Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  The popular perception of anyone who has had a thriller – or virtually any type of book – published, is that the author must automatically be immensely rich, very much on the same principle that because today’s Premiership footballers are paid many times the average annual salary per week, then all footballers must be earning fairly obscene amounts of money. But not all footballers play in the Premiership; many ply their trade in the less lucrative lower leagues. They are still good at their jobs and regularly provide entertainment (usually) to their loyal fans.

  And so it was with thrillers in the Seventies. There were many enjoyable stories written by talented writers who did not become household names. Some came and went with the decade whilst others enjoyed longer careers and received the plaudits of reviewers even if the sales figures of a Forsyth or a Higgins eluded them.

  One 1972 debutant, Owen Sela, really did seem like something new. He was young – his photograph on the jackets of his early hardbacks showed him with long hair and flowered shirt – recalling memories of that 1960s wunderkind Adam Diment – and he was neither a world-weary foreign correspondent nor a grizzled old soldier. In fact he was an accountant. Sela brought a certain freshness to the British thriller, even if his first novel, The Bearer Plot, did involve hidden Nazi loot, scuba-diving in an Alpine lake and frantic car chases across Europe. His first-person narrator hero, Nicholas Maasten is a sort of rogue antique dealer but fashionably hip and cocksure enough to think nothing of putting his feet and his ‘Pinet suedes’ up on a Hepplewhite table because he knows it’s an imitation. Maasten is also very knowing about what makes a good thriller and shares his taste with his readers. In The Bearer Plot, Maasten is in the home of a prospective client in Spain (having arrived in a white Alfa Romeo Sprint Coupé whilst smoking Sobranie cigarettes) and to while away the time, he examines the bookshelves in the room, expressing dismay that his host seemed to prefer detective stories to decent thrillers: ‘the shelves were filled with … Wilkie Collins, Agatha Christie, Dürrenmatt, Simenon, Dorothy Sayers … There was nothing by Chandler, Fleming, Deighton, or Gavin Lyall.’

  Early reviewers certainly appreciated his youthful narrative voice and he showed he could alternate between the spy novel (The Kiriov Tapes) and the adventure thriller set in exotic places (The Portuguese Fragment set in Ceylon, where Sela was born) and he could even handle that old stalwart, the World War II conspiracy thriller as he did in An Exchange of Eagles in 1977, the title for which he is best remembered.

  Two of the ‘new entrants’ showed that the British thriller was still open to experimentation, with novels which were critically acclaimed though so unusual that they were never likely to challenge the mainstream bestsellers.

  Geoffrey Rose, an actor, wrote only three adventure thrillers between 1972 and 1975, each using an exotic location and each with a nameless hero narrator. They were all noted for their surreal, dream-like style and their plots which were ‘pure chase’. His best was A Clear Road to Archangel in 1973, set in Russia during the 1917 Revolution and which follows a lone, badly-trained British spy racing across snowbound country to rendezvous with the warship sent to rescue him as he desperately tries to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.

  A Clear Road to Archangel, Panther, 1975, Illustrated by Richard Clifton-Dey

  Drawn Blanc, Panther, 1975

  Reg Gadney, a former soldier and art historian, began his long writing career in 1970 with Drawn Blanc, a spy thriller set in a hard, dirty, unsavoury London that was clearly tired of its ‘swinging’ image and coming to terms with a new and ruthless approach to spying and security matters. Gadney’s second novel, Somewhere in England, an action-packed hunt for a Nazi war criminal possibly alive and well as living ‘somewhere in England’, was a more conventional spy thriller but both books were very strong on atmosphere, especially where the seedier parts of London were concerned.

  Right at the end of the decade, a new fictional spy came on the scene, albeit relatively briefly, who offered a European realpolitik take on the tropes of successful spy thrillers of the Sixties. Cold War by David Brierley, published in 1979, gave us possibly the only professional female secret agent of the decade, known simply as Cody. Originally an American, CIA-trained spy (but her nationality was changed to British by – surprisingly – Brierley’s American publisher) living in Paris, the resourceful 28-year-old is attempting to go freelance, but the main spying nations fighting the Cold War will not, of course, let her. Cody was super-tough, streetwise, and skilled in spying tradecraft and comparisons with James Bond and Modesty Blaise were inevitable, although in truth she was a closer relative of Adam Hall’s ‘Quiller’. David Brierley abandoned his Cody series after four novels – though there was to be a fifth in 1999 – and went on to write other highly-regarded thrillers which took a perceptive and sympathetic view of the politics of Eastern Europe.

  By 1980 British thrillers were still selling internationally with John Le Carré and those relative ‘new boys’ Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett making regular appearances on the New York Times Best Seller List, but British thriller writers were no longer having it all their own way. There was serious competition now from across the Atlantic and one name in particular was appearing on that New York Times list with awesome regularity: Robert Ludlum.

  Chapter 12

  ENDGAME

  For the best part of twenty years, and in spite of a shrinking Empire and a decline in economic power and prestige, the British had saved the world from Nazis, ex-Nazis, resurrected Nazis, Communists, the secret police of any and all Iron Curtain countries, criminal masterminds, gangsters, triads, terrorists, mercenaries and megalomaniacs – or rather, the fictional heroes of British thriller writers had.

  It had been the names of British authors which had dominated the thriller market, the bestseller lists, the waiting lists in public libraries, and the shelves of High Street – and, yes, airport – bookshops. Fleming, MacLean, Innes, Bagley, Francis, Deighton, Le Carré, Forsyth and Higgins were names known worldwide to thriller readers and synonymous with the genre, just as for an earlier reading generation, the names Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh (although technically a New Zealander) had come to represent the English detective novel in its Golden Age.

  In the field of adventure and spy thrillers, the Brits seemed to have a monopoly, though when it came to the mystery and crime novel genres, American authors such as Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, Charles Williams, John D. MacDonald and Raymond Chandler were well known to British shelf-browsers thanks to eye-catching paperback editions. Of course there were American writers of spy fiction – lots of them1 – but only a few were recognised on this side of the Atlantic. Unusually, American paperback editions of Donald Hamilton’s ‘Matt Helm’ series were available if you could find them2 and Richard Condon’s 1959 thriller The Manchurian Candidate was certainly recognised as a classic, if perhaps more people had seen the film rather than read the book.

  Yet even as the boom in British thrillers was getting its second wind in the early 1970s, the colonials were striking back. New American authors were gearing up to make sure the British no longer had it all their own way and one American more than any other was responsible for signalling the end of British domination.

  When Robert Ludlum’s The Scarlatti Inheritance appeared in paperback in the UK in 1972, it seemed to be everywhere. It was hard to miss as its cover pressed all the right buttons for the (by now) veteran paperback thriller buyer. It was solid white – as distinctive and eye-catching as the famous Raymond Hawkey cover for The Ipcress File – with a single striking photographic image of bundles of $100 bills bound with paper bands bearing – you could have guessed it – a swastika. The book was reprinted twenty-seven times in the first ten years in the UK alone. It is still being reprinted, as are Ludlum’s following novels The Osterman Weekend, The Matlock Paper, and The Rhinemann Exchange (more swastikas on the cover), indeed as are all his novels.

  The Scarlatti
Inheritance, Grafton, 1972

  The generation of readers who came to Ludlum through The Bourne Identity and its follow-ups in the 1980s, or the later films, cannot possibly imagine the impact of his first four or five thrillers, published in rapid succession. They were immensely popular and because of that were somewhat disparagingly labelled ‘airport thrillers’. Indeed, Robert Ludlum is often cited (blamed?) as the originator of the ‘airport thriller’. There were, however, many thousands of transatlantic air passengers in the Seventies and since who have happily whiled away a flight with a Ludlum.

  Success on the scale Ludlum enjoyed – estimated sales to date of more than 300 million copies – was bound to get the critics hovering like vultures and complaining about one-dimensional characters, fantastical conspiracy theory plots and too much factual background information, just as they do today every time Dan Brown publishes a new novel. Few though could dispute the pace and page-turning qualities of Ludlum’s books, which he saw as ‘novels of paranoia’. There is a famous story about a Washington Post review of one of Ludlum’s books which is supposed to have said ‘It was a lousy novel, so I stayed up to 3 a.m. to finish it,’ but one British critic did not pull his punches. In Bloody Murder (1992), Julian Symons listed Robert Ludlum among those ‘immensely popular’ authors whose work ‘has a machine-like nature that removes it from the sphere of literary into that of sociological consideration’. He later admits, rather grandly: ‘A personal inability to finish any Ludlum book, because of the crudeness of the writing and the frequent absurdity of the subject matter, absolves me from detailed comment.’

  The Scarlatti Inheritance was only the advance guard of an American invasion of thrillers jostling for shelf-space in British bookshops.

  David Morrell’s First Blood (the source for the film Rambo) and Brian Garfield’s Death Wish (filmed starring Charles Bronson) both appeared in 1972, featuring violent, vigilante heroes. Morrell and Garfield went on to prove that Americans could do spy thrillers and thrillers with a historical setting: Garfield’s 1973 adventure Kolchak’s Gold, based on an incident in the Russian Civil War and his later wartime thriller about Winston Churchill, The Paladin, were both successes in the UK. So too were the piratical thrillers set on the high seas (territory previously thought to be ruled by Britannia) of Justin Scott, beginning with The Shipkiller in 1978.

  The American master of the adventure thriller – on land, sea, and often ice – was to be Clive Cussler whose first novel, The Mediterranean Caper (also known as Mayday!), was published in the UK in 1973 but caused only a ripple. Cussler’s 1975 Iceberg, with its dramatic paperback cover showing a ship frozen inside an iceberg, caused a bigger splash, but the real Cussler tsunami came the next year with Raise the Titanic! (Along with film producer Sir Lew Grade’s famous comment that it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic …) Dozens of adventure thrillers and millions of sales were to follow so that by the end of the century, Clive Cussler had replaced Alistair MacLean as the automatic response – at least among male readers – to the prompt ‘sea-faring adventure thriller’.

  Asked about his early influences from the Sixties for this book, Justin Scott recalled how he and his friend and contemporary Brian Garfield both ‘loved Len Deighton and Adam Hall, two of my favourites, and Gavin Lyall. I was a huge fan of Alistair MacLean and Hammond Innes and of course Day of the Jackal was a big influence.’

  Robert Ludlum, David Morrell and Brian Garfield all showed they could write good popular thrillers drawing on history as Clive Cussler and Justin Scott were to do, as well as claiming the high seas. Worryingly for the patriotic British reader, the Americans were proving themselves rather good at doing extravagant Nazi-based thrillers as well, with Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil causing a sensation when it arrived in 1976.

  Yet at least the British still had a firm grip on serious spy fiction, hadn’t they? Le Carré (a regular name in the New York Times bestseller lists in the Seventies) and Deighton were pretty much unchallenged still, weren’t they?

  Charles McCarry, a long-serving CIA field officer, gave lie to that myth in 1971 with his documentary-style debut The Miernik Dossier which the New York Times called ‘Arguably the finest modern American spy story’ and which Eric Ambler, no less, described as ‘Intelligent and enthralling … superbly constructed … wholly convincing.’ Two years later Robert Littell had the effrontery to win the (British) Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger with his debut spy novel The Defection of A. J. Lewinter.

  It seemed that America was set to replace the United Kingdom as the world’s policeman, Nazi-hunter, and chief spy in fiction, just as it had in fact.

  Not that British spy writers were immediately replaced by Americans, far from it. In the 1980s, John Le Carré produced A Perfect Spy and The Russia House; John Gardner combined family saga with spy novel and produced a trilogy – Secret Generation, Secret Houses and Secret Families; and Len Deighton completed two of the three trilogies featuring Bernard Sampson – Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match, and then Spy Hook, Spy Line, and Spy Sinker.

  All were successful and the constantly growing sales of Dick Francis (labelled ‘a racing Alistair MacLean’ by the Daily Mail) and Wilbur Smith did not seem at all threatened by American counterparts. Even James Bond, the quintessential British secret agent, came back from exile and the Ian Fleming fiction franchise was rebooted under the ‘continuation’ authorship of the prolific John Gardner.

  But in Britain tastes were definitely changing, or perhaps the male population was reading less and the females more. There was a clear revival under way of what used to be called, in newspaper review columns and public library classifications, the ‘whodunit?’ or the ‘detective story’, but was becoming more widely and more accurately known as the ‘crime novel’. It was, and is, a term which covers a multitude of different types and specialities, just as the term ‘thriller’ does, and was a genre often, though not exclusively, thought of as being female dominated both in reading and writing.3

  Certainly two women writers were leading the counter-attack on the male supremacy of the thriller-writing world. Phyllis James (who used the initials ‘P. D.’ to disguise the fact that she was a female author) and Ruth Rendell had both begun their careers in the Sixties, but were to flourish, critically and commercially, in the Seventies. James’ Shroud for a Nightingale (1971) and Death of an Expert Witness (1977) firmly established Adam Dalgliesh as one of the nation’s favourite policemen – if not necessarily the nation’s favourite poet – and Rendell’s Inspector Wexford made almost annual appearances in what the author always described as her ‘bread and butter’ novels. Both were winning prizes as well as readers on both sides of the Atlantic and if further proof were needed (it wasn’t) that Ruth Rendell was a major player in international crime fiction, then the publication of two outstanding non-series novels, considered by some to be her best work, in quick succession – A Demon in My View (1976) and A Judgement in Stone (1977) – provided it.

  In 1975 another fictional policeman whose name was to become almost as well-known as that of Sherlock Holmes – Inspector Morse – made his first rather low-key appearance in Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter. It was not long before Inspectors Dalgliesh, Wexford and Morse became well-known television characters, something which always increased paperback sales exponentially4 and policemen began to replace spies and secret agents in British popular fiction. That trend has continued into the present century.

  Like the fall of the Roman Empire, it did not happen overnight but the era of British blockbuster thrillers was definitely fading. The death of Alistair MacLean in 1987 was seen as one marker, but there was no unseemly scramble to find ‘the new Alistair MacLean’ as there had been to find ‘the next Ian Fleming’ in 1964. MacLean had, however, left behind outline treatments – more for films or television features than books – which were turned into novels by an unknown author named Alastair MacNeill, a name so suspiciously close to ‘Alistair MacLean’ that it was assumed by many
fans that it had been manufactured in the publicity department (though it was entirely genuine). There was one last hoorah in 1996 when thriller writer (and accomplished yachtsman) Sam Llewellyn wrote Storm Force from Navarone, a sequel to Force 10 from Navarone from 1968, which was in itself a sequel to The Guns of Navarone.

  The other fingerpost pointing to the end of an era was personified by no less a figure than the President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev. It was Gorbachev’s internal policies of glasnost (‘openness’) and perestroika (‘restructuring’) and his willingness to turn a blind eye to the collapse of communist regimes in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and actually withdraw rather than send in Russian troops which led to the opening, in 1989, of the Berlin Wall and, effectively the end of the Cold War.

  After decades of thwarting communist plots or uncovering traitors or ‘moles’ pursuing communists plot in house, and having seen off the Nazis, British thriller writers were in danger of running out of enemies. They still had their sense of humour, though, and one survivor from those thriller-writing golden days of the early Sixties, Gavin Lyall, summed up the dilemma succinctly, if tongue-in-cheek, at the Crime Writers’ Association and at the 1990 Bouchercon.5 Lyall’s solution was to establish a new pressure group and though quite what it was supposed to do was left deliciously vague, its name was sure to attract headlines. It would be called Thriller-writers Hoping to Unseat Gorbachev; or T.H.U.G. for short …

  One critic certainly thought the glister was beginning to blister on the thriller. In 1990, the Hatchards Crime Companion – a book mostly read by the writers who were mentioned in it – revealed the ‘Top 100 crime novels of all time’ as decided by a survey of members of the Crime Writers’ Association. Of the 100 titles suggested, from Wilkie Collins in the 1860s onwards, twenty-nine could be labelled thrillers rather than crime novels without much argument and seventeen of those were published in the period 1957–84; twelve of them being titles written by authors who had published notable thrillers in the ‘right year’ of 1962.