by Mike Ripley
Hammond Innes never received any awards from the Crime Writers’ Association in Britain, or was a member of the Detection Club, but he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the American Bouchercon convention in 1993 and was made a CBE in 1978.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Once George had got Karla under his skin, they said, there was no stopping him. The rest was inevitable, they said. Poor old George: but what a mind under all that burden.
– The Honourable Schoolboy, 1977
David John Moore Cornwell was born in Poole, Dorset in 1931 but since 1963 has been known, whether he wanted to be or not, as John Le Carré. He was educated at Sherborne and the University of Bern in Switzerland before doing National Service with the Army Intelligence Corps in Austria in 1951–2 and then reading German at Oxford, graduating in 1956.
Cornwell taught French and German at Eton, where he began to write (but set aside) the novel that would become A Murder of Quality. After less than two years he put out feelers to old contacts in Intelligence and was quickly recruited into MI5, at a time when Britain’s prestige was suffering from the Suez debacle and its security services deeply mistrusted, especially by the Americans following the Kim Philby fiasco. With little to do and bored with the dullness of life in MI5, Cornwell wrote what was to become his first published novel, Call for the Dead. Originally titled A Clear Case of Suicide and written under the pen-name ‘Jean Sanglas’, the novel was turned down by Collins.1 Fellow MI5 officer John Bingham, already a much-respected crime novelist, recommended that Cornwell send the book to his publisher Victor Gollancz and, with a change of title and a new pen-name, the book was published in 1961 and ‘John Le Carré’ and George Smiley were born.
By the time Call for the Dead appeared – to very favourable reviews – Cornwell had completed a transfer from MI5 to MI6 or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and been posted to British legations and embassies in Bonn and Hamburg. His second novel (begun at Eton), A Murder of Quality was published in mid-1962 and was again much praised by crime fiction reviewers and a first print run of 3,000 copies quickly sold out. Both novels were to appear as paperbacks in the famous Penguin green ‘crime and detection’ livery in 1964, by which time an awful lot of people had heard of John Le Carré.
His next manuscript was called The Carcass of the Lion2 – perhaps a reflection on the fate of the protagonist or perhaps a metaphor for the state of Britain’s role in the Cold War – but on publication in 1963 it caused a sensation as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which had been, perhaps surprisingly, positively ‘vetted’ by both MI5 and MI6 as the author was a serving Intelligence officer. Such was the success of the book (it was serialised in the Sunday Express, chosen by several Book Clubs and went on to top the New York Times best seller list ahead of novels by Leon Uris and Gore Vidal) it became impossible for David Cornwell to hide behind the pen-name any longer and in early 1964, whilst on duty in the British consulate in Hamburg, he received a call from the Sunday Times, ‘outing’ him as John Le Carré.
Published in Britain in September 1963, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, along with Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File which had appeared ten months earlier, signalled a sea change in spy stories, bucking the trend of Bond-mania which was on the point of becoming a global industry as the film series took off. Both books were to be turned into successful films in 1965 and perhaps fortunately the producers were unable to secure their first choice for the role of Alec Leamas – Burt Lancaster. Richard Burton took the central role of the spy who drank far too much and gave an impressive and sobering performance.
Deighton’s spy stories may have been a perfectly ‘cool’ and timely fit for the rebellious Sixties, but Le Carré’s novels took a longer view, almost revelling in the imperialistic hangover of Britain’s diminishing world status and making it clear that the class system was still well-entrenched, at least within British Intelligence. Le Carré’s heroes tended to be doom-laden and damaged and inhabited a different planet to James Bond, so different that one commentator suggested that Le Carré was ‘paranoic [sic] about Bond’.3 The world of Le Carré’s fiction was bleak and pessimistic compared to the fantasies of Ian Fleming (and the many authors who aped him in the Sixties) and though not all Le Carré’s novels featured spies, they all dealt with the moral vacuum left by betrayal. It also seemed an unnervingly realistic world, though one spy famously disagreed.
In a pointed Foreword to his 1966 spy novel The Double Agent, John Bingham wrote: ‘There are currently two schools of thought about our Intelligence Service. One school is convinced that they are staffed by murderous, powerful, double-crossing cynics, the other that the taxpayer is supporting a collection of bumbling, broken-down lay-abouts.’ Years later, in his Introduction to the re-issue of another Bingham novel4 Le Carré wrote that ‘No insider doubted that John was writing about me.’
John Bingham may have thought that Le Carré had dragged the good name of the Secret Service through the mud, but readers certainly did not, especially when the author began to put his hero George Smiley centre stage in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and subsequent novels. Among Smiley’s fans was Dame Stella Rimington, a future Director-General of MI5, who was to publicly declare George Smiley to be her ‘favourite fictional spy’.5
Smiley, that ‘old spy in a hurry’ gained further fame from Alec Guinness’ portrayal in the BBC’s revered serialisation of Tinker, Tailor in 1979 and, later, Smiley’s People. It was an inspired piece of casting, and one long-favoured by the author. In 1965, in a contrived interview between Le Carré and Margery Allingham for the American magazine Ladies’ Home Journal, he said: ‘I have always wished he could be played by Alec Guinness, but whether this will ever happen is rather a different matter.’ (The character was reinvented for another generation by Gary Oldman in the 2011 film version, which sparked a new interest in Le Carré and his novels among a post-Cold War audience).
In the following decade Le Carré had another huge success with A Perfect Spy (1986), possibly his best and certainly his most autobiographical novel. Philip Roth called it ‘The best English novel since the war’; it knocked Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Supremacy off the top of the bestseller list in the US, and in the UK it outsold Wilbur Smith’s Power of the Sword. It too was quickly filmed by the BBC in 1987 although the series never reached the heights of Tinker, Tailor.
Many of Le Carré’s twenty-three novels (to date) have been televised or filmed – not all with acclamation, as with The Little Drummer Girl in 1983 – including The Russia House, The Constant Gardener, A Most Wanted Man and The Night Manager, with Le Carré himself making Hitchcock-like cameo appearances in many of them.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, whose erection in 1961 may have inspired The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and the end of the Cold War saw no reduction in Le Carré’s pool of fictional targets. They may not be Karla-trained ‘Moscow hoods’ any more, but Le Carré has found many a villain on which to vent his political and moral outrage in the growth of international terrorism, global corporations, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical trade, banking, the Russian Mafia, and, as always, the rivalries within and between security services.
In his long career, Le Carré has been accused of concentrating on male relationships in an overtly male world (which MI5 and MI6 certainly were in his day), his female characters often being ‘difficult, sometimes unattractive women’ who are ‘vividly drawn [but] not agents in their own right’,6 of being anti-German, anti-Israeli, anti-American and nostalgic for the ‘romance’ of the Cold War.
The uncommitted readers who enjoy his novels for the sheer quality of the writing and the human frailties they highlight – even if only among men, Germans, Israelis and Americans – would say John Le Carré must be doing something right.
GAVIN LYALL
The revolver was a Smith and Wesson, all right, and somebody had cut away the front of the trigger guard, to give a faster grab at the trigger. That was the sort of thing professionals did to gun
s – not fooling about filing off numbers. I broke the cylinder one-handed, and caught a glint of light on five cartridges. Fully loaded. I snapped it shut again.
– The Most Dangerous Game, 1964
Described as ‘A bit of a man’s man [who] wrote tales of square-jawed men dodging bullets and doing man things’1 Gavin Lyall seemed pretty cool in 1961, or rather his heroes did. They were tough and resourceful, whether in shady foreign climes or up against violent criminals or, best of all, flying an ancient aircraft by the seat of their (and the reader’s) pants.
Gavin Tudor Lyall was born in Birmingham in 1932 and educated at King Edward’s School before doing his National Service in the RAF as a Pilot Officer and then reading English at Pembroke College, Cambridge where he became editor of the student newspaper Varsity in 1956. He entered journalism and after an apprenticeship on newspapers, became a film director for the BBC’s Tonight programme, before joining the Sunday Times as a reporter and aviation correspondent in 1959.
The Wrong Side of the Sky (1961) was the first of seven action thrillers, most of which featured flying, although his award-winning Midnight Plus One (1965) was more earth-bound, revolving around an extended – and violent – car chase through Europe. (The film rights were reported to have been bought by that well-known ‘petrol head’ Steve McQueen although no film of this, or any other Lyall novel, was ever made.)
Daphne Wright (who writes crime novels as Natasha Cooper) worked for Lyall and described that early phase of his writing: ‘His first few novels feature cynical but warm-hearted men who use their training and experience in the army or RAF in more or less legal ways. They know their way around Europe and are at ease with guns and planes. Many of them – or their colleagues or quarry – battle with alcoholism.’2
Lyall’s first seven novels were finely crafted adventure thrillers and he rapidly established himself as a leading player on the thriller scene, being elected Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association in 1967 after completing only four novels. In the 1970s his productivity fell drastically – ‘writer’s block’ was later blamed – but he returned in 1980 with a more conventional spy hero, Major Harry Maxim, in The Secret Servant, which was adapted for television in 1984 starring Charles Dance. Although only the first was televised, there were four books in the ‘Maxim series’ which some observers considered showed a ‘new maturity’ in Lyall and called them ‘the peak of his writing’.3
The Maxim books, though well received by the critics, never reached the heights of popularity of his early thrillers; nor did his final series of four books, beginning with Spy’s Honour in 1993, which were set in what he called ‘the kindergarten days of the Secret Service’ in the years immediately prior to World War I. The ‘Honour’ series as they became known inevitably drew comparisons with the early novels of John Buchan and there was every indication that Lyall had great fun writing them – several of the characters said to be based on crime-writer friends of his.
Gavin Lyall died in 2003 and all his novels except Midnight Plus One went out of print with indecent haste though they are now available in electronic and print-on-demand formats.
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
It was Jackstraw who heard it first – it was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternatively frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching his carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk …
– Night Without End, 1959
All the clues are there: ‘exposed’ hands, freezing conditions, sleeping-bags, a narwhal tusk carving, and the oddly-named but clearly useful ‘Jackstraw’. We are in Alistair MacLean territory.
Alistair Stuart MacLean was born in 1922 in Glasgow, the son of a Church of Scotland minister who insisted on the family speaking Gaelic.1 Alistair was not to learn English until he was seven years old by which time the family had moved to Torguish House in Daviot, near Inverness.2 Educated in Glasgow, Alistair joined the Royal Navy on the outbreak of World War II and was to see active service, as an Able Seaman and later Leading Torpedo Operator, on Arctic convoys, in the Aegean and the Far East. Those familiar with his early novels will instantly recognise the settings for HMS Ulysses, The Guns of Navarone and South by Java Head.
It was inevitable that MacLean would go down in folklore, if not history, as a teller of war stories and his debut, HMS Ulysses, clearly was a war story – a bleak and probably very realistic one – but his subsequent novels were thrillers even though they had wartime settings (most famously Where Eagles Dare).
After WWII, MacLean took a degree in English Literature at Glasgow University and became a teacher, trying his hand at the occasional short story in his spare time3 one of which, The Dileas, he entered in to a competition run by the Glasgow Herald where it won the first prize of £100. The school teacher’s talent for story telling was spotted by Ian Chapman, a young executive from Glasgow publisher William Collins, who persuaded him to try writing a full-length novel. The result, written with impressive speed, was HMS Ulysses, for which MacLean received a £1,000 advance,4 published in 1955.
The novel was a huge success, a Book Society Choice, advance orders of 134,000 hardback copies (it was to go on to sell more than 300,000), with serialisation and film rights snapped up. It had come at a time when non-fiction stories of the war were still immensely popular and the back jacket of HMS Ulysses carried an advertisement for six, including The Wooden Horse and Reach for the Sky. There was also a thirst for and a genuine interest in naval war stories. Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea had been a big selling novel in 1951 and a successful movie in 1953 and in the same year that HMS Ulysses came out, C. S. Forester, the author of the ‘Hornblower’ books, published The Good Shepherd, set during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942.
HMS Ulysses is a harrowing story of the courage of men under constant mental and physical pressure in truly horrendous conditions and reviewers were quick with their praise: ‘A brilliant and overwhelming piece of descriptive writing’ (The Observer) – though there was one loud dissenting voice in, ironically, MacLean’s local newspaper in Glasgow, the Daily Record, which complained that the book descended into ‘drivelling melodrama’ and ‘a horror comic strip’.5 It was very much a minority opinion that did not deter MacLean from starting a second novel.
The Guns of Navarone, although also set during World War II and again involving sea and ships, was a distinctly different sort of story to HMS Ulysses. This was ‘a gung-ho adventure story about a group of hand-picked Allied servicemen sent to destroy two huge Nazi guns in a heavily fortified base on a Greek island. While it retained all the authentic detail of his debut novel, the style and tone were much lighter’.6 The novel, published in 1957, was a rip-roaring success, as was the film version which followed four years later. (The jacket of the first edition announced that HMS Ulysses was ‘now being filmed by the makers of The Dam Busters’ but the movie never materialised.)
A commercially successful writer on the strength of two novels, MacLean and his family decamped for Switzerland, though not before delivering the manuscript of his third novel, again with a wartime setting, South by Java Head. Clearly popular with his reading public, MacLean’s writing was not to the taste of the more ‘literary’ editors at his publisher and South by Java Head (an adventure story of the escape, with secret information, of survivors from the fall of Singapore in 1942) was deemed, for whatever reason, to fall short of the standard required. It fell to Ian Chapman, MacLean’s discoverer and mentor, to travel to Switzerland to break the bad news. In a piece of dramatic plotting many an editor would call far-fetched, Chapman found a telegram from Collins waiting for him at the MacLeans’ telling him of a change of plan. The film rights to South by Java Head had just been sold, pre-publication, and he was to congratulate MacLean on ‘a great book’!7 The novel appeared in 1958 and though a film was never made, it showed that the movie business and Alistai
r MacLean were never to be far apart from now on.
To date, fifteen of MacLean’s novels have been filmed and in addition, he left numerous screenplays and outlines which were filmed for the cinema or television after his death. The Hollywood producer Elliott Kastner, who persuaded MacLean to write Where Eagles Dare in 1967, claimed that ‘All his books are conceived in cinematic terms’. Kastner went on to produce When Eight Bells Toll, Fear Is the Key and Breakheart Pass.8
It was perhaps significant that MacLean, a fiercely private (some would say anti-social) person, revealed something of his winning technique to film critic Barry Norman in an interview for The Observer in 1971. Having constantly dismissed his success – ‘I am not a born writer and I don’t enjoy writing’; ‘I write each book in 35 days flat just to get the damned thing finished’ – he told Norman that ‘the basic secret, if there is one, is speed – keep the action moving so fast that the reader never has time to stop and think.’
It had proved to be a golden formula for MacLean at least in the early part of his career, but it was a formula and whilst it worked in the years up to Ice Station Zebra (1963) thereafter it became far too predictable and new writers emerged in the Sixties – and in America in the Seventies – bringing different techniques and approaches to the thriller.
‘As time went on and tastes changed,’ wrote American critic J. Kingston Pierce in a 2013 retrospective,9 ‘Alistair MacLean’s flawless champions fell out of style and readers wearied of the verbal jousting he often contrived between his protagonists and pretty women (occasionally in the midst of the most dire circumstances!)’