Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  MICHAEL WOODMAN

  Creator of hard-drinking, womanising anti-hero Paul Gane working for MI6 to foil a plot to flood the USA with cheap narcotics from Thailand, who made his debut in The Medusa Kiss in 1970. He had one further outing, in Bullion in 1971.

  JAMES YARDLEY

  The author (possibly a pseudonym?) of two thrillers featuring Kiss Darling, the sexy insurance investigator ‘with a computer brain and Venus body’, although the resourceful Ms Darling – according to the dust-jacket blurb – ‘has one weakness: she is a virgin’! Her adventures, in Egypt and Africa, with her boss Angus Fane, were clearly an attempt to replicate the Modesty Blaise/Willie Garvin relationship of the mid-Sixties. Kiss the Boys and Make Them Die appeared in 1970 and should not be confused with the 1966 Italian spy film spoof Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die.

  ANDREW YORK

  One of the 15 pen-names used by Christopher Robin Nicole (born in 1930 in Georgetown, Guyana but a resident of Guernsey since 1957), the author of over 200 books including the series starring Jonas Wilde, the chess-playing, cocktail-drinking, karate expert assassin, who thinks nothing of accepting a dangerous assignment behind the Iron Curtain in Poland and Russia without speaking a word of Polish or Russian! Wilde’s first appearance was in The Eliminator in 1966 and the book was quickly filmed as Danger Route. Eight more novels followed until 1975.

  NOTES & REFERENCES

  Chapter 1

  1. Elwyn Brooks White (1899–1985), the Pulitzer-Prize winning American journalist and author of the children’s classics Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, famously wrote: ‘Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the scientific mind.’ E. B. White and Katherine White, eds., A Subtreasury of American Humor, 1941.

  2. Notably the works of William Le Queux such as The Great War in England in 1897, published in 1894.

  3. Many lesser lights have been returned to print for the first time in seventy years in the present resurgence of interest in the Golden Age.

  4. Eric Ambler, Here Lies: An Autobiography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985).

  5. Mike Ripley, Reviewing the Reviewer – Dorothy L. Sayers as Crime Critic (Proceedings of the 1999 Dorothy L. Sayers Society Convention, Newnham College, Cambridge).

  6. Papers in the Allingham Archive at the Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex.

  7. An observation made by Colin Watson in his Snobbery with Violence (Faber, 1971).

  Chapter 2

  1. Peter Lewis, The 50s (BCA, 1978). Much of Britain’s ‘debt’ came from borrowing in 1945 to aid recovery rather than to fight the war and was finally paid off in 2006.

  2. O. F. Snelling, Double O Seven, James Bond: A Report (Holland Press, 1964).

  3. The hugely popular thrillers of E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946) tended to reflect both the snobbery and the glamorous lifestyle of the author, who had homes on Guernsey and the French Riviera, and a luxury yacht where he ‘entertained’ a string of female friends. Peter Cheyney (1896–1951), an early supporter of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, became one of the most widely-read thriller writers of the 1940s with pseudo-American private eye stories and some fast-paced spy thrillers, selling over one million copies a year despite paper rationing. It was said that Ian Fleming was a big fan and many aspects of one of Cheyney’s last novels, Dark Bahama (1950), can be spotted in Fleming’s much better written Live and Let Die.

  4. Fergus Fleming, ed., The Man with the Golden Typewriter (Bloomsbury, 2015).

  5. In May 1964, Fleming was, belatedly, awarded a ‘Gold Pan’ for selling one million paperbacks but he was too ill to attend the ceremony.

  6. Fergus Fleming, ed., The Man with the Golden Typewriter. (Andrew Lycett, in his biography of Fleming, gives a first print run of 4,750 copies.)

  7. Both things were said about Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, though possibly not referring to crime fiction or thrillers!

  8. John Sutherland, Reading the Decades (BBC Books, 2002).

  9. In 1994 I was strangely proud to receive a fan letter from a magistrate in Nottingham who said he ordered all my novels through Selfridges Library and liked them so much he was tempted to buy one.

  Chapter 3

  1. Source: BFI Screen website (www.screenonline.org.uk).

  2. Both books have remained in print, with new editions as recently as 2013.

  3. Pre-publicity for the paperback edition announced that the book had been ‘A famous bestseller in hardback at 70/- … Now only 12/6’. Seventy shillings (70/-) in decimal currency would be £3.50, and 12/6 the equivalent of 62.5p. At the time (1960–4), a hardback novel could cost between eighteen and twenty-one shillings (90p to £1.05) and the price of a paperback thriller ranged from 2/6 to 5/- (12.5p to 25p), though the standard was 3/6 (17.5p). To put these prices into perspective, a pint of beer in a British pub over the same period cost around 7p.

  4. The most extraordinary story of the war in Burma was that experienced by ‘Francis Clifford’ when he was a young officer leading a company of native troops on a four-month, 900-mile fighting retreat through the jungle to escape the invading Japanese. Clifford wrote the story of that action in 1944 but refused to allow the book to be read during his lifetime. Desperate Journey was eventually published in 1979.

  5. In 2010 I edited a new edition of A Flock of Ships and asked Brian Callison if we should put that Alistair MacLean quote on the cover. ‘Of course we should,’ he said, ‘that was pure bloody gold dust for me.’

  6. Early export editions of Golfing for Cats were seized by West German police, where public displays of the swastika were illegal.

  7. The last V-2 attacks on London took place in March 1945; the last fatality caused by a V-2 rocket was on 27 March when one fell on Orpington in Kent.

  8. Household’s classic piece of English rural noir was turned, almost unrecognisably, into the American TV movie Deadly Harvest in 1972.

  9. In fact the familiar German army weapon, wrongly called a ‘Schmeisser’, was either an MP (machine pistol) 38 or an MP 40. The gunsmith and engineer Hugo Schmeisser had designed an early sub-machine gun, the MP 18 in 1918 towards the end of the First World War, but had in fact nothing to do with the more famous MP 38 and MP 40 versions. His name, however, stuck.

  10. The Dolly, Dolly Spy was promoted as ‘a contemporary Bond’, ‘the first Mod spy’, and ‘a real Chelsea swinger’, helped in no small part by the Carnaby Street image presented at every opportunity by its 23-year-old author. The book has been unfairly credited as the inspiration for Mike Myers’ movie character (and caricature) Austin Powers, but Diment’s debut, despite the hype, was a very competent thriller in the realistic style of Gavin Lyall rather than the fantasy of Ian Fleming or the fantastical farce of Mr Myers.

  11. A theme taken to its ultimate fictional conclusion in The Boys from Brazil by American author Ira Levin in 1976.

  12. Sandbostel was a camp for civilians regarded as ‘enemy aliens’ by the Nazi regime. Among its prisoners was Italian journalist Giovannino Guareschi, the author of the ‘Don Camillo’ stories.

  Chapter 4

  1. As there was no internet in those ancient days and as teenagers we did not read the review sections of the newspapers (if we read newspapers at all), actual visits to the bookshops, libraries and market stalls – my closest indoor markets, in Huddersfield and Wakefield, both had multiple stalls selling paperbacks – were our basic source of information on new titles.

  2. At the heart of a new school term, going to my first lesson with a notoriously sarcastic and much-feared English master, I made sure that my recent birthday present, a hardback first edition of Billion Dollar Brain, was in plain sight on my desk. The master (nicknamed “Fat Ooze” for some reason) spotted it, said ‘That’s not in paperback yet! Can I borrow it after you?’ and I sailed through English that year.

  3. It should be remembered that for most people at this time, spaghetti came out of tins and olive oi
l was only sold at chemists.

  3. Of the 155 thriller writers mentioned here, where details are known, 55 were journalists.

  Chapter 5

  1. The minor public school I went to in 1962 had seen no reason to update its stock of Atlases and the first one I was given not only still showed ‘the Empire’, but also had Germany marked by a swastika flag! The ‘pink bits’ of the world map were memorably discussed in a classroom scene in John Boorman’s 1987 film, Hope and Glory.

  2. Len Deighton, Battle of Britain, (Jonathan Cape, 1980).

  3. The League declined in membership and influence in the early Sixties until its remnants merged with the British National Party in the formation of the National Front in 1967.

  4. From the introduction to the second edition (1974) of the masterful study Clubland Heroes by Richard Usborne. His book first appeared, with immaculate timing, in the same year (1953) as Casino Royale.

  5. The story of George Blake formed the basis of the novel Shadow of Shadows by Ted Allbeury in 1982.

  6. Interestingly, pre-WWII thriller writers (e.g. Buchan, Wheatley) often had heroes, or the main hero’s closest friend, who were Americans. They were treated very much as visiting colonial cousins, despite America not having been a colony for some time.

  7. Filmed in 1961 as The Secret Ways (possibly to avoid confusion with Howard Fast’s historical novel of the old West) with MacLean’s British spy hero played inevitably, albeit creditably, by an American, Richard Widmark. The film is also notable for featuring one of the first credited film music scores by a then little-known composer called John Williams.

  8. Filmed very creditably even though the two heroic British characters had to be played by Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston.

  9. Book Club editions were an important promotional tool for thriller writers in those days, producing cheap hardback editions by popular authors usually a year after first publication and before the paperback appeared. The most important were probably the Companion Book Club which started in the 1950s (and boasted MacLean, Innes, Victor Canning, Desmond Bagley and even Agatha Christie titles), and Book Club Associates, which ran from 1966 and at its height operated twenty themed clubs. Members usually signed up to purchase a book a month for six months at reduced prices. Hammond Innes’ The Doomed Oasis, for example, was first published by Collins in 1960 priced 15/- (75p), the Companion Book Club edition in January 1962 cost club members 5s.3d (roughly 26p) and the Fontana paperback edition in December 1963 was priced at 3s.6d (17.5p). The Companion Book Club also produced a deluxe edition with better quality paper and coloured endpapers of some titles. Their deluxe edition of Victor Canning’s The Python Project in 1967 was priced at 8/- (40p). Once considered eminently disposable, Book Club editions with their specially designed dust-jackets are growing in value among collectors and in many cases are the only extant printed versions of some titles.

  10. ‘Anthony Boucher’ (William Anthony Parker White) was the pre-eminent American critic of crime and mystery fiction and his name is commemorated in annual ‘Bouchercon’ conventions celebrating the genre, usually held in the USA (although held twice in England in 1990 and 1995).

  Chapter 6

  1. British Passports used to have two pages at the back explaining the Exchange Control Act, with columns in which the amount of currency being taken abroad was meticulously recorded, along with an authorising stamp by a bank or travel agent.

  2. It is thought that 2014 was the first year that a majority of the British (58 per cent) travelled abroad. Government figures for 1965 and 1966 suggest that in those years only nine per cent of Britons travelled abroad (Hansard, 19 June 1967).

  3. In his first novel, The Dark Frontier, in 1936.

  4. From Canning’s obituary in The Times, 27 February 1986.

  5. I am indebted to the splendid website run by Philip Eastwood at www.bagleysrunningblind.info

  6. The novel, the only Alan Williams thriller to be filmed, was turned into a romantic comedy called The Pink Jungle in 1968, starring James Garner as a fashion photographer, and has thankfully been little seen since.

  7. It is a memorable part of a splendid novel and stayed in the minds of readers long after. In 2011 I was contacted by American crime writer Walter Satterthwait who asked if I could remember not just the book and that section of it, but the names of the medieval weaponry the heroes construct. I was disgracefully proud to tell him I could, more than forty years after reading the book. (The survivors actually build an arbalest crossbow and then a trebuchet siege engine.)

  8. In The Watering Place of Good Peace (1960).

  9. Hammond Innes had featured the whaling industry in Norway in The Blue Ice (1948) and in Antarctica in The White South (1949).

  10. But Hollywood, despite rumours of lengthy negotiations, never made the film. A German/South African production was made in 1990 starring Dack Rambo, an American television actor best known for appearing in the successful series Dallas.

  11. Just as the then Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, did in 2011.

  12. A small West German saloon car no longer made.

  13. The film, starring Laurence Harvey, Mia Farrow, Tom Courtenay and, in a supporting role, satirist Peter Cook, was directed by Anthony Mann who died of a heart attack whilst filming in West Berlin. Laurence Harvey completed the film which, despite being praised for its Berlin setting, has been rarely seen since. Derek Marlowe’s novel, out of print for forty years, was republished in 2015.

  14. Notable exceptions were, of course, the Inspector Maigret novels of Georges Simenon and the Martin Beck series by the Swedish team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöo. The earliest ‘foreign’ detectives working in their homelands but created by Britons appeared in the 1970s, with Roderic Jeffries’ Inspector Alvarez novels, set on Mallorca, and the Superintendent Bernal books, set in Spain by David Serafin (Professor Ian Michael), being among the first.

  15. The CWA’s Silver Dagger that year went to another veteran thriller writer, Victor Canning, for The Rainbird Pattern, a novel set entirely in a cosy, yet very dangerous, England.

  16. All ‘James Graham’ titles – as well as his other pen-names – disappeared in 2009 when his entire backlist was reissued under the name Jack Higgins.

  17. Australian Women’s Weekly, 23 October 1974.

  18. The Satan Bug and When Eight Bells Toll.

  Chapter 7

  1. Cited in James Chapman, Licence to Thrill, 2007.

  2. The novel was based on an unused treatment for an American TV series written by Fleming in 1957, a Caribbean adventure featuring a freelance spy of Chinese–German extraction and a ‘Commander James Gunn’. (Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming, 1995).

  3. Journalist and editor Anthony Price was to become an innovative, award-winning writer of spy fiction in the Seventies.

  4. Harry Saltzman had cut his producer teeth on an adventure series for American TV, Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, which ran for 65 episodes, 1955–7.

  5. Op.cit. Lycett and Fleming.

  6. Chopping wanted 250 guineas for the painting but the publisher’s budget was 25 guineas. Fleming paid the difference.

  7. One of the many pen names used by thriller and crime writer Roger Longrigg. This author can also admit to having read a much-thumbed copy of The Passion Flower Hotel as a schoolboy.

  8. With a script co-written by bestselling novelist James Clavell.

  9. Duff Hart-Davis, the biographer, historian and naturalist, who also turned to thriller writing in 1968 with The Megacull.

  10. Symons made, perhaps pointedly, no mention of Alistair MacLean in his 1972 study of crime fiction Bloody Murder despite admitting that ‘adventure stories’ were indeed ‘a steadily rising market’ in which context he mentioned only one author, Dick Francis. Symons went on to become President of the Detection Club in 1976, which Francis joined in 1966. It is unlikely that MacLean was ever proposed for membership, or if he had that he would have accepted.

  11. Bestseller lists as in
The Times, 27 February 2016.

  12. A Murder of Quality was eventually made as a TV movie in 1991 with a script by Le Carré, starring Denholm Elliott as George Smiley after Alec Guinness and Anthony Hopkins had both turned down the role.

  13. The Gaunt Woman was made as an American TV movie in 1969 under the title Destiny of a Spy with Lorne Green as Peter Vanin and Harry Andrews as General Kirk.

  14. Barry Forshaw, Alan Williams: Renaissance of a Master, (www.ostarapublishing.co.uk, 2009).

  15. Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley, eds., The Noël Coward Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982).

  16. The comic strip adaptation of Dr. No was done by Peter O’Donnell who went on to create the comic strip (and novels) featuring Modesty Blaise.

  17. For the genesis of The Ipcress File, I am indebted to Len Deighton for conversations over the years, and correspondence in October 2015.

  18. In the flush of enthusiasm which overtakes all first-time novelists, Len Deighton gave away all his author copies to friends and then found himself unable to buy a genuine first edition and has never actually owned one, although over the years many book dealers have offered to sell him one!