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And with all these ‘MacGuffins’ (as Hitchcock would have called them) played out against a ticking-clock scenario, MacLean invented a template for the adventure thriller which he soon moved out of the wartime milieu with great success. MacLean was to return to WWII again later in his writing career and he was far from alone in using personal wartime experience and war stories as an entré into the thriller business.
South by Java Head, Fontana, 1961
Ice Cold in Alex, Pan, 1959
Christopher Landon’s best-known book remains Ice Cold in Alex (1957), for which he wrote the screenplay for the very successful film starring, inevitably, John Mills, which was certainly based on his own wartime experiences in the Medical Corps in the Western Desert. Landon’s debut, however, had been a gripping and much underrated spy thriller set in Tehran and wartime Persia where he also served, A Flag in the City, which was published in 1953, the year of Casino Royale.
Interestingly, one of the other stars of Ice Cold in Alex had already extended his acting career into thriller-writing based closely on his wartime experiences. Anthony Quayle (1913–1989) had served with the Special Operations Executive during the war, rising to the rank of major. An unsuccessful SOE operation ‘behind the lines’ in Albania gave him the basis for a novel, Eight Hours from England, which was published in 1945, and which reviewers said had ‘masculine appeal’. A second thriller, On Such a Night (which had a British wartime Cabinet minister suspected of treason), followed in 1947 and became a successful paperback in 1955, the year of HMS Ulysses. Quayle, later made Sir Anthony, wrote no more thrillers but went on to act in some memorable film thrillers with wartime settings, including The Guns of Navarone, Operation Crossbow and The Eagle Has Landed.
The year 1953 had also seen (from the same publisher as Casino Royale), the debut novel of Francis Clifford, a genuine and very modest war hero. Honour The Shrine was a brutally honest WWII story set in Burma – possibly autobiographical – about a commando raid to destroy a Japanese railway bridge over a river. (The rather more famous The Bridge Over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle had been published in French in 1952 but the English translation did not appear until 1954.) Clifford was to become one of the most respected – and yet strangely instantly-forgotten after his death – British thriller writers. He returned to the jungles of Burma in fiction with a gruesome and utterly gripping war novel in A Battle Is Fought to Be Won in 1960.4
The Second World War continued to kick-start thriller writers into taking up their typewriters for at least a quarter of a century after it formally ended. Brian Callison started his lengthy thriller-writing career with A Flock of Ships in 1970 (of which Alistair MacLean said: ‘The best war story I have ever read’)5 and in 1974 George Markstein moved from television to novel writing with The Cooler, set in England on the eve of D-Day.
For other writers, it may not have provided the initial impetus, but it certainly led to a breakthrough in terms of sales and a quantum leap in reputation for authors such as Colin Forbes (Tramp in Armour in 1969), Jack Higgins (The Eagle Has Landed, 1975, which was in fact his thirty-sixth thriller and certainly not his first wartime setting), and Ken Follett (Eye of the Needle, 1978).
In a way the template had been created during WWII itself and very early on as well. Hammond Innes, who was to enjoy huge success in the Fifties, had published four novels before the war, but it was his three war stories – Wreckers Must Breathe, The Trojan Horse (both 1940), and Attack Alarm (1941) – which were to lay the foundations of his post-war bestselling career. Three excellent thrillers in less than two years is an impressive enough feat for anyone, let alone someone serving as an anti-aircraft gunner during an actual war. The imaginative and, no doubt at the time, sensational, if not terrifying Wreckers Must Breathe, about a secret U-boat base in the coastal caves and tin mine workings of Cornwall, was supposedly written as a result of a holiday in Cornwall by Innes and his wife in the late summer of 1939. Both The Trojan Horse and Attack Alarm would have been thrillingly ‘topical’ to the British reading public now at war and although Innes – serving in the Royal Artillery – did not resume fiction writing until 1946, his reputation as a storyteller survived and his readership was waiting for him.
The damage and displacement left by the Second World War remained a central theme in British thrillers, its main legacy of course being the Nazis, the best fictional villains no writer ever had to invent. The swastika became a vital part of the tool-kit of every book jacket designer and no bookshop or library shelf was immune. Thirty years after the actual fall of the Third Reich, in 1975, British humourist Alan Coren published a collection of his funniest essays from Punch magazine under the title Golfing for Cats, having noted that as books about cats and golf sold well, this seemed as good a title as any. But Coren had also noticed how many bestsellers featured swastikas on their covers and so insisted that his publisher include one! The paperback cover showed a cat on a golf course where the pins marking the greens flew swastika flags.6
The European war against the Nazis and its aftermath formed, if not the setting, then the back story or main plot point to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of thrillers. Nazi war criminals, neo-Nazis, resurgent Nazis, Nazi secrets and secret weapons, works of art stolen by Nazis, missing Nazi submarines, and (very popular) hoards of Nazi gold, sometimes on board the missing submarines, were all grist to the thriller mill.
The first three ‘Johnny Fedora’ novels by Desmond Cory – Secret Ministry (1951), This Traitor, Death (1952), and Dead Man Falling (1953) – all had Nazis or Nazis-on-the-run as villains. In a later adventure, Undertow (1962), Fedora is involved in salvaging secret Nazi documents (before his Russian KGB opponents can get them) from a sunken submarine off the southern coast of Spain. James Bond himself had to tackle a megalomaniac Nazi bent on attacking London with an upgraded V-2 rocket in the form of Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker in 1955, only a decade after the real thing.7 In 1958, John Blackburn’s A Sour Apple Tree suggested an evil legacy put in place by a William Joyce-like character, an English traitor who had made radio broadcasts for the Nazis (and escaped in a U-boat). Geoffrey Jenkins’ 1959 debut A Twist of Sand revolved around the wartime destruction of a top-secret U-boat off Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. In Watcher in the Shadows (1960), Geoffrey Household had his hero, who is mistaken for a Nazi war criminal, being hunted across the idyllic English countryside by a vengeful former leader of the French Resistance.8 Geoffrey Household being Geoffrey Household, and the author of the classic pre-war thriller Rogue Male, the result is something akin to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral being staged in St Mary Mead. In 1961, under the pen-name Martin Fallon, an early Jack Higgins thriller called The Testament of Caspar Schultz revolved around the hunt for authentic missing Nazis and in 1962, Philip Purser’s debut thriller Peregrination 22 exposed a neo-Nazi youth movement being secretly trained on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen.
Secret Ministry, Frederick Muller, 1951
Horse Under Water, Penguin, 1965
Neither could the ‘new wave’ of spy-fiction writers in the Sixties resist the hypnotic glow of the Nazis. Len Deighton’s Horse Under Water (1963) had his un-named spy hero scuba-diving for secrets into a wrecked U-boat off the Portuguese coast; Adam Hall’s super-agent, the seemingly indestructible Quiller, single-handedly disabled a Nazi resurgence in The Berlin Memorandum in 1965; James Leasor’s Bond clone, Dr Jason Love, faced a megalomaniac ex-Nazi (armed with a fleet of U-boats) in Passport in Suspense in 1967; Lionel Davidson gave us a much more measured, less frantic, thriller about claiming reparations for Nazi crimes in modern Germany in Making Good Again in 1968; Reg Gadney’s Somewhere in England (1971) had wanted Nazis alive and well and living in the UK; and, possibly the most famous of all, in The Odessa File in 1972, Frederick Forsyth had them alive, well and very active just about everywhere.
The appeal of the Nazis for fictional purposes was fairly obvious. As far as the British were concerned they represented a force of pure evil which seemed to blend barbarism and paganism, even the occult, with modern technology and perverted science and medicine, truly heralding a new Dark Age for Europe if not the world, as Winston Churchill had warned. They were easily identified and immediately sinister. In Hollywood Westerns, the bad guys traditionally wore black hats; the worst of the Nazis, the SS, conveniently wore black uniforms. Even their so-called secret police, the Gestapo, had an iconic fashion sense, with black leather trench coats and soft black Fedoras which made them instantly recognisable to millions of cinemagoers. As villains went they were, thanks to Hugo Boss, tailor-made.
Passport in Suspense, Pan, 1969
The Achilles Affair, Fontana, 1961
Nazism had seen murder on an industrial scale; robbery and theft from individuals, the pillaging and piracy of entire countries; education, art, medicine, the media, and history twisted to a bizarre ideology. And it had been done with all the accoutrements that twentieth-century technology could provide.
To schoolboys and men young enough to have missed the war years there was also a certain fascination with the hardware, the equipment, of the Nazi war machine. Their armies moved with lightning speed, they had charismatic commanders (Erwin Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’, was the ultimate ‘Good German’), plush Mercedes staff cars, powerful motor-bikes, and tanks with names such as ‘Panther’ and ‘Tiger’ which sounded far more dangerous than the ‘Matilda’ and ‘Valentine’ of the British army. They had fast E-Boats, pocket battleships, rockets and jet-engined aircraft for goodness sake. By the early Sixties, thanks to films and comics, schoolboys knew exactly what was meant when a character in a thriller appears armed with ‘a Schmeisser’9 – the sub-machine gun as synonymous with the Nazis as the Thompson ‘Tommy Gun’ had been seen as the weapon of choice of Chicago gangsters in the Thirties. Plastic toy soldiers, Dinky and Corgi toy military vehicles and Airfix scale-model kits made sure that young males were totally familiar with the paraphernalia of the European war; less so with the war in the Pacific and the staggering scale of the Russians’ contribution to WWII hardly figured at all.
Thriller writers quickly realised that if their plots struck a familiar resonance with the war, they would find ready acceptance among a young male readership. Their characters would be very straightforward: they would be male of course, and in the main British (though Canadian or a New Zealander might be allowed) as, after all, the British had won the war, hadn’t they? And the plot possibilities seemed endless: revenge and the settling of old scores, bringing war criminals to justice, reclaiming stolen treasure, uncovering treachery, revealing Byzantine espionage conspiracies, and secrets thought safely buried by governments.
When he turned to writing novels after a decade of success as a radio and television dramatist, Berkely Mather set his first thriller, The Achilles Affair (1959), in the Eastern Mediterranean with a detailed back-story (almost a third of the book) involving the wartime resistance in Greece. In 1963, a writer who was to become possibly the closest to rival Alistair MacLean in the adventure thriller stakes, Desmond Bagley, made his debut with The Golden Keel, a sea-going tale of modern piracy which involved smuggling Mussolini’s personal treasure, lost during the war, out of Italy. Indeed, the Sunday Times said of newcomer Bagley that The Golden Keel ‘catapults him straight into the Alistair MacLean bracket’. Another thriller-writing talent coming into full bloom at the same time was Gavin Lyall and his highly regarded third novel Midnight Plus One in 1965 harks back to the ‘rat lines’ and escape routes used by the French Resistance during WWII. Even that rather more ephemeral talent and the epitome of Swinging Sixties London, Adam Diment, had former Nazis at the core of the plot of The Dolly, Dolly Spy in 1967,10 and Diment’s very modern hero, the rebellious, ultra-hip, pot-smoking Philip McAlpine toted a trusty ‘Schmeisser’ as his weapon of choice.
If memories or hangovers from the Nazi-era were not enough, some thriller writers invented hereditary threats in the form of biological, rather than ideological, children of Adolf Hitler.11. Both Victor Canning and John Gardner speculated on Hitlerite off-spring in, respectively, The Whip Hand (1965) and Amber Nine (1966), and again in Gardner’s The Werewolf Trace (1977).
A Game for Heroes, Panther, 1971
The ’44 Vintage, Futura, 1979
Yet wartime settings never ever went out of fashion. For thriller writers in the 1960’s and ’70’s, ‘don’t mention the war’ was definitely counter-productive advice. Alistair MacLean was to revisit the war years several times, most notably in 1967 with Where Eagles Dare. Before he hit the jackpot with The Eagle Has Landed, Jack Higgins – writing as James Graham – produced A Game for Heroes in 1970, an exceptional thriller set on an imaginary Channel Island in 1945. The Sunday Express proclaimed the author as one who ‘makes Alistair MacLean look like a beginner’, but it was to be another five years before the eagle actually landed for Jack Higgins and he was able to move to the less onerous tax regime of a real Channel Island. In 1974, Clive Egleton scored with a convoluted scheme to assassinate Hitler’s Deputy, Martin Bormann, in The October Plot, and in 1978 Duncan Kyle presented an even more complicated scenario surrounding a suicidal commando raid on Heinrich Himmler’s spiritual home of the SS, Wewelsburg Castle, in Black Camelot. One of the leading spy-fiction writers of the 1970s, Anthony Price even provided a stunning wartime backstory for his contemporary spy hero Dr David Audley in The ’44 Vintage in 1978.
It should not be surprising that the war was a popular topic with writers (and by extension: agents, editors, publishers, and readers) as at least a third of the British thriller writers in the boom period of the Sixties and Seventies had seen active service during WWII.
In many cases, the wartime experiences of these authors were stranger than any fiction they produced, but writers being writers, few life experiences were wasted. Miles Tripp, a noted crime writer who experimented with Bond-like thrillers under the pen-name John Michael Brett, flew thirty-seven sorties as a bomb-aimer with the RAF during WWII and his first novel about the crew of a Lancaster bomber, Faith Is a Windsock in 1952, was clearly semi-autobiographical. Berkely Mather – an old ‘India hand’ with considerable (and colourful) military experience in the Far East – certainly knew of what he wrote when he penned his bestselling The Pass Beyond Kashmir (1960) and the piratical treasure-hunt adventure thriller The Gold of Malabar (1967). Geoffrey Household, for whom the Second World War had started early and very unofficially in ‘neutral’ Romania, then served in Field Security in the Middle East for the best part of five years, which provided background for his 1971 thriller Doom’s Caravan, set on the border between Lebanon and Syria. Household was also affected by his experience at the very end of the war when he was with a British army unit liberating the Nazi concentration camp at Sandbostel12 near Hamburg, which he later described as ‘beyond experience or imagination’. Antony Melville-Ross (who was to create the only secret agent in fiction called Alaric) was a highly successful and highly decorated Royal Navy submarine commander and Lionel Davidson, who was to write some iconic thrillers, served in submarines in the Indian Ocean for most of the war, though much against the trend in adventure thrillers of the period, a submarine never featured in his fiction.
Doom’s Caravan, Michael Joseph, 1971, design by Richard Dalkins
Even when the cinema box office turned away from the war film and embraced the spy film after 1962, the Second World War continued to influence British thriller writing and indeed still does; as in the work of contemporary writers Philip Kerr (1956–2018), John Lawton, David Downing, Laura Wilson and Paul Watkins (also writing as Sam Eastland). Nazi Germany and WWII has figured widely in the work of novelist Robert Harris, who was born in 1957, not least in his debut thriller Fatherland. In 2017, whilst promoting his new novel Munich, he was asked why the Nazis were still a popular subject for British thriller writers – and readers. ‘The Nazis,’ he said, ‘are like a planet with a gravitational pull.’13
Today’s wartime thrillers may be more nuanced and certainly more cynical, with the methods and motives of characters blurred to suit modern sensibilities, but the war proved that you just can’t keep a good villain down and WWII was a war, if you were British, where it was very clear who the villains were.
Chapter 4:
TINKERS, TAILORS, SOLDIERS, SPIES. BUT MOSTLY JOURNALISTS.
In 2009 I was approached by a small publishing company called Ostara which was making a reputation for itself bringing out-of-print detective novels back to life. Did I think there were old thrillers as opposed to detective series that were out of print and worth rescuing?
I went to the fount of all knowledge – my bookshelves – and discovered that many of the paperbacks, cracked spines and yellowed pages notwithstanding, which I had treasured for more than forty years were indeed out of print. It came as a shock. Was it possible that authors who had thrilled and, yes, educated me in the Sixties and Seventies – authors like Alan Williams, Adam Hall, Duncan Kyle, Brian Callison and Clive Egleton – were being or had been forgotten? When I discovered that only one of Geoffrey Household’s novels (Rogue Male, his 1939 classic) was still in print, I needed no further persuading.
Tracking down the owners of the rights to many of the thrillers I remembered from my youth was an education in itself. As most of the authors were writing in the days ‘B.C.’, i.e. Before Computers, details of their contracts, correspondence with their agents or literary executors were ‘paper records’ and had not been computerised. Whilst chasing an author I was told by one publisher that they ‘had no record of him’ (on their computer database) but that ‘the company archivist may know where the paper files are’. When I asked where the company archivist could be contacted, the publisher said, rather sheepishly, that the archivist had been made redundant ‘when we computerised’.
Then there were two authors whom I was assured by their publishers were dead. One turned out to be delighted to see one of his thrillers back in print and even supplied an illustration – a wonderful cover design created by his artist wife in 1972 but never used. The other was not only not dead but so happy ‘to be thought of as a writer again’ that he bought me lunch in his Chelsea club, and an instance where an author buys a publisher lunch really is the world turned upside down.
My search for out-of-print thrillers from the period when I did my formative leisure reading, roughly 1964 to 1972, made me realise just how many thrillers had been published in paperback in that period. It was a staggering number, and they all seemed to be by British authors – at least the ones on my bookshelf were.
Not all had been first published in the Sixties but advances in printing and the use of photographic cover designs rather than painted or drawn ones meant that fresh, uniform paperbacks of an author’s backlist could appear alongside his latest novel. Paperback cover design was taken seriously in the Sixties. Well, perhaps not so seriously when it came to the many James Bond clones that sprang up after the death of Ian Fleming in 1964, but covers were certainly eye-catching and brasher, more exciting than anything that had gone before, just like the decade.
It was possible around 1965, for example, to spot an Alistair MacLean paperback from quite a distance. Just over half the cover would be a solid colour on which was printed the author’s name (often the ‘Alistair’ was in black and the ‘MacLean’ in white) and top right would be the title, in type half the size of that used to identify the author. The bottom section of the cover would be a photographic image cut out on a white background, to suggest the story but nearly always showing a man holding a gun or perhaps an ice-axe. The same principle, from the same paperback publisher Fontana, applied to new editions of the work of Hammond Innes. They would have a block of background colour striped across the centre of the cover with the author’s name in a darker shade and the title in a (much) smaller font. There would be one illustration below the title and a related image on the back cover. For example, the 1966 edition of The Blue Ice had the image of a lone skier on the front, suggesting a trek across country rather than ‘Ski Sunday’, and the rear cover photograph was a dramatic one of a man (possibly the skier) with his mouth and beard obscured by ice. The avid fan knew immediately that this was one of Innes’ man-against-the-frozen-elements adventures – much of it is actually set on a glacier in Norway – and nobody seemed to mind that the book had been written in 1947 and had first appeared in paperback in 1954. By the Sixties, Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean were recognisable brands of a particular type of adventure story and their paperback covers were ‘branded’ to make them stand out on the bookshelves from the growing competition.
The Blue Ice, Fontana, 1966
Thunderball, Pan, 1963, designed by Raymond Hawkey