Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  Ten years later that ‘best 100’ exercise was repeated by The Times newspaper, this time relying on two reviewers 6 to nominate the best ‘crime novel’ of each year (or as near as possible) of the twentieth century. Of the 100 books chosen, which included a large percentage of American titles plus French and Scandinavian entries, eighteen were clearly identifiable as British thrillers and nine of them had been published in the period 1957–79. Only one published later, in 1986, made the cut and that was a John Le Carré.

  In the early 1980s, The Times divided its review columns into ‘Crime’ and ‘Thrillers’ though without any clear working definition of either genre other than, as a rule, thrillers were fatter and heavier than hardback crime novels. Marcel Berlins covered crime – and still does – whilst crime-writer Tim Heald was given the ‘thriller’ beat.7 He stuck with it for six years (1983–9) but then found he’d had enough.

  In an essay in that 1990 Hatchards Crime Companion, Tim Heald explained how ‘thriller fatigue’ had overtaken him:

  True to the traditions of the paper I duly thundered out every month or so, pontificating on the virtues of an extraordinary number of very fat books, most of them – it seemed to me – with hammers and sickles, Union Jacks, swastikas or stars-and-stripes on the cover. Oh, those fifth-hand descriptions of the Oval Office in the White House, those Moscow street plans based on the Intourist A-to-Z. Ah, those macho men with their incessant ‘shooty-bangs’ (John Le Carré’s laconic put-down phrase) and those inevitable available ladies with their ‘generous mouths’, ‘high cheek bones’ and ‘pert breasts’. In the end I couldn’t bear another airport lounge or AK-47 and I gave up. I was, it seemed to me, a sub-genre that had had its day. The thriller wasn’t thrilling any more.

  Was Tim Heald right, back in 1990? Had the thriller ceased to thrill?

  Clawing memories out of an ether clogged with millions of printed words, I can see what he meant. By then I was catching up on crime novels rather than thrillers and what looked suspiciously like a ‘new wave’ of British writers prepared to push the accepted limits of the genre – writers such as Ian Rankin, John Harvey, Val McDermid, Denise Danks, Sarah Dunant, Derek Raymond, Russell James, Michael Dibdin, Philip Kerr and Mark Timlin.

  It was also around that time that I discovered a new (to me) generation of American crime writers – James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, James Crumley, Charles Willeford and, above all, Elmore Leonard – usually in difficult to find imported paperback editions, for the perceived wisdom in publishing circles (I was told by a senior crime editor) was that ‘American crime does not sell well in the UK’, though that was about to change.

  Crime novels, British or American, suddenly seemed more innovative, more interesting, more thrilling and the whole crime genre was expanding fast, which added to the excitement. Two Americans provided a major shake-up of the UK’s bestseller charts – Patricia Cornwell with Postmortem in 1990 and John Grisham with The Firm in 1991 – and in doing so effectively invented two new sub-genres: the ‘forensic thriller’ and the ‘legal thriller’. Given that Thomas Harris, with Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs had already invented the ‘serial-killer thriller’ (exploited to the max by Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho, also in 1991), the very notions of crime novels and thrillers were becoming blurred. Which is not necessarily a bad thing; after all, crime novels should be thrilling and perhaps we readers are, and should be, less worried about pigeon-holing popular fiction.

  So what did all those British thrillers ever do for us, if anything? Speaking personally, they gave me my first smatterings of Russian (Smiert Spionam – ‘death to spies’) and Italian (pericolo di morte – danger of death), both thanks to Ian Fleming. Though neither phrase has actually come in useful, at least not yet. All the German I thought I would ever need (Hände hoch! Achtung! Schweinhund!) had already been acquired via schoolboy comics.

  Did they reinforce any sense of misplaced imperial superiority? Not really, as we were already supremely over-confident in the knowledge that we had the best music, cutting-edge fashions, the best football team (for a brief period in 1966), the best armed forces and, of course, the best policemen in the world. Only slowly did it dawn on us that Britain could be involved in a nuclear war in which we would have little say and less impact, that other countries made better cars and electronic consumer goods, that we were not going put the first man on the Moon or even into space, and that we now had trouble finding a gunboat to send anywhere. Only in the pages of a paperback thriller could we actually save the world.

  There is no doubt that thrillers improved my knowledge of geography. A previous generation of schoolboys had to resort to their stamp collections to get a sense of the far flung world. Thanks to thrillers, I knew all about the Arctic (MacLean), the Andes (Bagley), Finland (Lyall), Algeria (Williams), the Namib Desert (Jenkins) and Berlin (Deighton) long before I ever had a passport.

  I had also acquired far more sailing knowledge and (theoretical) proficiency with firearms than I would ever need in an unadventurous life mercifully devoid of shipwrecks and crashing aeroplanes and I knew enough about submarines to convince me that I never wanted to sail in one.8

  I learned enough about scuba diving to qualify, I am sure, as a diving buddy for Jacques Cousteau (though I am old enough to remember Lloyd Bridges in Sea Hunt) but the occasion never arose to exploit my underwater skills as I have a very healthy respect for the territorial imperatives of sharks.

  Did they teach me anything about sex? I can’t honestly say that they did. In the biggest selling adventure thrillers (MacLean, Bagley, Innes) there simply wasn’t any and the chat-up lines of James Bond in the books tended to be more like commands and in the films were too cheesy to be taken seriously – at least in a Sixth Form discotheque in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1968.

  But at the end of the day, all they had to do was entertain, and that they did. Not all were finely-tuned examples of the thriller writer’s craft – far from it. Quite a lot were, frankly, awful, especially the flood of James Bond imitators trying to cash in on the success of the films.

  The critic and crime writer Julian Symons got into a lot of trouble with the Crime Writers’ Association when he suggested that most crime writers ‘write too much’ even though he included himself in that generalisation. He could have said, and probably did, the same about the thriller writers of that purple patch of British production between Casino Royale and The Eagle Has Landed.

  Of the thousands of titles published, the majority went out of print relatively quickly, just as did the vast majority of English detective novels written during the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s9 and in both cases they probably deserved to. Yet many of the biggest selling titles are still in print – Fleming’s Bond books of course, MacLean, Le Carré, Deighton, Dick Francis, Wilbur Smith, Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins – even if the authors are no longer with us or not writing fiction any more, which is quite remarkable after 40–60 years. (Le Carré, Higgins and Smith are still producing regular bestsellers.)

  Yet among those titles which have gone ‘extinct’ or survive only as electronic downloads (often badly formatted or sometimes pirated), there are many which would stand up against today’s thriller output because of their imaginative plots, the quality of the characterisation and the sheer pace of their story-telling.

  In my not-so-humble opinion, I think it disgraceful that the thrillers of Alan Williams, Francis Clifford, John Blackburn and especially Anthony Price, seem to have been totally forgotten. Those four authors had little in common and they wrote totally different types of thriller in totally different styles, but they never failed to entertain.

  In researching this book and talking to writers and reviewers of every ilk over many years, I am convinced that those boom times for British thrillers inspired a feeling of camaraderie, or at least mutual respect, among the writers.

  There were, perhaps, a couple of the big players who preferred the solitary life of the writer, but in the main
they seemed to have been generous in their praise for their rivals. Ian Fleming was notably generous when it came to reviewing or providing cover quotes (‘blurbs’) for new authors, for example Geoffrey Jenkins, Berkely Mather and Len Deighton. Dick Francis and Alistair MacLean showered Brian Callison’s first thrillers with praise; Len Deighton’s recommendation supported Owen Sela’s debut; Anthony Price, as a long-serving reviewer, recommended hundreds of authors; Gavin Lyall promoted Desmond Bagley; and Bagley not only promoted Palma Harcourt but went out of his way to help at least one fledgling thriller writer find a publisher, just as John Bingham had done with John Le Carré in 1961.

  In 1984, to mark his seventy-fifth birthday, possibly the most respected writer (by other writers) in the genre, Eric Ambler, was invited to lunch – ‘kidnapped’ might be only just too strong a word – at the Savoy in London by Len Deighton. It was not to be the private lunch-for-two Ambler had been expecting, as a surprise party awaited his arrival. Among the guests all there as a mark of respect to Ambler’s contribution to the Great British thriller were: John Le Carré, Lionel Davidson, Miles Tripp (John Michael Brett), Gavin Lyall, John Gardner, Frederick Forsyth and Ted Allbeury. And from his home in Switzerland, that other Grand Master, Graham Greene, sent his best wishes by telephone.10

  I suspect it unlikely that such an event will ever be repeated.

  Appendix I

  THE LEADING PLAYERS

  DESMOND BAGLEY

  The Dakota was still moving too fast. Already it was more than half-way down the strip and O’Hara could see the emptiness ahead where the strip stopped at the lip of the valley. In desperation he swung the rudder hard over and the Dakota swerved with a loud grating sound. He braced himself for the crash. The starboard wingtip hit the rock wall and the Dakota spun sharply to the right. O’Hara kept the rudder forced right over and saw the rock wall coming right at him. The nose of the plane hit rock and crumpled and the safety glass in the windscreens shivered into opacity. Then something hit him on the head and he lost consciousness.

  – High Citadel, 1965

  In the mid-Sixties Gavin Lyall called him ‘The fastest developing writer in the thriller business’. In 2012, leading crime writer Christopher Fowler remembered him as a writer who had ‘hit upon a winning combination of craftsmanship, authenticity, and excitement’ with the result that all his novels were bestsellers.

  Desmond Bagley – often known as ‘Simon’ for no obvious reason other than he used the pen-name Simon Bagley on one occasion – was born in Kendal in the Lake District in 1923. He left school at 14 and showed an early aptitude for mechanical engineering by servicing the fruit machines and amusements on Blackpool’s ‘Golden Mile’. From childhood he struggled with a severe stammer and his speech impediment meant he was passed over for military service and spent World War II in a factory making gun turrets and spare parts for Spitfires.

  After the war he decided to emigrate to South Africa and to do it, unusually, overland. He left England in January 1947 and travelled across the Sahara, then worked in Uganda, Kenya, and Rhodesia before settling in South Africa in 1951 where he became a journalist specialising in scientific and technological subjects at first, then turning to film and book reviewing.

  He sold his first fiction, a short story, to Argosy magazine in 1957 and then began work on a novel which he submitted to Alistair MacLean’s publisher Collins. The Golden Keel was an instant success when published in 1963 and probably because of its wartime backstory, Bagley was automatically compared to Alistair MacLean, though in truth his novels were closer to those of Hammond Innes (and Bagley never resorted to a wartime setting again).

  Like Innes and his wife, Desmond Bagley and his wife Joan were inveterate travellers, spending months abroad researching each new novel. There were to be sixteen in all, which were translated into twenty-two languages (although Joan Bagley completed Night of Error and Juggernaut after Desmond’s death in 1983 and both were published posthumously).

  Bagley returned to England in 1964 and his second novel, High Citadel, was published in 1965 firmly establishing his reputation as a leading writer of adventure thrillers. Christopher Fowler, almost thirty years after Bagley’s death, summarised his technique as: ‘His novels had richly exotic settings and situations: a plane crashing in the Andes, a hurricane veering off-course, corruption over a new hydro-electric dam, a search for Mayan gold in the jungles of Central America, drug-trafficking, Cold War spies, jailbreaks, hidden technological treasure, an avalanche, power struggles in corrupt states.’1

  Fowler’s analysis is spot-on: Desmond Bagley was really good at disasters and how his characters reacted to the dangers which surrounded them, often natural or physical (hurricanes, avalanches) or man-made and occasionally his characters showed extraordinary (though not fantastical) resourcefulness.

  The ‘unique selling point’ of High Citadel was how the survivors of a plane hi-jack (and crash) in the Andes fight off well-armed insurgents by resorting to building weapons from antiquity. When a condensed version of the book appeared (with illustrations) in the American magazine Argosy in August 1965, it was under the rather bellicose headline: ‘Are medieval weapons a match against the military might of a modern Communist force?’2

  Perhaps surprisingly, Bagley’s stories were not well-served by Hollywood – or at least nowhere near as well as those of Alistair MacLean or, in an earlier decade, Hammond Innes. His 1971 novel The Freedom Trap was filmed by John Huston as The Mackintosh Man (starring Paul Newman) and Running Blind became a successful and fondly-remembered BBC series, but the three other Bagley books adapted as television movies in Canada and America after the author’s death have never been shown in the UK.

  Even more surprisingly, given his immense popularity over two decades, 1963–83, his novels slipped out of print appallingly quickly after his death. (His backlist has since been revived and made available.)

  And Desmond Bagley was not only popular with readers, he seems to have been genuinely popular among his fellow writers – and even with editors!3 It seems there are few people who knew him who have a bad word to say about him and some of his friendships became part of thriller-writing legend, such as his relationship with Swedish editor and thriller fiction guru, Iwan Hedman Morelius, who helped Bagley on research trips to Scandinavia and famously tutored him in the workings of his own army-issue Husqvarna m/40 Lahti 9mm pistol (a plot point in The Tightrope Men).4

  The only – mildly – disreputable story about Desmond Bagley was, to a writer, perfectly understandable and totally forgivable. Because of his stammer, Bagley was reluctant to give too many interviews but when his success made it impossible to stay out of the media spotlight, he reluctantly agreed to be interviewed by the Sunday Times (or so the story goes.) A very junior female reporter duly arrived at Bagley’s London hotel and began the interview with the crass opening: ‘I’ve never actually read any of your books, Mr Bagley’. To which, without any trace of a speech impediment whatsoever, Mr Bagley responded: ‘Then why the fuck have they sent you?’

  Always fascinated by mathematics and mechanical things (with a particular affection for Land Rovers), Bagley was, like Len Deighton, an early experimenter with computers.5 This naturally led to press speculation that he had somehow found, or developed, a computer programme which would produce a bestselling thriller.

  Bagley’s success depended on something far older than computers: good-natured basic storytelling which included a genuine curiosity about natural phenomena, little if any sex, and the violence where necessary but never gratuitous. It was a technique which endeared him to everyone who knew him and anyone who read him.

  FRANCIS CLIFFORD

  The first bullet must have struck him in the side. He crumpled up as if he’d gone headlong into a wall, and for a moment or two he didn’t move. The searchlights were sweeping everywhere now and there was an awful wailing noise rising from farther along the far fence, like a warning maroon on a foggy river. It seemed to rouse him, as if he’
d recollected something. In the moonlight they could see him raise his head and start to crawl. And he probably managed several feet before another bullet smashed into him …

  – All Men Are Lonely Now, 1967

  Francis Clifford was the pen name of Arthur Leonard Bell Thompson who was born in Bristol in 1917 but as a young man went out to south-east Asia to work in the rice trade, joining the army in Burma on the outbreak of WWII. After very distinguished war service (winning the D.S.O.) in Burma and India, in Europe with the S.O.E., and later in Intelligence, his first novel was published in 1953. Honour the Shrine was a tense and compassionate war story, qualities Clifford was to show from then on in a succession of well-received thrillers with settings ranging from South America to the Arizona desert, Africa to Cold War Germany.

  ‘The war was, and is, the essential core of my experience,’ Clifford said in an interview in 1974.1 ‘I continue to draw on that experience in writing my novels, which are largely about people in extremis, people facing dangers, terrors, pressures, temptations, tests of strength, and character beyond the bounds of their normal experience.’

  Clifford’s 1959 thriller Act of Mercy, about a young British estate manager and his wife helping a deposed politician flee a coup in a South American ‘banana republic’ received rave reviews and was filmed in 1962 by Anthony Asquith, starring David Niven and Leslie Caron, under the title Guns of Darkness. His 1966 spy novel The Naked Runner was turned into a film vehicle for Frank Sinatra and directed by Sidney J. Furie (who directed The Ipcress File). Another of his spy stories, All Men Are Lonely Now, was also optioned for filming, but never made.