by Mike Ripley
Following MacLean’s death in 1987, the general opinion of the Obituary writers was that MacLean had been a crowd-pleaser but that his output had become repetitious. In The Scotsman, novelist Allan Massie made an excellent observation but possibly a flawed prediction, summing up MacLean’s career thus: ‘Because he lacked the ability of a Buchan or an Ambler to make particular moods his own, to put an unmistakeable stamp on certain areas of experience, it is unlikely that his books will last. I can’t imagine this would have worried him. He wrote books to make air journeys tolerable and to take people out of themselves for a few hours; he did it very well.’
Certainly, from what we know of his attitude to his own writing (and his Calvinist unease at the staggering wealth it brought him), Massie was probably right in assuming that MacLean thought little about the legacy of his fiction. But Massie was wrong in assuming that MacLean’s books would not last and that his work did not have an ‘unmistakeable stamp’ – they did.
In any imaginary league table of thriller writers compiled in terms of literary merit rather than sales, MacLean would be unlikely to be placed close to John Buchan and nowhere near Eric Ambler. Yet just as every thriller reader knows what it means if a book, or a plot or situation (usually a chase scene), is referred to as ‘Buchan-ish’ or a setting or a character is labelled ‘Ambler-esque’, then so do they immediately understand when a story is described as ‘pure Alistair MacLean’.
His novels have lasted, admittedly some better than others and some only thanks to their more memorable film versions, but they still have many fans and his best would feature on any reader’s fantasy list of ‘Best Thrillers’: certainly South by Java Head, The Last Frontier, Night Without End, The Satan Bug and Ice Station Zebra.10 Thirty years after his death, there are major websites devoted to MacLean by fans in the UK and the Netherlands.
His novels were of their time and they were very male-orientated; girls usually only present to twist a pretty ankle at a crucial point in the plot or provide the hero with a verbal sparring partner – the sparring never getting beyond the verbal. Yet they were exciting – they were thrilling. Awful things happened to seemingly ordinary men who got out of trouble by cunning and sheer nerve and despite what twists the plot threw at them.
They were surprisingly innocent in their own way and thought of as perfectly respectable reading material for young teenage boys – not as respectable as John Buchan, perhaps, but certainly less morally corrupting than Ian Fleming!
In his heyday MacLean bridged a gap between the generations. His first readers were primarily men who had personal experience of the war, as he had, but then – with the mass marketing of his paperbacks in the Sixties – came a generation of teenage readers born after the war and as more of his books were filmed, another generation of teenagers discovered him in the Seventies. MacLean’s greatest trick was to keep a remarkable number of his early fans as loyal readers for over thirty years, from HMS Ulysses in 1955 to Santorini in 1986.
Alistair MacLean was the ultimate brand name and benchmark in adventure thriller writing and for three decades, if not more, was as much a household name as James Bond. His reputation was such that when veteran radio presenter of Desert Island Discs, and big MacLean fan, Roy Plomley was told that the programme had finally secured the reclusive Alistair MacLean as a guest, he was so excited he failed to carry out even the basic of checks and found himself interviewing a rather bemused Canadian gentleman who worked for the Ontario Tourist Board, called Alistair MacLean.
One of the most lauded American crime writers of recent years, Dennis Lehane, discovered MacLean as a teenager. In 2011, in an interview with crime fiction blogger Ali Karim, Lehane said: ‘Alistair MacLean would always set up his books with a basic foundation in which not a single thing you learned would turn out, in the end, to be true. After you read a few of his books, you’d start to look for the twists, but you could rarely see them coming. For a 12-year-old boy, this was heaven. Plus, a good half of his novels were set during World War II, which I’ve always been fascinated by.’
In MacLean’s native Scotland, bestselling crime writer Ian Rankin was nudged towards his future career by the MacLean reputation and has admitted: ‘One of the reasons I wrote my first crime novel [was] because my father was reading Alistair MacLean. I didn’t want to write Dubliners. I wanted to write something he would read.’11
BERKELY MATHER
I dropped and fired in one movement just as he used to impress on me: ‘the thickest part of the sonofabitch’s body – and keep on firing’.
– The Achilles Affair, 1959
If the basic requirements needed to be a successful thriller writer in the 1950s were some wartime or military service or experience of foreign travel, then Berkely Mather was, in many ways, over-qualified. In fact his own life story – of which there were several versions – contained enough material to make him a character in one of his own stories or indeed one of Rudyard Kipling’s.
He was born John Evan Weston Davies (which later became ‘Weston-Davies’) in Gloucester in 1909. His father (also John), a master cabinet maker succumbed to the demon drink and emigrated with his family to Australia in 1913 to find work as a carpenter. The family fell apart when the two eldest sons were killed on the Western Front during WWI and John (Senior) deserted his wife and youngest son to return to England.
John Evan completed school and military service in Australia and aged 20 worked his passage back to the UK on a variety of tramp steamers, arriving in 1929 in the depths of the Great Depression. Unemployed and possibly homeless, he drifted aimlessly until, in desperation, he joined the army in 1932 and was posted to north-west India as a Private in the Royal Field Artillery to serve with a battery stationed in Lahore. On arrival there he brazenly declared he was Second Lieutenant Davies and that he had been robbed of all his kit and papers on landing in Bombay. The Battery Commander was puzzled as he had been expecting a Gunner Davies, but the new chap seemed to know how to behave and so showed him to the Officers’ Mess and put him on the payroll!
It was two years before he was rumbled and to avoid a scandal (or a trial), Davies rapidly transferred to the Indian Army Farms Department, the only branch of the Indian Army in which it was possible for a British man to serve in the ranks. He was made Sergeant and spent several happy but idle years travelling around India by car, buying forage for the large number of horses that were still the mainstay of transportation in the Indian Army.
On the outbreak of WWII, he volunteered for active service and was eventually commissioned in 1943 after which he served on the staff of General Slim, commander of the 14th Army (and was mentioned in Dispatches). After Indian Independence in 1947, he transferred back into the British Army and served in Hong Kong, Egypt, and Cyprus before eventually resigning his commission as a Lieutenant Colonel in order to write full-time. In the latter stages of his military career, in 1954, he was seconded to MI6 and involved in planning what would have been seen (at the time) as ‘counter terrorism’ operations against growing Egyptian nationalism, one of which supposedly involved him working undercover in Cairo as a dealer in Oriental carpets but, perhaps fortunately, that particular mission was never given the go-ahead.1
John Evan Weston Davies became Berkely Mather around 1940 when he successfully submitted a short story to a British Indian magazine. As a serving soldier, it could not be published under his real name and he needed a nom de plume. Inspiration came when he and his wife Kay were sitting in a café in Poona (now Pune in Maharashtra in central India) discussing the matter. Looking across the street, they saw the Berkeley Grill and, next door, Mather’s the Chemist, both establishments having recently installed neon-lighting signs. The budding writer reputedly said ‘That’s it – my name’s already up in lights!’ put the two names together (managing to mis-spell one) and the result was ‘Berkely Mather’.
His first piece of fiction after the war was a radio play sent in to the BBC after reading producer (and crime writer) Val Gielgud
’s ‘self-help’ book on how to write for radio. Mather’s script was reputedly accompanied by a note threatening that if the BBC did not accept it, it would therefore be Val Gielgud’s fault! The play was accepted and Mather rapidly followed it with a script for the ‘new’ medium of television, even though at that time Mather had never seen a television set. Yet it was with the blossoming field of television drama in the Fifties, mostly for the BBC, that the Mather name became inextricably linked, as he proved himself a prolific and extremely fast scriptwriter, able to complete a 30-minute television script in 8 to 12 hours. In 1957 he created the character of Detective Chief Inspector Charlesworth, who was to feature in several series of crime dramas over the next four years and become one of the first popular ‘television detectives’. By the early Sixties, Mather and Ted (later Lord) Willis, the creator of Dixon of Dock Green, shared the accolade of being jointly the most prolific writers for British television and his contribution to television drama was recognised with a Special Merit Award from the Crime Writers’ Association in 1962, presented by Sir Compton Mackenzie.
As well as scriptwriting for television, Mather kept his hand in at radio, creating a series for the BBC’s Light Programme featuring ‘Geth Straker’ – the Canadian owner and master of a fast diesel launch operating in the Adriatic and described as ‘Radio’s trouble-hunting mariner’. He also contributed short stories to Argosy (UK), Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Suspense monthly magazine, before, at the age of 50 in 1959, he turned to the novel, later to express surprise that ‘it had taken so long’ to get round to writing one.
That first novel, The Achilles Affair, ticked all the key boxes for the adventure thriller: a smart-talking and almost reluctant hero with a suitably professional military background and an exotic set of locations, including Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, and the Lebanon. The story has its origins during WWII with a clandestine British operation in support of local guerrillas in Nazi-occupied Greece. As was to become his trademark, Mather moved his characters across vast distances of wild country (here the Greek mountains) on foot. Forced marches whilst living off the countryside were nothing to Mather’s heroes (and heroines) and they never seemed to mind the hardship; these were tough, sun-burned outdoorsy types willing to put up with a little discomfort for the greater good, though one of their number would usually turn out to be a traitor.
The Achilles Affair certainly pleased the critics, the Manchester Evening News describing it as ‘Brilliantly conceived and packing a really punchy climax.’ It certainly does: a tense, last-page shoot out still holds up to0day. The novel also greatly impressed Ian Fleming, who wrote in the Sunday Times: ‘One thriller which I can unreservedly recommend to my friends.’
But if the reviewers liked Mather’s first novel, they were ecstatic over his second, The Pass Beyond Kashmir in 1960, in which the author incorporated his own experience of living in India into the character of Idwal Rees (Mather/Davies was proud of his Welsh heritage) and placed him at the centre of a ripping yarn involving spies, mercenaries, oil companies and politics across three countries – mostly on foot and sometimes in disguise.
The Pass Beyond Kashmir is the ultimate chase-and-pursuit thriller which takes the hero Rees – technically an insurance assessor but a former military intelligence man and clearly an ‘old India hand’ – and his sidekick, a fierce and fiercely loyal Pathan called Samaraz on a journey from Bombay across India and Pakistan and into the disputed Kashmir territory bordered by China and Tibet. The driving force behind the plot is that there may be oil in the Himalayas – or is that being too literal? Certainly there are enough ruthless baddies trying to stop Rees and Samaraz from finding out, but the real joy of the story is not the geo-politics or the double-crossing intelligence agencies involved, but the way Mather describes the countries his heroes cross and the various sub-cultures and tribal lore they encounter. It was also topical in that publication coincided with growing tensions between India and China over Nepal which briefly shone the searchlight of world interest on to the region.
Many a reviewer drew comparisons with A. E. W. Mason and John Buchan. American mystery-writing legend Erle Stanley Gardner declared that Mather had ‘a remarkable gift for thrills and suspense’ and in Britain Anthony Price2 wrote ‘You only get one or two thrillers a year – if you are lucky – as good as Berkely Mather’s Pass Beyond Kashmir’. Yet the highest praise came again from Ian Fleming who wrote that the book took Mather ‘triumphantly into the small category of those adventure writers whose work I, for one, will in future buy sight unseen.’
Despite the reviews and publication in America (with many translated editions following), The Pass Beyond Kashmir did not appear in paperback in the UK for almost five years. In April 1962, however, it was chosen as Book of the Month by the Companion Book Club3 and in an article in the Club’s magazine Companion, Mather is again rather casual when it came to exact details of his career, adopting a self-effacing attitude which would not have fooled anyone who knew him. The article was entitled ‘Don’t Call Me A Swashbuckler’.
‘I am often annoyed to see myself represented in the papers as everything from an ex-Secret Service Agent to an Asian soldier-explorer [one suspects he loved being so mis-represented] … Actually I am a very prosaic Colonel of Gunners,’ says Jasper4 Davies (‘Berkely Mather’). His leisure hours he devotes to fast cars, sailing boats, cooking and shooting. ‘I am 44 and intend staying that way!’5
Ian Fleming’s genuine admiration for Mather’s first two novels (as well as his considerable – though now totally forgotten – contribution to television and radio drama) undoubtedly led to him being offered a job as what today would be called a ‘script doctor’ on a modest film due for release in 1962. Mather’s brief was to ‘lighten’ the script and the film was Dr. No, though he showed himself to be a better writer than businessman as when offered a flat fee or a percentage of the profits, he took the flat fee! The experience kick-started another career in films and Mather was to write (uncredited) for two more Bond films and then script the historical epics The Long Ships and Genghis Khan.
He never abandoned the novel, writing over a dozen more over the next twenty years, and he certainly never abandoned India, in which he set a successful series of historical sagas. There were thrillers – two more featuring his heroic duo Idwal Rees and Samaraz in 1971 and 1973, and an excellent modern pirate/buried treasure tale called The Gold of Malabar in 1967, one of three Mather titles where the movie rights were snapped up, though no films of his novels were ever made.
From 1966–7 he served as Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association6 and his novels continued to be published into the 1980s (he died in 1996); but as a thriller-writer, his reputation rests on those early swashbuckling adventures, particularly those set in the Indian sub-continent which had a Kipling-esque feel for the place and the people but without the Imperialistic bombast.
‘Jasper’ Davies may have claimed in vain ‘Don’t call me a swashbuckler’, but like many of his heroes, Berkely Mather certainly was one.
WILBUR SMITH
During the dark hours before dawn they were visited by an old lion. He came with a rush from the darkness beyond the fire-light, grunting like an angry boar, the great black bush of his mane erect, snaking with incredible speed towards the huddle of blanket-wrapped figures about the fire.
– Shout At The Devil, 1968
Neither Wilbur Smith nor his novels fit the pattern of the thriller boom of the Sixties and his fiction is closer to that of Rider Haggard than that of Ian Fleming and a dark continent away from that of a Len Deighton or a John Le Carré. His novels were long and often had historical, colonial settings but there was no doubt that they were adventure thrillers aimed at red-blooded heterosexual males. They often harked back to the days of the British Empire at exactly the time the Empire was dissolving. They were, and remain, immensely popular worldwide.
Wilbur Addison Smith was born in 1933 on his father’s 25,000 acre cattle ranch in Broken Hil
l, Northern Rhodesia (since 1966, Kabwe in Zambia) where he claimed to have shot his first lion at the age of 14. He was educated in South Africa and graduated from Rhodes University as a chartered accountant in 1954. He went to work for the Rhodesian income tax department and, fifty years later joked that he was ‘still working for the damned thing’.1
Like Desmond Bagley, then in South Africa and at almost the same time, he sold a short story to Argosy magazine and then tried his hand at a novel. His first attempt, which he described as ‘full of politics and philosophy’, was roundly rejected and Smith later claimed to have destroyed the manuscript so it could not be published after his death. For his next attempt he abandoned the politics and philosophy and concentrated on hunting, shooting, sex and violence in nineteenth-century Africa. When the Lion Feeds, published in Britain in 1964, was a phenomenal success and launched Smith’s seemingly unerring production line of international bestsellers, the one constant factor in them being that Smith’s most important series character was not a particular hero, but Africa.
He is South Africa’s most popular literary export and in 2013 the official government website proclaimed ‘There is no doubt that Smith has a propulsive narrative gift (but) there have been accusations of sexism and racial stereotyping as all his heroes are strong, white and male’, but the leading South African crime writer, Deon Meyer, described South Africans as being proud of Smith ‘as a local boy who has done very well’.2
Wilbur Smith has certainly done ‘very well’. Global success – his books are translated into 24 languages and he has devoted followings in India and, oddly, Italy – has brought him great wealth and a jet-set lifestyle (with homes in London, Cape Town, Malta and Switzerland). In recent, more politically correct, years his fiction and the accusations of sexism in it have become intertwined with a sometimes salacious interest in his private life, mostly centred on his fourth wife being 39 years younger.