Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  – The 9th Directive, 1966

  ‘Adam Hall’ and his iconic, high-tech, Sixties super-spy hero Quiller both seemed to appear out of nowhere in 1965 on publication of The Berlin Memorandum. Quiller was definitely something new in spy fiction and Adam Hall a brand new name in thriller writing; or was he? The super-tough and emotionless agent Quiller was certainly a new arrival on the crowded spy scene of the mid-Sixties, but his creator was no novice author. In fact, he wasn’t even Adam Hall; he was established popular novelist Elleston Trevor.

  The creator of Quiller was also, or had been, Mansell Black, Trevor Burgess, Roger Fitzalan, Simon Rattray, Warwick Scott, Caesar Smith, and Lesley Stone in a writing career which went back to 1943, when his first children’s book was published under his real name, Trevor Dudley-Smith.

  Born in 1920 in Bromley, south-east London and educated at Sevenoaks School in Kent, Dudley-Smith was apprenticed as a teenager to a racing driver but with the outbreak of World War II immediately joined the RAF in the hope of flying Spitfires. An eyesight defect prevented him from flying and he served for the duration as a Flight Engineer, using his time off duty to write stories for children for, as he said later, one of the few publishers with a large pre-rationing stock of paper! By 1948 he had diversified into crime stories, science fiction and thrillers such as Now Try the Morgue under the pen-name Elleston Trevor. He liked the name so much he changed his name legally to Elleston Trevor, under which (along with the other names) he produced around sixty novels before Quiller appeared, as well as numerous plays and television scripts. Several of his novels from the early 1950s were filmed by Hammer Films but his greatest success came with his 1955 wartime novels Squadron Airborne and The Big Pick-Up, which was filmed as Dunkirk by Leslie Norman.1

  His two most famous titles came about almost by accident, according to an interview he gave four years before his death.2 As ‘Adam Hall’ he had written a novel, The Volcanoes of San Domingo, for a publisher in 1963 but was unhappy with the book and so submitted it to another publisher who accepted it. This left Elleston Trevor (as he now was) one novel short on a two-book contract. He therefore agreed to write a ‘quickie’ to make good on that contract and the result was The Flight of the Phoenix, which became an international bestseller and was filmed with an all-star cast.

  But the publisher of The Volcanoes of San Domingo (Collins) had liked the book and now reminded Trevor that he had signed a two-book deal for that one as well. Inspired by the success of John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, ‘Adam Hall’ turned to the spy novel (although he maintained that he had not at the time read the Le Carré) and produced The Berlin Memorandum in 1965, which became The Quiller Memorandum once the movie version appeared. The novel, highly praised by American critic Anthony Boucher, won the Grand Prix de Litérature Policière in France and the 1966 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

  Early successes and film deals had allowed Trevor to relocate to Spain and then the south of France, but after the success of Quiller he moved to America and lived in Arizona until his death, and the ‘Adam Hall’ pen-name became henceforth reserved for Quiller. At the age of 58 he took up Shotokan karate (and became a black belt) to add realism to his fight scenes.

  Eighteen more Quiller adventures were to follow and about the same number of non-Quiller novels, including (as Elleston Trevor) a more than competent WWII thriller about a British agent in Nazi Germany in 1939, The Damocles Sword in 1981. There was a short-lived BBC television series of Quiller stories in 1975, though only one episode was taken from an Adam Hall novel (The Tango Briefing) and the series is pretty much forgotten. There were moves to revive the Quiller brand with a new film franchise in the twenty-first century, with Pierce Brosnan (then still playing James Bond) initially touted as Quiller, but it has yet to materialise.3

  The Quiller novels achieved an international following and were particularly popular in America. The pared-down, streetwise style of the Quiller stories – Trevor/Hall always saw Quiller as ‘an alley cat with scars all over his body’, something of an ‘anti-Bond’ – was undoubtedly an influence on the generation of American thriller writers which emerged in the Seventies. Veteran agent Henry Morrison4 maintains that all American thriller writers of the Seventies must have been inspired by Adam Hall and that renowned student of spy fiction, Randall Masteller, regards the Quiller books as ‘one of the greatest spy series ever written’.5

  It was part of Trevor’s skill that he could write quickly and convincingly with (it seems) a minimum of research. He was not at Dunkirk in 1940, yet his book The Big Pick-Up is regarded as the definitive novel of the engagement. Similarly, he was complimented by his British editor on his knowledge of Soviet-era Poland as he described in The Warsaw Document in 1970, although he had never been near the country.

  In 1995, as he was dying from cancer, he dictated the final chapters of his last book Quiller Balalaika to his son and the novel was published posthumously. It was set in Russia. A country he had never visited.

  JACK HIGGINS

  The bodies started to come in with the tide just after dawn, clustered together, bobbing in through the surf to the beach a hundred feet below my hiding place.

  – A Game for Heroes, 1970

  Henry (‘Harry’) Patterson was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929 but before the age of two, his parents had split up and his mother returned to Belfast, where young Harry was brought up by her extended family in the Shankhill area. He attended Nettlefield elementary school, as George Best was to do some twenty years later, and claimed to have witnessed his first sectarian bombing at the age of six. He was ever thankful for the public libraries in Belfast and became an enthusiastic and fluent reader, he once claimed, from the age of two.

  Barely a teenager, Harry was transposed to wartime Leeds, where his mother remarried and worked as a waitress. He described himself as coming from ‘a poor background – very working class’ but did apply himself enough to win a scholarship to Roundhay School, a classic escape route to advancement which he singularly failed to take. Famously flogged by the headmaster for throwing a snowball at the school clock, the young Patterson was told ‘You’ll never amount to anything’. A judgement he was often to recall with pride, especially when awarded an honorary doctorate by Leeds Metropolitan University.

  During National Service, 1947–50, he served in the Household Cavalry, attaining the rank of corporal and a posting to guard duty on the East German border. He also, thanks to army testing, discovered he had an IQ of 147 and the realisation spurred a return to education once back into civilian life.

  Supporting himself with a variety of jobs including tram conductor and tent hand with Bertram Mills Circus, and eventually finding his way into teaching, he filled his spare time writing short stories, plays, and radio scripts all of which failed to attract publishers or payment.

  In the 1950s, he was accepted into teacher training college in Leeds and also enrolled for a ‘distance learning’ BSc degree course in sociology from the LSE. He was one of the two external candidates to sit the final exams in Bradford in 1961, in which he was awarded a Third Class Honours, making him one of the earliest graduates in the new subject of sociology in Britain.

  Although married by now and starting a family, Patterson the qualified teacher seemed to enjoy the bohemian life of late Fifties Leeds, befriending the young unknown actor Peter O’Toole and the recently-published novelist John Braine. Whilst lecturing at Leeds Polytechnic he met literary agent Paul Scott who finally found him a publisher for his adventure thriller Sad Wind from the Sea in 1959. Harry was 29 and was paid an ‘awesome’ £75 advance.

  Thrillers, crime novels, and spy stories flowed effortlessly under a clutch of pen-names, including his attempt at a series secret agent hero1, though many had print-runs only large enough to supply the demand from public libraries. His fan base was growing though, albeit in the shadow of the thriller writers in the Collins stable such as Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes, Desmo
nd Bagley and Geoffrey Jenkins. ‘I had done alright,’ Patterson was to say, ‘but I hadn’t done brilliantly.’

  The early Seventies saw more attention to character in his writing, solid commercial success, and even some glowing reviews. His war story A Game for Heroes, published in 1970 by Macmillan under the name James Graham, was set in the Channel Islands, a location he was to return to several times in fiction and later, in life. It was well-enough received by both serious reviewers and readers but it was his next two books for Collins, as Jack Higgins (the name borrowed from an uncle of his mother), that were to make his name. The Savage Day (1972) and A Prayer for the Dying (1973) were centred on the troubles in Northern Ireland and publication coincided with the release of a film of an earlier book, The Wrath of God, starring Robert Mitchum and Rita Hayworth. Whatever Harry Patterson thought, Jack Higgins was starting to do brilliantly.

  His big breakthrough came with The Eagle Has Landed in 1975 and if he was never to achieve such heights for a single book again, Harry Patterson/Jack Higgins had made the quantum leap into thriller superstardom. For the next thirty years the brand name Jack Higgins guaranteed commercial success, with total sales (to date) estimated at over 250 million copies, despite a falling off in ideas, repetitious plots, and characters2 and an almost rigid adherence to formulaic writing.

  Had his age not been fixed by his involvement in the 1943-set The Eagle Has Landed, it is likely that Liam Devlin, the IRA man assisting the German commandos in their attempt to kidnap Churchill, would have gone on to be Higgins’ long-running series hero as he moved his thrillers into more contemporary settings. Instead, that role fell to a protégé of Devlin’s, Sean Dillon, who began as an IRA hitman but ends up working for British Intelligence3 and foiling assassination attempts on both the British Prime Minister and the President of the United States.

  Patterson/Higgins had an undeniable talent for spotting a popular story and was particularly quick off the mark with Exocet in the wake of the Falklands War and Eye of the Storm following the mortar attack on John Major’s Cabinet in 1991 by the IRA. Above all he created a series of flawed heroes who were ‘good guys fighting for rotten causes’, notably Steiner, the ‘good German’ in The Eagle Has Landed, Liam Devlin and Sean Dillon (who both had backgrounds as IRA gunmen), and the renegade unit of ‘noble’ Finnish soldiers reluctantly doing their oath-sworn duty by helping Martin Bormann escape from Nazi Germany in 1945 in The Valhalla Exchange.

  With commercial success came the opprobrium of the literary critics and accusations of poor writing and the recycling of characters and plots from earlier books. The New York Times said that his 1986 bestseller Night of The Fox had ‘a plot which thickens to the point of congealing’ and one Internet critic described Thunder Point (1993) as ‘the finest book about drinking ever seen’, noting that references to drinking Champagne outnumbered Scotch by 39 to 16. (Higgins always maintained that he had been advised ‘never to read reviews’ by fellow thriller-writer Alistair MacLean.)

  Once settled in tax exile on Jersey, his writing regime soon became legendary. He always wrote longhand and was said to start each evening in his favourite Italian restaurant in St Helier, then continue at home through the night before a glass of Champagne and bacon-and-eggs breakfast at dawn, then bed. In 2003, the BBC reported his annual earnings at £2.8 million.4

  In addition to four novels for young adults, co-authored with Justin Richards, Harry Patterson has to date written over seventy-five novels and, on the cover of The Death Trade (2013), his publisher HarperCollins labelled him simply: ‘The Legend Jack Higgins’.

  HAMMOND INNES

  There was a great roaring sound and a wall of white water hit us. It swept over the cockpit, lifting me out of my seat, tugging at my grip on the wheel. The sails swung in a crazy arc; they swung so far that the boom and part of the mainsail were buried for a moment in the back of a wave whilst tons of water spilled across our decks; and close alongside the steamer slid by like a cliff.

  – The Wreck of the Mary Deare, 1956

  In her introduction to the 2013 re-issue of The Lonely Skier, Dame Stella Rimington, the former Director General of MI5 and now a successful author of spy fiction, called Hammond Innes ‘the most wide-ranging and longest lasting of the post-war thriller writers.’

  In fact, the thriller-writing career of Ralph Hammond Innes began before the Second World War and almost accidentally. Born in Horsham, Sussex, in 1913, but of Scottish heritage, Hammond Innes left school at 18 and, in the midst of the Depression, eventually found work as a journalist on the London business newspaper, the Financial News.1 In 1936, looking to get married and in need of extra income, he bashed out a supernatural thriller, The Doppelganger, and sent it to an agent in Fleet Street who promptly sold it to a small publisher. No doubt pleased that his first novel was to be published, Innes was shocked to find that he had signed a contract which required four books in two years, for the princely advance of £30 per book.2 He delivered three more thrillers (all now very difficult to find) and then, in 1939, switched to publisher Collins. His career was just taking off as war broke out, with the imaginative and genuinely exciting Wreckers Must Breathe and The Trojan Horse. He joined the Royal Artillery and wrote his wartime thriller Attack Alarm (1941) whilst serving on an anti-aircraft battery during the Battle of Britain, but then military necessity and a posting overseas put his writing on hold. He ended the war a Major in the 8th Army, having served in Italy, and he returned to England with the completed manuscript of one thriller, Dead and Alive, and the idea for another, The Lonely Skier, based on an arduous army skiing course in the Italian Dolomites.

  His thrillers now drew on his wartime experiences and set new standards of accuracy in their depiction of places and technical details of things with which his (male) readership would have been very familiar.

  Innes’ novels began to appear in paperback as early as 1946, when Dead and Alive was published as a Collins White Circle Mystery, and by 1955 he was an established bestseller with thirteen thrillers in hardback and Fontana paperbacks. A long association of travel-writing with the American magazine Holiday financed his research into exotic locations but his most famous title, The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1956) was set, literally, in home waters. The success of that title and the subsequent film allowed Innes to buy a yacht (which he named the Mary Deare) and for him and his wife to explore other locations for more stories.

  The contemporary thriller writer Andy McNab puts the publication of The Wreck of the Mary Deare as a key point in Innes’ career: ‘By this point Innes had a large and loyal fan base of readers who relied on him for action-packed stories flavoured with plenty of suspense, drama, rollercoaster plotlines and that trade-mark authenticity … his books were particularly popular because of their leading men. They were seemingly unremarkable characters accustomed to a quiet life, who found themselves in impossible situations. Many people could identify with or aspire to the sense of honour and determination their unlikely heroes show when fighting their corner.’3

  Hammond Innes’ heroes may have been ‘unremarkable’, often lonely or solitary types who rarely had access to gadgets or weaponry other than their own wits in their struggles. Often the villain they were opposing was motivated by greed, pure and simple, and on several occasions the hero would find himself up against a more formal, judicial foe. (Legal hearings or Courts of Enquiry feature in several books – the ordinary man up against a faceless establishment). But invariably the prime struggle in an Innes adventure would be what Stella Rimington has called ‘man versus nature’ which would be a constant theme in his fiction, whether struggling in caves or deserts, skiing down mountains or over glaciers, or battling the sea.4

  In later novels, as he became more concerned with environmental causes, the basic villain in his fiction became man as destroyer of the environment, both wildlife and landscape. Nowhere is this strand of his writing clearer than in his twenty-seventh novel High Stand in 1985 set in British Columbia and Alaska (thou
gh the hero is an unassuming Suffolk solicitor), where the plot centres on drug-smuggling and a ‘cursed’ stand of timber being decimated by greedy capitalists. It is a book which Kirkus Reviews said contained ‘a few sermons about the nobility of trees’.5 Previously renowned as an enthusiastic supporter of sailing and maritime education, Innes became a dedicated planter of trees, establishing forestry projects in Wales, Suffolk, and Australia. His campaigning on the subject led one Scottish newspaper to once ask if he was aware how many trees millions of copies of his books must have used up and he supposedly replied that he ‘didn’t want to know’.6

  For all the serious conservation issues that he tackled through his thrillers, Hammond Innes is primarily remembered for his travelling to and thoroughly researching his locations – often spending six months of each year on research. He wrote numerous travel books, notably Harvest of Journeys (1960) and Sea and Islands (1967), and will forever be remembered for his association with and love of the sea. When he died in 1998, he left the bulk of his estate to the Association of Sail Training Organisations, dedicated to introducing young people to sailing.

  Although the best of more than thirty adventure stories (he also wrote children’s stories under the name Ralph Hammond) were written before the Sixties boom in British thrillers, reissues as mass market paperbacks brought him to the attention of a new, younger readership. The author whose first novel had appeared in the same year as Eric Ambler’s (1936) and whose hardback sales Ian Fleming had so envied back in 1955, was giving Alistair MacLean a run for his money in paperback sales in the Sixties. He was also a clear inspiration for one of the new generation of adventure thriller writers, Desmond Bagley, who paid him the compliment of a name-check in his 1963 debut novel The Golden Keel. When the hero, Peter Halloran, explains the story behind ‘Mussolini’s Treasure’ (the nub of the plot) to his wife Jean, she responds by saying ‘It’s like something from the Spanish Main … Or a Hammond Innes thriller’.