Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  In Seven Days to a Killing Major John Tarrant, a regular soldier with a relatively unimportant job in military intelligence, has to work out why his 13-year-old son has been kidnapped, how on earth he can be expected to raise a £500,000 ransom, and what it all has to do with the defection of a British spymaster. Seemingly thwarted at every turn, Tarrant takes matters into his own hands to ensure a positive outcome from the final, violent shoot-out. Fans of the book were slightly surprised to find that in the 1974 film version, which had Michael Caine as the avenging Tarrant, this key shoot-out takes place in an historic windmill on the Sussex Downs, but it did (finally) explain why the title of the film had been changed to The Black Windmill.3

  On the strength of the success of that film Lt-Col Egleton was able to retire from the army after thirty years – almost to the day – and concentrate on writing thrillers. His next, The October Plot in 1974, being regarded by many as his masterpiece. It was certainly one of his most successful titles, perhaps because he returned to those tried and true ingredients: World War II and the Nazis.

  Taking as his starting point the failed 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Egleton proposed a follow-up plot to knock off Hitler’s deputy Martin Bormann by infiltrating a commando force made up of British and anti-Nazi Germans into Germany. There are, of course, traitors and plot twists on all sides not the least because Bormann is suspected of being a long-term Soviet agent, and the plot seems doomed from the outset, but the desperate commando force behind ‘Operation Leopard’ does not go quietly. The reviewers certainly approved: ‘A very fine story, shrewdly researched and splendidly written’ (Sunday Times), ‘Well-constructed adventure thriller … alarms and excursions galore’ (The Guardian) and ‘Jumps him straight into the top class’ (Daily Mirror). Given the plot, comparisons with the author of Where Eagles Dare were inevitable and they came from the veteran crime fiction reviewer on the Birmingham Post, Bill Pardoe4 who said ‘Alistair MacLean should look to his laurels’.

  Clive Egleton went on to publish a thriller annually for a further thirty years, including the highly regarded Backfire in 1979 about a brainwashed SAS officer who escapes from what he thinks is a Siberian prison. He became known as a ‘safe pair of hands’ when it came to thriller writing; even if his political stance was always distinctly Conservative, few could fault him when he was writing about soldiers and particularly soldiers under stress. Surprisingly, apart from Seven Days to a Killing, none of Egleton’s solid, action-packed thrillers were ever filmed, although he did write the ‘novelisation’ of the slightly bizarre all-star war film Escape To Athena in 1979, perhaps wisely using the pen-name Patrick Blake. His substantial body of work was, inexplicably, to drop off the radar of thriller fiction.5

  One other addition to the Collins stable of thriller writers, and one who seems in absolutely no danger of dropping off the radar more than 40 years on, was Gerald Seymour with his stunning debut Harry’s Game in 1975.

  Harry’s Game, Fontana, 1977

  Seymour, an established and highly regarded television journalist who had reported from Northern Ireland, Vietnam and on the growth of urban terrorism in Europe, moved seamlessly into a career as a thriller writer without mentioning the war, ex-Nazis for villains, or an Arctic or high seas setting. In fact, the setting for Harry’s Game was the far-from-exotic back streets of strife-torn Belfast, familiar to many television viewers of the nightly news programmes where ‘The Troubles’ were reported all too often, as they had been for ITN by Seymour himself. It may not have been the first thriller to explore the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, but Harry’s Game, with its stark, realistic portrayal of paranoid communities where neighbours were not to be trusted, brought a hard and frightening edge to the story of Harry Brown who goes undercover to find the IRA assassin of a Cabinet Minister.

  The fact that this was a thriller based firmly in a real, ongoing political conflict set more or less ‘on the doorstep’ ensured maximum publicity greeted the book’s arrival. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic acclaimed it and that new superstar of the genre, Frederick Forsyth, reviewing it for the Sunday Express said that it ‘Evokes the atmosphere and smell of the back streets of Belfast as nothing else I have ever read.’

  Gerald Seymour acknowledged a debt to Frederick Forsyth for more than just the review in an interview in The Guardian in 2003 when he remembered Forsyth’s dramatic entry into the field. ‘Day of the Jackal – that really hit the news rooms. There was a feeling that it should be part of a journalist’s knapsack to have a thriller.’ He was one of scores, perhaps hundreds, of journalists who turned to, or tried to turn to, thriller writing as a new career6 in the heyday of British thrillers but of the new entrants to the field in the Seventies, only Seymour, Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett were to have writing careers which were still reserving them a place in the bestseller lists of the twenty-first century. All used their journalistic experience, particularly of foreign ‘hot spots’ as well as their eye for detail, as backgrounds to their thrillers. Seymour, for example, used his reporting on the Italian terrorist ‘Red Brigades’ menace as the backdrop for Red Fox in 1979, a novel which, like Harry’s Game, was turned in to a successful television series.

  Some did not become household names yet acquired excellent reviews and a loyal following of readers for their well-plotted Cold War spy fiction; one notable example was former foreign correspondent Brian Freemantle, a well-regarded practitioner of the craft who created a popular series hero in the eponymous novel Charlie Muffin in 1977. A very sympathetic, down-to-earth, just-doing-my-job sort of hero, Muffin’s trade mark became his scuffed brown suede shoes, but his shabby exterior was simply cover for a razor-sharp intelligence. That first novel was adapted as a television movie in Britain in 1979 under the title A Deadly Game7 starring David Hemmings, and Freemantle continued to write the series into the present century although is now published only in America where the series was if anything more popular than in the UK.

  There was one journalist, though, who was not a globe-trotting foreign correspondent or a war reporter – in fact he felt more at home sitting at a sub-editor’s desk – but who had probably read more thrillers than Gerald Seymour and Frederick Forsyth had had hot dinners and who was to add a new and distinctive twist to the spy thriller.

  Anthony Price enjoyed a long career as a journalist, a reviewer of crime and thriller fiction for the Oxford Mail (from the late 1950s onwards including the books of Fleming and MacLean), and as editor of the Oxford Times. When he decided to write his own thrillers he introduced a fierce intelligence and convoluted plots which invariably harked back to historical incidents, which included in his early books the Trojan War, the late Roman Empire, Arthurian Britain, both English and American Civil Wars and both World Wars.

  Ostensibly Price’s books were about Cold War espionage and most featured to some degree Dr David Audley, a shrewd academic with a healthy cynicism about the Intelligence establishment, but impeccable credentials when it came to loyalty and humanity in a very dirty business. In the Audley series, which Price wrote over a period of twenty years, the novels flit backwards and forwards in time and over Audley’s personal history, as well as over history and military history – a pet Price subject. These elliptical, usually two-layered narratives were never likely to find favour with those who preferred their blood-and-thunder very macho and preferably set during World War II – although one of Price’s most successful titles was a flashback to just that, an outstanding ‘prequel’ to the career of David Audley that was The ’44 Vintage in 1978.

  Price’s thrillers were something new and clearly in the spy fiction bracket rather than spy fantasy in the James Bond sense. In fact, it would be difficult to think of a fictional spy less like James Bond than David Audley. Yet there was something of a ‘fantasy’ element in the way they merged ancient history with modern spying and this undoubtedly appealed to fans of science fiction and probably attracted more female readers than the average paperback th
riller with a swastika on the cover. In a retrospective appreciation in 2010, Canadian fantasy and sci-fi writer Jo Walton said that Price’s books were ‘informed by history’ and that ‘Most people who like good books like them.’

  That Anthony Price was producing novels ‘in the upper IQ spy story bracket’ as Maurice Richardson said in The Observer, was clear from the moment The Labyrinth Makers appeared in 1970 and won the Crime Writers’ Silver Dagger. Reviews – all ecstatic – from luminaries such as Edmund Crispin, Francis Goff, and Marghanita Laski quickly followed. As did a book a year, with Price’s Other Paths to Glory involving a World War I parallel plot winning him a Gold Dagger in 1974.

  If Anthony Price never quite made it to the status enjoyed by the biggest-selling thriller writers of the 1970s, it was almost certainly because, not to put too fine a point on it, his books were too clever or perhaps that should be too specialised. As a reader you were on the same wavelength as the author, or you weren’t, it was as simply as that. If one of his books caught your imagination, you became a dedicated fan of all the series. If one tried at random did nothing for you, you were unlikely to try another.8

  There was an attempt to transpose the David Audley stories to television, first as a Granada TV series called Chessgame in 1983 and, a few years later, as TV movies compiled from the six broadcast episodes, with Terence Stamp as Audley, but it was not a ratings success. Unaffected by television exposure, Price continued to stick to his guns (in one case, The Old Vengeful, old naval guns), and produced clever spy thrillers interwoven with historical themes – and always fascinating, well-drawn characters – which invariably got the critics purring in delight. Not only was it Price’s fellow crime fiction reviewers such as John Coleman of the Sunday Times (‘unbeatably blends scholarship with worldliness’) and Anthony Lejeune (‘First-class civilised entertainment’) who showered praise, but reviewers of more serious ‘literary’ fiction began to sit up and take notice. Christopher Pym described Price’s books as ‘diabolically ingenious’ in Punch magazine and Patrick Cosgrave, in the Daily Telegraph, called the author ‘this remarkable writer’ and concluded ‘One can hardly over-praise Price’.

  One famous thriller writer9 has always maintained that the two most dangerous things for an author to deal with were alcohol and praise. Anthony Price seemed to deal with both perfectly well and in his early sixties, coincidentally shortly after the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War, theoretically, ended, decided to retire. Despite pleas from editors, publishers, fellow writers, reviewers and distraught readers, Price was resolved: retirement meant retirement and he was not to be tempted out of it. Inexplicably, given the high regard they were held in, Price’s novels – there were nineteen in all – slipped out of print, although his 1974 Gold Dagger winning Other Paths to Glory was reissued in 2002 as part of Orion’s Crime Masterworks series. Price remained phlegmatic about this, saying in 2008, ‘My thriller writing was so long ago, the books are not so much history as archaeology now.’10

  If anyone could claim (not that he ever did) to be the ‘spy writer’s spy writer’ in the 1970s, it was probably Ted Allbeury. He was eminently qualified to write spy fiction, having served in SOE (Special Operations Executive) from 1940 to 1947, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and was said to have been the only British secret agent parachuted into Nazi Germany. Not only did he survive the Nazis but after the war he was captured and tortured by the Russians after being found running agents into what was to become East Germany, or so the stories went. Allbeury, despite encouragement from many quarters, never wrote his autobiography as he felt honour bound by the Official Secrets Act he had signed back in 1940.

  It was only in his mid-fifties, after successful careers in business and public relations, that he began writing spy fiction, his debut A Choice of Enemies being published in 1972. He was to produce over 40 novels by the end of the century, many with wartime settings, which were lavishly praised by fellow practitioners of the spying arts, including Anthony Price (‘The master of espionage …’), Ted Willis (‘One of the best half-dozen writers of adventure and spy fiction in the world …’), Len Deighton (‘Truly a classic writer of espionage fiction …’), and Desmond Bagley, who praised Allbeury on numerous occasions, calling one of his books ‘The best novel of espionage I have ever read’. After publication of Allbeury’s 1978 novel The Lantern Network – a book the author dedicated to Spike Milligan – Desmond Bagley went further: ‘I have been reading all his [Allbeury’s] stuff and am most impressed. He has had personal experience in the Intelligence racket and it shows – the books are authentic and most exciting.’

  The Lantern Network, Mayflower, 1979, photography by John Knights

  If the spy fiction of Anthony Price appealed to the more cerebral reader, then that of Ted Allbeury was clearly aimed at the romantic one. Allbeury was never slow to show the human cost of spying – not just the physical bravery of men, and especially women, operating alone and always on dangerous ground, but also the long-term effect of betrayal and living a secret life on the emotional existence of those involved. Perhaps it was Allbeury’s skill at describing broken hearts as much as broken promises or broken political systems, plus the fact that he wrote extensively for women’s magazines, that he acquired a large and loyal female following.

  Given his own experiences as an agent during World War II, the novels he wrote with a wartime setting – or where the plot necessitated a flashback narrative to the war years – were a world away from much of the gung-ho tales of action and derring-do produced by many of his competitors. Allbeury always looked at the personal cost of being in a war zone or operating in enemy territory and the moral choices his protagonists faced on a daily basis, simply to survive, and few of his novels end happily. It was said that Allbeury ‘added depth’ to the wartime thriller and certainly The Lantern Network in 1978, which unpicks the legacy of fighting with the French resistance, is positively heart-breaking in places. Ironically, it was his 1976 novel The Only Good German (a title that begged for the old soldier’s automatic addition of ‘is a dead one’) which got him noticed although war buffs expecting a shoot-’em-up firefight and lots of action would have been disappointed. Fans of good, intelligent, unfussy writing which got, literally, to the heart of the matter were delighted.

  One other bestselling British thriller writer – or to be accurate, Welsh – who broke through in the mid-Seventies was Craig Thomas, an author forever credited, whether he wanted to be or not, with the creation of the ‘techno thriller’. It was a sub-genre which was to become perpetually linked to American Tom Clancy, although Clancy’s Red October was still several years away from being hunted, when Thomas published his best known thriller Firefox in 1977.

  Thomas’ debut, Rat Trap, in 1976, had tapped in to a very topical fear, the hijacking of passenger aircraft (alternatively known as ‘sky piracy’ or ‘skyjacking’), and though Thomas set his story at Heathrow, the subject made global headlines with real events in Uganda and Somalia at exactly the time the book went on sale. This being the Seventies, it was not surprising that Thomas’ third novel Wolfsbane followed the thriller fashion and harked back to World War II for its back story, but it was his futuristic Firefox which caught the imagination and remained Thomas’ best known book. In many ways it is the ultimate story of air piracy as the plot involves the stealing of a prototype supersonic warplane developed by the Russians and flying it to the West. It gained further fame – and cemented the ‘techno-thriller’ title Thomas probably never wanted – when it was filmed by, and starring, Clint Eastwood in 1982.

  Another Welshman, destined for even more fame and fortune than Craig Thomas, saw his thriller-writing career take off at the tail-end of the Seventies, and he did it with a story set during World War II, involving a Nazi spy, the plans for the D-Day landings, and a U-boat. Originally published, in a fairly low-key way, as Storm Island in 1978, but far better known as Eye of the Needle, under which title it was filmed in 1981, it was not Ken Follet
t’s first novel by any means, but it was the one which got him noticed. Indeed, it was difficult not to notice the dramatic Futura paperback with its stand-out cover (black this time, rather than white) and it promised everything the thriller reader brought up on MacLean and Higgins could want. It did not disappoint and was particularly well-received in the USA where it won the 1979 Edgar Award for Best Novel given by the Mystery Writers of America.

  Although Follett went on to write other action thrillers – Triple in 1979 followed the hunt in the Middle East for a 200-ton ship’s cargo of uranium – plus hugely successful historical novels, Eye of the Needle remains in print almost forty years on and as the author himself says on his website: ‘It would take an accountant a week to work out the exact numbers, but it has sold about ten million copies.’

  There were many British ‘new entrants’ into the thriller writing business in the Seventies, and though the urge to produce ‘the next James Bond’ had dissipated, there was still the feeling that writing a thriller would be followed instantly by a move to tax-exile in Switzerland. In fact ‘having to move to Switzerland’ became a popular synonym for hitting the big time in any field and was used more in hope than expectation, just as that famous piece of ‘Del Boy’ Trotter philosophy ‘This time next year we’ll be millionaires’ slipped from television sitcom into popular parlance. Whilst many a would-be Alistair MacLean might have dreamed of doing so, few, if any, of the bestselling British thriller writers of the Seventies actually did decamp for Switzerland, although several did suddenly find the Irish countryside or the sea air surrounding the Channel Islands far more appealing.