Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  19. In 2015, in the midst of a mini-revival of Golden Age detective stories, one prolific Internet blogger missed the point entirely and read a fiftieth anniversary edition of The Ipcress File assuming it was a ‘whodunit?’, duly complaining that the author had not played fair in laying enough clues for the reader!

  20. John Atkins, The British Spy Novel, 1984.

  21. In March 1963, at the White Tower restaurant in London’s Percy Street, one of Fleming’s favourite haunts famed for Greek dishes and its ‘crisp and juicy roast duck’ (Len Deighton). It was a private lunch organised by journalist Peter Evans, who wrote about it in his Daily Express column on 27 March. Fleming later wrote to Raymond Hawkey, who designed covers for both authors, saying ‘I thought Evans’ piece was pretty skimpy, but don’t tell him I said so!’

  Chapter 8

  1. Coincidentally at exactly the same time as the highly-decorated wartime submarine commander Antony Melville-Ross, later to become a noted thriller writer, was serving there as a naval intelligence officer.

  2. The subject of Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge of Spies in 2015.

  3. There is a famous photograph of Philby fielding questions at that press conference (from his mother’s flat) on 8 November 1955 where one of the journalists is Alan Whicker, who was to become the first celebrity television reporter with his own show, Whicker’s World. Kim Philby would cement his own celebrity with his defection to Russia in 1963 and his treachery, as a long-standing Russian agent, would feature, as he himself would, in many a spy thriller for the next half century (so far). Philby’s performance, as filmed by Pathé News, can be seen on YouTube.

  4. The most renowned probably being The Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby (1988) by the celebrated Sunday Times journalist Philip Knightley and the more recent and highly informative A Spy Among Friends (Bloomsbury, 2014) by The Times journalist Ben Macintyre.

  5. In 2011, whilst (coincidentally) en route to a preview of the film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I met an English actress who recalled the times, as a young girl aged four or five, when she would sit on the knee of Greville Wynne, a family friend, as he told her stories, only to be astonished to learn on his death in 1990 that he had been a famous British spy in the 1960s. She was most impressed that I knew instantly who she was talking about.

  6. I also used a wartime Philby in the short story Gold Sword, first published in 1989.

  7. Charles Cumming, one of Britain’s leading writers of spy fiction in the twenty-first century, was himself approached as a possible recruit into the Secret Intelligence Service in 1995 after gaining a First at university, albeit Edinburgh rather than Cambridge.

  8. In 2015, I contacted Philip Knightley in Australia to ask if he recalled Stephen Coulter from his days on the Sunday Times, where Coulter supposedly worked. He did not.

  9. The first draft of Diment’s novel (said to have been written in a flat rented from thriller-writer James Leasor) had the title The Runes of Death but the change to The Dolly, Dolly Spy, possibly suggested by his agent, ensured immortality.

  10. Quoted by John-Michael O’Sullivan in Esquire magazine, 24 November 2015.

  11. Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett, 1995.

  12. There was a curious off-shoot of the Bond franchise in 1967, with the publication of The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003½ – the exploits of the young James Bond, written by ‘R. D. Mascott’ – a pen name thought to disguise the identity of the novelist, critic, and essayist Arthur Calder-Marshall (1908–92). It turned out to be a one-off, but a successful ‘Young Bond’ series was established by Charlie Higson in 2005.

  13. Jonathan George (aka John Burke) in The Kill Dog in 1970 also used a dissident Czech, an archaeologist, fleeing the Soviet invasion as a hero.

  Chapter 9

  1. Jack Webster, Alistair MacLean: A Life, 1991.

  2. After Bagley’s death, three other novels of his were turned into mediocre films which had only limited release: Landslide (1992), The Vivero Letter – also known as Forbidden City (1999), and The Enemy (2001).

  3. When I first met Gavin Lyall, around 1989, I gushed at being in the presence of one of my thriller-writing heroes and blurted out that when I had read that scene, I had promised myself that I would get a Citroën ‘just as soon as I was old enough to drive’ (I was 14 when I read the book). Mr Lyall did not seem too impressed, though was absolutely charming at subsequent meetings and I did, eventually, own a Citroën.

  4. Davidson was to win an (unprecedented) third Gold Dagger for his crime novel The Chelsea Murders in 1978.

  5. She was a successful Hammer Films production in 1965, featuring Ursula Andress, who had made such an iconic entrance in the film of Dr. No.

  Chapter 10

  1. The first house my wife and I bought in 1976 had been previously owned by students who had been suspected of being sympathisers if not members of the Angry Brigade and had been raided many times by Special Branch in 1972–3. Thanks to the extensive anti-capitalist graffiti in one of the bedrooms, we were able to negotiate a lower asking price.

  2. In the twenty-first century, six months between hardback and paperback became the norm and it was not unknown for some thrillers to be published in trade paperback first, with a hardback following later to supply public libraries.

  3. It was to be the last of MacLean’s novels to have a first-person narrator, which may or may not be significant.

  4. The film of ‘Alistair MacLean’s Bear Island’ (as the opening titles call it) was directed by Don Sharp, whose second-unit work on the Amsterdam speed boat chase sequence was the highlight of Puppet on a Chain.

  5. Jack Webster’s biography of MacLean cites a review of Caravan to Vaccarès in the Sunday Express by Graham Lord who called it ‘The worst written, feeblest and most boring novel … an insult to his army of faithful fans.’

  6. Jack Webster, Alistair MacLean: A Life, 1991.

  7. A Birdcage Companion by John Higgins, 2010.

  8. On Desert Island Discs, 12 December 1981. He appeared again in 2006 and on both occasions chose music used in the film The Wrath of God.

  9. Oxford Mail, 18 September 1975. Interestingly, a similar plotline was used by Ted Allbeury in Codeword Cromwell in 1980.

  10. Interview in Writers’ Journal, March/April 2000.

  11. Selling Hitler became a Thames Television mini-series in 1991, starring Jonathan Pryce and the Marxist comedian Alexei Sayle as the forgers of the Hitler Diaries.

  12. Only two books of the planned trilogy appeared in the Seventies as Gardner put the project on hold when he was asked to write the James Bond continuations. He finished the third ‘Moriarty’ book shortly before his death in 2007 and it was published posthumously.

  13. In August 2015, the Sunday Express carried the story of a chandelier hanging in Bute House, the official residence of the First Minister of Scotland which it claimed was ‘Nazi Loot’.

  14. Stonehouse faked his own death from a beach in Miami only to be spotted in Australia soon afterwards. He was extradited and imprisoned for fraud. Only several years after his death in 1988 was it revealed that Stonehouse had actually been spying for the Czech–Soviet Republic since 1962: the only British Cabinet Minister (so far) found to be working for a foreign government.

  15. Dr Eric Homberger, University of East Anglia, in Contemporary Writers: John Le Carré, Methuen 1986.

  16. In interviews on www.thedeightondossier.net

  17. In correspondence with the author in 2014, Len Deighton recommended the novella I, James Blunt by H. V. Morton, which was published in 1942 but set in 1944, and written in the form of the secret diary of a retired Englishman coming to terms with life under Nazi occupation.

  Chapter 11

  1. In the section Writers and Their Books: A Consumer’s Guide compiled jointly by H. R. F. Keating, Dorothy B. Hughes, Melvyn Barnes and Reginald Hill.

  2. The Bookseller Trade News, 20 April 1974.

  3. The reason for this was simple. Whilst scouting locatio
ns in England, director Don Siegel liked the look of the famous Clayton Windmills at Burgess Hill in Sussex and decided he wanted to film one of them, despite the fact that a windmill on a hill would hardly have been an inconspicuous hideout for a gang of kidnappers and spies trying to keep a low profile.

  4. Actually F. E. Pardoe (Frank Earnest) in print but always known as ‘Bill’. Long-time reviewer of crime fiction for the Birmingham Post and also Chairman of the judging panel for the Crime Writers’ Association Gold and Silver Daggers.

  5. Seven Days to a Killing and The October Plot were both republished in 2012 as Top Notch Thrillers.

  6. The foreword to the fortieth anniversary edition of Harry’s Game in 2015 was written by Tom Bradby, himself an ITN television journalist and thriller writer.

  7. Thames TV’s A Deadly Game was scripted by novelist Keith (Billy Liar) Waterhouse and produced by Ted Childs who was to go on to produce the long-running series Inspector Morse.

  8. In 1979, facing a long flight to Chicago and discovering I had forgotten to pack a book for the journey; I bought Anthony Price’s The Alamut Ambush at Heathrow purely on the strength of its paperback cover, never having heard of the author. I finished the book as my flight came in to land at O’Hare airport and immediately began to hunt down his backlist. On 16 September 1988 I made my first public appearance and gave my first reading as a published crime writer at Hatchards bookshop in Kensington, as the ‘warm up’ act for Anthony Price, an occasion which gave lie to the myth that one should never meet one’s heroes.

  9. Len Deighton.

  10. In private correspondence with this author.

  Chapter 12

  1. See www.spyguysandgals.com

  2. Hamilton’s complete Matt Helm series (27 novels) began to be reissued in the UK in 2012.

  3. In terms of writing crime fiction, about one-third of published crime writers are women, based on data collected by this author relating to the years 1995–2015. There is no reason to think this percentage has changed since the Twenties, though it bears no relationship to sales or readership. Women have always been in the minority of crime writers but very often the best sellers.

  4. As a fledgling crime writer in the early 1990s, I was assured by publishers and agents alike that getting a book on television would increase paperback sales tenfold.

  5. Bouchercon – the international crime-writing convention named after American critic Anthony Boucher – was held outside the USA, in London, for the first time in 1990.

  6. H. R. F. Keating (former crime reviewer for The Times) and, I’m afraid, Mike Ripley in the Crime 2000 supplement to The Times, 30 September.

  7. A similar division of labour was enforced at the Daily Telegraph from 1990. I was to review crime fiction and Martha Gellhorn, the distinguished war correspondent and former wife of Ernest Hemingway, reviewed thrillers. When I once asked how a ‘thriller’ was defined I was told it ‘was a thriller if Martha Gellhorn said it was’ and that seemed reasonable enough to me.

  8. Though I have spent a day on board a U-boat, fortunately a decommissioned one in a museum in Chicago, some 1,500 miles from the sea.

  9. In the twenty-first century there have been numerous attempts to rediscover or resurrect many of the forgotten or neglected authors of the Golden Age, republishing books which have been out of print for 70–80 years.

  10. Also present were Kingsley Amis, and crime writers and critics Harry Keating and Julian Symons. Deighton, Le Carré and Forsyth split the bill between them.

  Appendix I: The Leading Players

  Desmond Bagley

  1. Christopher Fowler, ‘Invisible Ink (144)’, The Independent, 6 October 2012.

  2. Cited by Philip Eastwood on www.bagleysrunningblind.info

  3. I have met several Collins editorial staff from the early Eighties who all confirmed the feeling of shock and sadness at the London office in Grafton Street when the news of Bagley’s death was received.

  4. Iwan Morelius, who died in 2012, in conversation with the author, reported in ‘Getting Away with Murder #39’ on www.shotsmagazine.co.uk in 2010.

  5. Nigel Alefounder on www.desmondbagley.co.uk

  Francis Clifford

  1. For Australian Women’s Weekly, 23 October 1974, in advance of the magazine’s serialisation of his new novel The Grosvenor Square Goodbye.

  2. Francis Clifford’s entry in Whodunit? in 1982, almost certainly written by H. R. F. Keating, who was known to be a fan.

  3. Information from Geoff Bradley, editor of Crime and Detection Stories in correspondence in 2016.

  4. Cited on www.ostarapublishing.co.uk.

  Lionel Davidson

  1. Correspondence with Philip Davidson, 2016.

  2. Interview with Colin Maclaren for Romances and Picaresques on BBC Radio 3; 22 February 1985.

  3. Private correspondence with Len Deighton, 2012.

  Len Deighton

  1. Interview with Jake Kerridge in the Daily Telegraph, 18 February 2009.

  2. Later collected and published as Où est le Garlic? and Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book in 1965.

  3. Correspondence with the author, 2015.

  4. Interview with Melvyn Bragg for the BBC’s The Lively Arts, 18 December 1977.

  5. There was a follow-up in 1968, Len Deighton’s Continental Dossier, though Deighton has always maintained that his contribution to it was mainly his name on the cover, the book being entirely the work of the compilers Victor and Margaret Pettitt.

  6. Len Deighton confirmed this story with the author in September 2016, but expressed surprise at the suggestion that he might have been the first writer to use a word-processor. He did, however, suspect that sometime later he might have been the first to write a novel on a lap-top.

  7. In the book SS-GB there are memorable scenes set in the school where Deighton sat the 11-plus in 1939 and in the railway yard where he worked as a teenager.

  8. Including a youthful Rob Mallows who was to establish the authoritative Deighton Dossier website.

  9. In The Double Game by Dan Fesperman, 2012. On being informed of this, Len Deighton said: ‘Good old Bernie!’.

  10. The Len Deighton Companion by Edward Milward-Oliver, 1985.

  Ian Fleming

  1. In 2009 I acted as an unofficial mentor to a young Colombian crime writer visiting England shortly after his first novel had been published in Spain and South America. As he requested a crash course in British crime-writing post-Conan Doyle (the only British crime-writer he said he had read), I took him on a trawl of my favourite second-hand bookshops where he was genuinely dumbfounded to see a row of Ian Fleming paperbacks with ‘James Bond’ blazoned on the covers. ‘I didn’t know there were books,’ he said honestly. I later asked him what his favourite Sherlock Holmes story was and without hesitation he said ‘Sherlock Holmes in Washington’ – the 1943 Basil Rathbone movie. Truly a child of the cinema.

  2. The Corgi model of Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, complete with working ejector seat, from the film Goldfinger, was one of the bestselling toys of the 1960s.

  3.Fergus Fleming, ed., The Man with the Golden Typewriter, 2015.

  4.Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett, 1995.

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

  6. Writing in the Introduction to The Spectre Trilogy, 2015.

  7. Phensic – now discontinued in the UK – was a proprietary medicine containing aspirin and caffeine.

  8. 16 August 1964.

  9. Jack Webster, Alistair MacLean: A Life, 1991.

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

  11. Quoted in Richard Burton: A Life by Melvyn Bragg, 1990.

  12. Published as a Kindle Single.

  13. The working title for what was intended to be the first James Bond film was Longitude 78 West.

  14. Including, in the twenty-first century by some heavyweight ‘literary’ authors such as Sebastian Faulks, William Boyd and Anthony Horo
witz. It is surely only a matter of time before J. K. Rowling is given a shot.

  Frederick Forsyth

  1. At the Hong King Book Fair, July 2010.

  2. Frederick Forsyth The Outsider, 2015.

  3. Jacket notes on first editions of The Odessa File.

  4. The Andrew Marr Show, 13 March 2016.

  Dick Francis

  1. Dick Francis on Desert Island Discs, 13 December 1998.

  2. BBC Radio 4 Front Row, 15 February 2010.

  3.New York Times, 9 October 2000.

  4. Conversation with Dick and Felix Francis at the launch of Silks, Claridges Hotel, London, September 2008.

  Adam Hall

  1. Father of film critic and thriller writer Barry Norman.

  2. Telephone interview with Matthew R. Bradley in 1994, cited on www.quiller.net.

  3. Correspondence with Jean-Pierre Trevor, 2010.

  4. Henry Morrison, agent for Robert Ludlum, Justin Scott, Eric Van Lustbader and Brian Garfield, among others, in conversation with the author, 2016.

  5. www.spyguysandgals.com

  Jack Higgins

  1. Paul Chavasse who was to feature in seven novels 1961–78, initially published under the name Martin Fallon.

  2. As well as a multiplicity of pen-names, Higgins was notorious for re-using the names of his characters. In both A Game for Heroes (1970) and The Eagle Has Landed (1975) there are German soldiers called Steiner and Radl.

  3. Since 1992, Dillon has appeared in more than twenty novels to date.

  4. Radio Jersey.

  Hammond Innes

  1. The Financial News merged with the (larger) Financial Times in 1945.