by Mike Ripley
New Clifford novels were consistently favourably reviewed: ‘Clifford writes from a deep understanding of violence born of his own experiences but also – and this is his main strength – from compassion and a sensitivity to despair’ (Times Literary Supplement); ‘a writer who can tell a fast, exciting story and yet tell it with style, intelligence and purpose’ (Sunday Express); ‘Francis Clifford is almost unique in combining a deeply felt philosophical truth with the excitement of the thriller’ (The Guardian), and he was also held in high esteem by fellow crime writers: ‘His novels are remarkable for their high level of tension, produced by a combination of people with whom one deeply sympathizes and situations carefully calculated to put them under most strain. To this he added a remarkable ability to conjure up scenes that an unknown reader will see and remember.’2
He won two Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association, for Another Way of Dying (1969) and The Grosvenor Square Goodbye (1974), as well as being short-listed for Daggers in 1966, 1967, 1971 and 1973. He was also short-listed for the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1974 and 1975.3
Despite his popularity with readers (all his books went through numerous paperback and Book Club editions), universal praise from reviewers, and numerous accolades and awards, the thrillers of Francis Clifford fell from memory remarkably soon after the author’s death in 1975 and most have remained, inexplicably, out of print for thirty years.
In 2010 and 2011 when two Clifford titles were reissued, one of them his last big seller The Grosvenor Square Goodbye (entitled Goodbye and Amen in America), Barry Forshaw, the editor of Crime Time magazine and British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia (2009) wrote:
Francis Clifford’s The Grosvenor Square Goodbye [is] another of that master thriller writer’s perfectly tuned offerings, this one involving the after-effects of a killing in London’s West End (in the vicinity of the American embassy) by an unbalanced sniper. A warning, though … modern thriller writing will seem thin and etiolated to you after reading a book such as The Grosvenor Square Goodbye.4
In his entry on Clifford in British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia, Barry Forshaw had bemoaned the fact that his ‘highly accomplished novels’ were now neglected: ‘Francis Clifford’s star has waned, and many far less talented writers have enjoyed greater success.’
Despite a move to produce his early titles in electronic formats in 2016, Francis Clifford retains the dubious honour of being the most highly regarded, but totally forgotten author from the Golden Age of British thriller writing.
LIONEL DAVIDSON
It was a very old bear, a hungry one, Houston calculated later that it had not eaten enough before hibernation, and had awakened early in the savage winter. It had blundered down the mountain looking for a meal. At eleven o’clock it saw one.
– The Rose of Tibet, 1962
Lionel Davidson was not in the same league as Alistair MacLean when it came to sales figures or film adaptations and was nowhere near as prolific as Jack Higgins, writing only eight full-length novels; though those eight books won him three Gold Daggers and a Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement, making him the most decorated thriller writer of the Sixties and Seventies and still one of the most respected thriller writers of the period.
Lionel Davidovitz was born in 1922 in Hull, the ninth child of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Lithuania. His father died when he was two and when aged seven his mother (who spoke mostly Yiddish) moved to London where the family name was changed to Davidson.1
Leaving school at 14, he worked as an office boy for a shipping company and a year later applied for a job as an office ‘junior’ on The Spectator, which he would later describe as ‘a nest of spies’ as contributors at the time included Anthony Blunt and Graham Greene. Whilst still a teenager, he slipped one of his own short stories – The Fleet – written under a pseudonym into the in-tray of the literary editor and it became his first published work.
By the age of 17, Davidson was turning out children’s stories, features and even an advice column on romantic problems for syndication in popular magazines and had moved to the Keystone Press Agency, where he was writing captions for photo-journalist stories when World War II broke out. He joined the Royal Navy in 1941 and soon volunteered for the submarine service as a wireless operator and telegraphist, initially around Arran and in the Western Isles before being posted to Trincomalee in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and serving for the rest of the war in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. He was, he claimed, ‘one of the only two Jews’ in the submarine service. On demobilisation, Davidson returned to Keystone as a freelance reporter and began working across the agency’s newly re-opened European offices, as well as contributing features to the Picture Post. He covered the emigration of Holocaust survivors from Europe to Cyprus en route for Israel and one assignment took him to Prague in Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Russian invasion in 1948, but on his return to England and with marriage looming, he abandoned the precarious life of the freelance and joined John Bull, the illustrated weekly magazine, becoming the fiction editor, publishing the short fiction of many bestselling writers including Graham Greene, Nevil Shute and Agatha Christie.
His own first novel The Night of Wenceslas was eventually finished in March 1959. It was accepted by Victor Gollancz immediately and published in 1960, when it won The Silver Quill from the Authors’ Club as Most Promising First Novel and the Gold Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association.
The acclaim for The Night of Wenceslas took Davidson somewhat by surprise. Publication had been delayed by a printers’ strike and Davidson had been in Switzerland interviewing top-selling thriller writer Alistair MacLean, only to return on a weekend and find glowing reviews in the Sunday newspapers. (‘Fast-moving, exciting, often extraordinarily funny’ – the Sunday Times; ‘Don’t miss it. Brilliant’ – The Observer.) Having convinced himself that his first novel would not make him any money, he had already started on a second and was startled to find he had a success on his hands, with his tale of an innocent young Anglo-Czech hero being duped into the machinations of Cold War espionage. Told with an almost disarming straightforwardness – and light years away from the spy fantasy world of James Bond – The Night of Wenceslas was leavened with wry, often sardonic humour. Film rights were quickly sold but when the film did appear, as Hot Enough for June (US title Agent 8¾) in 1964, it had been transformed into a romantic comedy vehicle for British matinee idol Dirk Bogarde.
For his second thriller, Davidson took inspiration from nineteenth-century writers such as Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson, and set his tale of high adventure during the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet (a country he had never visited, nor had any intention of doing so). The Rose of Tibet was published in 1962 and although the romantic quest adventure novel seemed out of kilter with the fashion in British thrillers (it was the year of Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File and the first Bond film, Dr. No) it was ecstatically received by reviewers, including Graham Greene and Daphne du Maurier, with Philip Purser choosing it as his Book of the Year for the Sunday Telegraph. Davidson, however, thought it ‘an awful book’ and often claimed that he hated writing it. It did, however, propel him into a higher league of commercial authors and he began to be offered scriptwriting jobs (including work on a draft script for the film of The Ipcress File), although he was to later say he hated such work and that ‘digging the roads’ was a preferable occupation.
His next thriller, inspired by a guide book brought back from Israel by a relative, was an adventure set in the war-torn Middle East, featuring archaeologists in search of a priceless piece of Jewish history. Immediately picked as a Book Society Choice and a Book-of-the-Month Club Choice, A Long Way to Shiloh was destined to be one of the bestselling novels of 1966. It was to win Davidson his second Gold Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association and mark the start of, as he described it, his ‘love affair with Israel’.
His interest in Israel awakened Davidson to the scale and consequences of the
Holocaust which he admitted ‘had passed me by’ until then, although many distant family relatives in Eastern Europe had perished in concentration camps. It was to inspire his fourth adult novel Making Good Again published in 1968, about a Jewish claim for reparations against the West German government, a subject which Davidson tackled with his customary wit, deliberately attempting to deal with the Holocaust in a ‘light entertainment’ thriller format.
Soon after the publication of Making Good Again, he emigrated to Israel. Whilst living in Tel Aviv he wrote what he called his ‘love letter to Israel’, Smith’s Gazelle (published in 1971), and The Sun Chemist (1976), which had an espionage plot concerning the search for a missing formula which would produce cheap synthetic oil.
In 1976 Davidson returned to London, buying a flat at Carlyle Mansions in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, which was to provide the inspiration for his next novel, the blackly comedic detective story The Chelsea Murders, published in 1978. Although described by Davidson himself as ‘a lousy murder story’,2 it won the author an unprecedented third Gold Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association and was adapted for television as part of ITV’s Armchair Thriller series in 1981.
Settling back in England, though, did not provide the inspiration Davidson had hoped for and although he produced other books for children, it was to be sixteen years before his next, and final, thriller appeared. Published in 1994 and immediately reprinted twice in hardback the same year, Kolymsky Heights had an unusual hero – a Canadian Indian who is a brilliant linguist as well as a very efficient spy – infiltrating a highly secret research station in the frozen wastes of Siberia. Getting in to the research station was only half the problem for the hero; it was his dramatic escape across the frozen Bering Sea which caught the imagination of readers and reviewers alike and made the book one of Davidson’s biggest successes. Len Deighton said he wrote ‘the only fan letter I ever sent’ to Davidson after reading it.3 Surprisingly there was no fourth Gold Dagger for Kolymsky Heights, but Davidson did receive the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement in 2001.
Lionel Davidson’s thrillers were all marked by a vivid, muscular style and a dry, intelligent wit. He often likened the writing process to a boxing match, saying in a 1994 interview that ‘It’s like getting into a boxing ring and taking a really good hiding’. For the often convoluted openings of many of his stories he established a (fictional) introductory framework in an attempt to provide a new method of narration. This he regarded as ‘the shadow boxing that prize-fighters engage in before ducking under the ropes in earnest. It gets you up on your toes, legs in the right shape for all the footwork, round upon round of it, that lies ahead.’
Lionel Davidson died in 2009. In February 2016 a new edition of The Rose of Tibet, 54 years after first publication, was the Number One bestseller in the Sunday Times paperback fiction list.
LEN DEIGHTON
‘You speak the truth,’ said Stok. ‘Well, do as you wish. It’s a free country.’ He drank and I took his glass. ‘You mustn’t believe all you read in Pravda,’ I said … Stok was something no computer could deal with, perhaps that’s what I liked about him.
– Billion-Dollar Brain, 1966
According to the first very stylish Penguin paperback editions of Horse Under Water (1963) and Funeral in Berlin (1966), the unsuspecting reader could be convinced that Len Deighton was either five feet six tall and fair or six feet tall and dark, the eldest son of a Governor of the Windward Isles or the manager of an Aldgate gown factory, a chain-smoking heavy drinker or possibly a seldom-smoker who drank warily. These deliberate biographical confusions were either a subtle warning to the reader that they were entering the murky world of spies and spying where nothing may be what it seemed; or they may have been the author, still not taking the idea of being a writer very seriously. By 1966, though, no one should have doubted that Len Deighton had arrived on the thriller-writing scene and needed to be taken seriously.
Leonard Cyril Deighton was born in Marylebone, London in 1929, and sat his 11-plus grammar school exam the week the Second World War broke out. After the war, as a teenager, he worked in the Nine Elms railway shunting depot whilst waiting for his call up for National Service where he served as a photographer in the RAF, flying in Mosquitoes and Lancaster bombers.
He studied art and graphic design at St Martin’s School of Art in Soho and the Royal College of Art then took (what today would be called) a gap year to travel the world as a steward on BOAC airlines. On one flight to Beirut he served coffee to Agatha Christie, then en route to an archaeological dig in Syria. Years later, when introduced to her as a new member of the Detection Club, Dame Agatha said, ‘I don’t believe we’ve met before.’ and the by now bestselling author was able to remind her that they had.
Deighton settled into a career as an illustrator, working in both New York and London, and producing jacket illustrations for paperback editions of books by Jack Kerouac and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Whilst on holiday in France in 1960 he began to experiment for amusement only with a story of his own, wrote some and then filed it away, only returning to finish it on the following year’s holiday.
‘When I wrote The Ipcress File I didn’t want to be a writer at all,’ he was to say later.1 He was an established illustrator and developing an interest in cooking, which he was to combine with his graphic talents in his ‘Cookstrips’ for The Observer.2 It was only at a chance meeting with a literary agent at a party that Deighton mentioned he ‘had a manuscript’ and, after being turned down by two publishers, The Ipcress File appeared just as the first James Bond film was premiered and the Sixties really began to Swing.
‘Ipcress was written to fill up spare time while I was on holiday. It was only after meeting a literary agent – Jonathan Clowes, still my agent – that I started thinking it might become a published book. I believe this factor, that is not [deliberately] writing for publication, gave the book its unusual character but don’t ask me what that character is.’3
Unusual or not, the rave reviews his novel garnered were, Deighton thought, partly due to a reaction against James Bond. ‘I became a blunt instrument to be used by the critics to beat Ian Fleming over the head,’ he said in a 1977 interview4 and certainly Deighton’s un-named, working-class spy hero was perceived as a trendy ‘new man’ who could cook, travelled by bus instead of vintage Bentley, smoked Gauloises, fiddled his expenses and was always butting foreheads with establishment figures or the officer class, usually his immediate bosses in a spy world riven by inter-departmental rivalries. Deighton’s anonymous hero (‘Harry Palmer’ in the films) may have been an ‘anti-Bond’ figure, but he was not an anti-hero as such, for he had more in common with Raymond Chandler’s romantic, incorruptible private eye Philip Marlowe – and he had a similar line in caustic, wise-cracking dialogue. Indeed, the San Francisco Chronicle called him ‘The Raymond Chandler of the cloak-and-dagger set’.
Gripped in a wave of Anglomania which included the Beatles, Carnaby Street and Jean Shrimpton, America took to Deighton’s fertile and inventive thrillers as the ultimate in British ‘cool’. After five months on the US bestseller lists with Funeral in Berlin, Life magazine predicted that: ‘Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops’.
Whether he had wanted to be a writer or not, by the mid-1960s Deighton was a very busy one. Apart from his thrillers, three of which were quickly filmed, he tried his hand at film scripts (including a treatment for From Russia with Love), became Travel Editor for Playboy and edited Len Deighton’s London Dossier (1967) with its iconic ‘keyhole’ cut-out cover by Raymond Hawkey which had the eye of the model Twiggy peeping through it.5
Fascinated with anything to do with machinery, it was not surprising that Deighton became one of the first writers to take advantage of emerging modern technology, leasing an IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter in 1968. The machine weighed 200 pounds and the front window of his London house had to be removed in order to deliver i
t!6
Always interested in military history and particularly the Second World War, his non-fiction histories Fighter, Battle of Britain, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly were all popular and well-received by academic historians, as was his fiction in Declarations of War (short stories) and the outstandingly successful novel Bomber. He also, in 1978, magnificently twisted the history of WWII in SS-GB, which was filmed for the BBC in 2017.7
Perhaps Deighton’s most ambitious project, which brought him a new generation of readers from 19838 was the first ‘Bernard Samson’ trilogy: Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match, which were later complemented with two further trilogies plus a scene-setting ‘background’ novel Winter, making ten books in the series to feature Samson, a British spy brought up in Berlin (and the family business of spying) as a boy. The saga of Samson’s dealings with treachery, both professional and personal, was serialised for television and acquired dedicated fans, among them (it is rumoured) Quentin Tarantino and American thriller writer Dan Fesperman who, in one novel had his cast of ‘real’ spies discussing fictional spies and coming to the conclusion that Bernie Samson was by far ‘the best lover in spy fiction’.9
Deighton’s approach to spy fiction came at precisely the right time, whether by accident or design, revolutionising the whole genre. His spy stories were not replacements for James Bond’s adventures (it was certainly possible to read and enjoy both); they were more realistic antidotes to the Bond fantasies and they were of the Sixties and in tune with the prevailing optimism of an era engaging with youth, fashion and social mobility. Deighton had removed the fantasy element and replaced it with well-researched realism. Spy fantasy had become spy fiction, or as the author himself put it: ‘It’s probably true to say that I had an instinctive desire to write a ‘spy procedural’ and I think that’s probably what I still write today’.10