did this really happen? Towards the book’s climax the reader is convinced that he’s actually going to do it … and perhaps even willing the Jackal on to success, before the shock realisation that the reader may be cheering for the bad guy. Finally, there comes the stunning twist about the Jackal’s identity.

  It was a tour-de-force, won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for best first novel in 1972, was filmed in 1973, went on to sell over ten million copies, and has been continuously in print since published.

  Forsyth was to prove he was no one-hit wonder. His second novel, The Odessa File in 1972, was also set in the recent past (the early Sixties) and the villains were those perennial favourites the Nazis, though the plot ranged far wider than the average hunt-the-war-criminal thriller. It was successfully filmed in 1974 starring Jon Voight as the German investigative reporter Peter Miller who infiltrates ‘the ODESSA’- the powerful organisation of SS survivors still operating inside Europe and meddling in the politics of the Middle East.

  The Odessa File, Corgi, 1974

  His third, The Dogs of War in 1974, featured a group of mercenaries hired to assist in a coup in an unstable African republic, for which Forsyth certainly drew on his experiences as a journalist in Africa in the 1960s. The book was filmed in 1980 starring Christopher Walken and acquired something of a cult following within the action/adventure genre, along with The Mercenaries, based on Wilbur Smith’s novel Dark of the Sun, and The Wild Geese, the 1978 all-star vehicle for Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Roger Moore.

  Frederick Forsyth was not the only journalist to break through into the ranks of bestselling thriller writers in the early 1970s, in fact he followed, by a few months, the latest ‘find’ by publishers Collins, who seemed determined to expand their stable of adventure thriller writers. The newcomer was Duncan Kyle and his debut thriller was A Cage of Ice, which brought him the accolade ‘The most exciting thriller-writer discovery of the Seventies’ from the London Evening News. That ‘Duncan Kyle’ was the pen-name of fellow Fleet Street journalist John Broxholme was probably coincidental, but being a journalist there was sure to be a good story or two behind his overnight success somewhere.

  Broxholme, a Yorkshireman who lived in Suffolk, made no secret of the fact that he had invented the name ‘Duncan Kyle’ because he wanted a pseudonym ‘that sounded Scottish as all the big thriller writers seemed to have Scottish surnames’ and he would cite Ian Fleming, Alistair MacLean and Hammond Innes to support his case. The fact that MacLean and Innes were both published by Collins (as well as Desmond Bagley, Berkely Mather and Geoffrey Jenkins) undoubtedly was behind Broxholme’s decision to send the first Kyle manuscript to Collins as his first choice of publisher. There the story behind the book began.

  Publishing legend has it that, in those days, the chairman of the company Sir Billy Collins lived above the London offices of the company in Grafton Street. Late one night, unable to sleep and in need of something to read, he sneaked downstairs into the editorial department. (He probably didn’t ‘sneak’ as after all, it was his company.) In the ‘In’ tray of a fiction editor he found the newly-arrived manuscript of A Cage of Ice and appropriated it for his bedtime reading. The next morning, contracts were issued and another Collins bestseller was on its way.

  Duncan Kyle delivered further bestselling adventures regularly throughout the 1970s, each with carefully researched, out-of-the-ordinary locations from the Shetland Islands to Greenland, from the Russian Arctic to the jungles of Borneo, and with titles such as Terror’s Cradle (1975), Whiteout! (1976) and Green River High (1979). Each followed a distinct Kyle approach, which was to be followed by many another thriller writer, of a long, detailed build-up of plot establishing the setting, often quirky characters and location, then a climactic burst of action and usually a violent conclusion. It was a technique he had perfected by the time he too felt the need to resurrect the Nazi menace in Black Camelot in 1978 which focussed on Heinrich Himmler’s insane shrine to the SS at Wewelsberg Castle in north Germany.

  All Duncan Kyle titles did well, establishing him as a credible stablemate of Alistair MacLean if not a commercial threat, and they would certainly have done better internationally if any had been filmed, however badly. None were.

  Collins continued their 1970 winning streak with the discovery of another new thriller writer who not only seemed likely to compete with Alistair MacLean, but was actively promoted by him.

  MacLean perhaps saw echoes of his own early career in that of Brian Callison, who blasted his way into thrillerdom with a blood-and-thunder World War II sea story, as visceral as MacLean’s HMS Ulysses. A fellow Scot, Callison had been too young to see wartime service but had joined the merchant navy in 1950, aged 16, as a midshipman with the Blue Funnel Line sailing on cargo ships mainly to the Far East and Australia.

  His debut novel, A Flock of Ships, begins with the discovery on a tiny, remote island in the South Atlantic of a wrecked German U-Boat and an abandoned British freighter, the Cyclops, which had supposedly sunk several hundred miles away more than 25 years before in 1941. The story of the merchant vessel, its crew, and the U-boat is revealed in flashback through the discovery of the log kept by the Chief Officer, along with some rather gruesome clues littered around the wreckage. It is a story ripe with classic MacLean elements: the lonely ocean, the permanent lurking danger of pursuing enemy submarines (which herd the ‘flock’ of merchant ships to a mysterious destination), secret cargoes, a ‘closed circle’ of suspects on board ships on the high seas, and crew members who are not who they are supposed to be. There were differences to the MacLean formula though: the writing style was pared down, almost staccato; the plot twists came fast and furiously, preferring highly dramatic impact to a build-up of suspense; and the violence was really violent, matching the trend in cinema violence more than MacLean was by now.

  A Flock of Ships, Collins, 1970, design by Connell Lee

  Alistair MacLean was certainly impressed and gave his new rival an enormous boost – one suspects both in morale as well as sales – by praising A Flock of Ships most profusely if not perhaps a little too profusely: ‘The best war story I have ever read. No qualifications, no reservations, no exceptions as to type and time: it’s the best. Makes All Quiet on the Western Front look like one of the lesser works of Enid Blyton.’

  Brian Callison had found his metier and he stuck to it firmly over a writing career of more than thirty years and twenty-one novels, all bar one of which involved the sea, ships, few if any female characters, and very often World War II or its aftermath. He produced nine novels in the 1970s in rapid succession, following A Flock of Ships with A Plague of Sailors (1971) and The Dawn Attack (1972) which, unusually, followed the progress of a German amphibious attack on British forces during the Narvik campaign in Norway in 1940. Then in 1974, in Trapp’s War, he introduced the character of Captain Edward Trapp, an unscrupulous mercenary sea-dog to whose blackly comic adventures in wartime, peacetime and even the Cold War as a modern day pirate Callison would return over the years.

  Callison’s books gained a loyal following, almost invariably among male
readers, and are still fondly remembered by former naval (Royal, Merchant, and American) personnel. His machine-gun like prose, with sentences cut short and at times every paragraph ending on a cliff-hanging note, was not to everyone’s taste but few reviewers could deny the effect that it added to the pace and power of the story-telling. When Trapp’s War was published, Alistair MacLean was again prompted to wax lyrical, claiming of Callison that ‘There can be no better adventure writer today’ and even that other popular, though more reserved, author Dick Francis admitted that Callison’s books were ‘Outrageously alive … his action scenes thunder along.’

  The other principal debutant of 1970 could not really avoid referring to the war and things military in his fiction as Clive Egleton had been a professional British army soldier since he volunteered (under-age) on D-Day 1944. He was later to admit that as an army officer, he wrote ‘a book a year for eight years’ until, finally, A Piece of Resistance found a publisher in 1970. It was to be the first of a trilogy of futuristic thrillers set in an England occupied by the Russian army, the other titles Last Post for a Partisan and The Judas Mandate following at yearly intervals.

  Egleton’s view of expansionist Soviet communism stirred some interest (though nowhere near the controversy of Constantine FitzGibbon’s When the Kissing Had to Stop on a similar theme had in 1960) but his breakthrough into the top rank of thriller writers only came with his fourth published novel Seven Days to a Killing in 1973. With its British army officer hero (Egleton was by this time a Lieutenant-Colonel), Seven Days was an instant hit and publication rights quickly sold for America, most European countries, Japan, and – unusually in those days – Turkey, as well as the film rights which were bought for £20,0002 and Don Siegel, fresh from thriller successes with Dirty Harry and Charley Varrick, was hired to direct.