Читать книгу Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed - Mike Ripley, Mike Ripley - Страница 13

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, illustrated by Raymond Hawkey

The brand of brands when it came to spy stories was, of course, James Bond and in the Sixties his name was shouted loudly and very proudly from the covers of millions of Pan paperbacks – literally. It was possibly the first time in publishing, at least in adult fiction, that a fictional character’s name was featured on the cover in type three times larger than either the name of the author or the title of the book. Not surprisingly, readers began to demand ‘the latest James Bond book’ rather than ‘Ian Fleming’s latest’. The unmissable placement of ‘James Bond’ in large letters was an innovation of designer Raymond Hawkey, who also came up with the famous ‘bullet holes’ cover for the paperback of Fleming’s Thunderball and the iconic ‘white’ covers of Len Deighton’s early novels.

Looking back on it, it was a boom time for British thrillers and I loved it. There was a new author to find just about every week, and a weekly visit to a book shop was vital in case you missed the latest sensational adventure¹ and a school friend found a new author before you did.

There was definitely classroom kudos to be had from being the first to track down the latest Alistair MacLean or in discovering a Len Deighton or a John Gardner or a Gavin Lyall, and schoolmasters often joined in the hunt, recommending titles. If that sounds as if we were teenage nerds when it came to paperback thrillers, we weren’t. There were lots of other things to be nerdy about – for teenage boys there always were. Reading thrillers was just something we did, as previous generations of schoolboys had read the Biggles or Just William stories. We were lucky, it was the Sixties and we had James Bond. There was always time to devour a good thriller and reading one never stopped us from listening to music or trying to meet girls, though it didn’t necessarily help in the latter pursuit or make us anywhere near as cool as we thought it did (though a good one might supply the odd chat-up line).

Perhaps it was because it was the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and attitudes were changing – though in a mining village in the West Riding they didn’t change that much – but no adult ever said ‘Are you sure you should be reading that?’ Our schoolmasters might have wished that our ‘holiday reading’ (at the start of each new term we had to report on what extra-curricular reading we had done) was on a slightly higher intellectual level, but encouraging teenage boys to read anything which did not come with pictures was a goal in itself and anyway, they were thriller fans themselves.² The older ones were always willing to debate that the present generation of thriller writers were ‘not a patch on John Buchan or Erskine Childers’ whilst the younger masters were keen to swap notes on the new Alistair MacLean or the latest pretender to the throne of James Bond.

The fantasy spy novels of Ian Fleming and his many imitators may have been regarded as somewhat risqué, but nowhere near as salacious as, say, the works of Harold Robbins or Mickey Spillane – and if you were caught reading them you could be in trouble. The adventure thrillers of Alistair MacLean and Hammond Innes were perfectly acceptable, almost innocent, as they contained no sex or bad language, usually had upright, decent (British) heroes and were jolly exciting ‘ripping yarns’. The new generation of spy fiction novelists were not only seen as acceptable, reading them was positively encouraged. When at school, Graham Greene’s thirty-year-old novel Brighton Rock was one of the set texts for my O Level English Literature exam. By the early Seventies, the novels of John Le Carré were on the syllabus.

For male readers of all ages, Fleming, Deighton, Le Carré, MacLean and Innes were instantly recognisable. The dedicated follower of the fashion in thrillers was also familiar with Blackburn, Lyall, Gardner, Leasor, Clifford, Mayo, Jenkins, Mather, Hall, Francis, Canning and a host of others. New names appeared on the covers of paperbacks every week, or if the names were not exactly ‘new’, the covers were.

During the Golden Age of the Thirties it had been as if almost anyone – or at least anyone who was upper middle-class and reasonably well-read – could turn their hand to a detective story. In the Sixties, it was as if the same applied to thriller writing, with the prospect of substantially greater rewards. But were being middle-class and well-read sufficient qualifications? A classic English detective story might never leave the setting of a country house or a vicarage and require no more technical background knowledge than the use of pipe-cleaners, the distribution of keys among the senior servants, and when the clock in the hall is wound for the night. Thrillers had more exotic settings, usually foreign, and needed less domestic but far more technical information: on guns, on surviving a desert, a storm at sea, on a glacier or an ice flow, on radios, on navigation, on codes and the tradecraft of spies, on mixing with lowlife, on unarmed combat, and on enjoying the high life. Since the Bond books, it was de rigueur that every special or secret agent would eat only the finest foods and drink only the most expensive wines or elaborate cocktails, and though many of the descriptions of the licensed-to-kill gourmand never held up to really close scrutiny,³ they had to appear plausible.

All of which meant that the writer of a good thriller had to be an experienced traveller conversant with foreign lands and cultures, who had enjoyed a varied and exciting, not to say dangerous, life – at least one more exciting than his (as it was invariably a ‘he’) readers. Surely not everyone could have such an interesting life, so who did?

There were few tinkers and probably even fewer tailors tempted to try their hand at thriller-writing in the boom time of the Sixties and Seventies, but many who did had certainly been soldiers or sailors – or airmen during World War II or in National Service and a large proportion were members of Her Majesty’s Press.

Of the 155 authors mentioned in this study for whom career details are known, over 70 per cent had experienced active military service other than peacetime National Service, or were professional journalists, in some cases both. Among other professions, teaching provided the biggest single breeding-ground for those seeking bestsellerdom, though of course careers often overlapped. Alistair MacLean, for example, had served in the Royal Navy during the War but was a school teacher when HMS Ulysses was published.

Given the popularity of war stories, it was to be expected that anyone with actual wartime experience and a modest grasp of basic English would fancy their chances supplying stories to a growing and seemingly insatiable market. Notable military ‘veterans’ included Berkely Mather – a career soldier for twenty years before taking to writing radio and television plays and then thrillers, Francis Clifford – a genuine war hero, Clive Egleton – a long-serving professional soldier, Eric Ambler, Victor Canning and Hammond Innes, who all saw wartime service in the Royal Artillery. Also, John Gardner and James Leasor, who both served with the Royal Marines, John Michael Brett and Adam Hall were in the RAF, and Lionel Davidson and Antony Melville-Ross served in submarines throughout WWII.

Quite a few that we know of had worked for the British Intelligence services. Famously, Graham Greene had served in MI6, as had Kenneth Benton and Ian Fleming in Naval Intelligence during the war and John Le Carré, John Bingham and Antony Melville-Ross during the Cold War. Several others had experience of intelligence or counter-intelligence work during their military careers, for example: Ted Allbeury, Clive Egleton, Francis Clifford and Berkely Mather.

It is also worth mentioning that of the few (five) women thriller writers in this period, other than Helen MacInnes who, in the words of American academic Professor B. J. Rahn ‘always seemed to be flying solo’, two also had similar useful experiences. Joyce Porter had served throughout the Fifties in the Women’s Royal Air Force where she learned Russian in order to work in Intelligence, and Palma Harcourt, after reading classics at Oxford, worked for various branches of British Intelligence including MI6 postings abroad. She began to write her ‘diplomatic thrillers’ in 1974, by which time Joyce Porter (now better remembered in America than Britain) had abandoned comic spies and was concentrating on comic detectives.

The Companion Tenth Anniversary Issue, The Companion Book Club, April, 1962

There were career diplomats (for example, Dominic Torr), three advertising executives, two doctors, several television scriptwriters, two television presenters, and three actors. One of the latter, Geoffrey Rose, had a starring role in a popular BBC drama written by another thriller writer (James Mitchell’s When the Boat Comes In) as well as a part in the long-running soap opera Crossroads.

The prospect of fame and fortune also attracted disciples from many a respectable, more stable, career. There was an accountant, a research chemist, a brace (at least) of publishers, several advertising and public relations executives, a graphic artist, a merchant seaman, a poet, a senior policeman, a technical writer for the Ministry of Defence, two bankers, a poultry farmer, a football commentator, and a Governor of Bermuda.

Given their access to news sources not in the public domain (which many would call ‘gossip’), their natural links to publishers, and their opportunities for travel – particularly abroad – it was inevitable that journalists and especially foreign correspondents would be tempted into testing their typewriters with a thriller. At least a third of the authors named in this book were journalists by trade, and half of them had been foreign correspondents. It must have seemed, at certain points in the 1960s, that everyone on Fleet Street was bashing out a thriller in their spare moments. After all, journalists led pretty exciting lives – the travel, the deadlines, the expense accounts … Indeed, it is often forgotten that Ian Fleming was rather a good journalist before he created James Bond. Hammond Innes, Desmond Bagley, James Leasor, John Gardner, Duncan Kyle, and Anthony Price were all, among many others, journalists before they were thriller writers.

Foreign correspondents who had reported from Russia were perceived to have an immediate advantage, and several put the experience to good use, notably Ian Fleming, Derek Lambert, Andrew Garve, Donald Seaman and Stephen Coulter (‘James Mayo’). But it was not just the traditional Cold War enemy which provided useful background for a plot or two.

Frederick Forsyth spent many years as a senior correspondent in France, work experience which clearly proved useful for The Day of the Jackal. However, his first published book was non-fiction, a quite harrowing account of the Nigerian civil war he had covered in 1967, The Biafra Story, and he was to use his knowledge of Africa again in his third novel, The Dogs of War. In his 2015 memoir, The Outsider, Forsyth revealed that it was during his time as a reporter in Africa that he was approached by MI6 to take undertake minor jobs (unpaid, he stresses) as a courier.

Other trouble spots covered by journalists also gave rise to some outstanding thrillers as well as dramatic reportage and, in the early 1970s, there was no more troubled a spot than Northern Ireland. Independent Television News reporter Gerald Seymour covered ‘The Troubles’ there, which provided the background and the inspiration for his first thriller, Harry’s Game, in 1975. Alan Williams too reported from the front lines in Northern Ireland and also from Vietnam, Rhodesia, and Algeria as well as covering the Arab–Israeli Six Day War in what was, to put it mildly, a colourful career. Even as a student at Cambridge, he had been drawn to political ‘trouble spots’ starting with the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule and later helping to smuggle a dissident student out of Poland via East Germany. (He was also credited with helping to smuggle the manuscript of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward out of Russia.) His coverage of the civil war in Algeria not only gave him the background for his thriller Barbouze (meaning ‘spy’ in French slang) but brought official complaints about him from both Arab insurgents and the French Army and made him something of a legend in Fleet Street.

Barbouze, Panther, 1970

Many of Alan Williams’ contemporaries from Fleet Street told stories of his time in Algeria and of how his fondness for dressing in a white safari suit and Panama hat made him such a clear target for the gangs of roving gunmen (from both sides) that fellow foreign correspondents would discreetly move away from him whenever he entered a sidewalk café or a bar frequented by the press corps. In later years, Williams gleefully told the story himself.

As part of their job, journalists mingled with thriller writers on a regular basis, whether they had their own ambitions in that direction or not. In a feature marking the 50th anniversary of The Ipcress File on the crime fiction website Shots Magazine, journalist and film critic Barry Norman recalled:

I first met Len Deighton in the ‘Mucky Duck’ (The White Swan pub off Fleet Street frequented by reporters from the Daily Mail) when The Ipcress File had just hit the bestseller lists. He couldn’t believe his luck. Up to then he’d been known – if at all – as a cookery writer in national papers. Nice bloke, he seemed then, and personally I took to the guy.

But I wasn’t all that happy with Deighton later after I’d written my first spy novel, The Matter of Mandrake, rather in the James Bond genre, and I wasn’t too chuffed about some bloke coming along and moving the whole business from upper and middle to the working class. But his were bloody good books and I still enjoy the films.

Another Fleet Street stalwart, George Thaw, the Literary Editor for the Daily Mirror, became close friends with and a neighbour of one of the rising stars of that decade, Duncan Kyle – himself a journalist until he hit the bestseller lists with his debut A Cage of Ice in 1970. When Kyle’s novel was reissued in 2012, Thaw recalled how the author took his research seriously, sometimes allowing it to spill over into his private and social life:

The research for Whiteout! (Kyle’s seventh thriller, published in 1976) included a sojourn at an American kind-of-secret base in the Arctic. Apart from background and colour (mostly snow white) for the book he emerged with the recipe of the most sophisticated dry Martini ever served in Suffolk and perhaps in Britain. It involved keeping a special tea pot in his fridge/freezer, carefully measured high-proof gin, un-waxed lemons and a very secret proportion of Martini to gin. It tasted fabulous and he always claimed the most important part of the whole business was using that teapot –and drinking with friends.

The lure of writing a bestselling thriller which would lead to untold riches, film deals, and tax exile in Ireland (the popular choice for high-earning artists in the Seventies), was stunningly obvious. Journalists knew, or thought they knew, that they could write; former military men who had seen active service and overseas postings felt they had the required background knowledge. Journalists certainly had the confidence to attempt a thriller⁴, yet the ability to produce a bestseller was not exclusively theirs. As well as Alistair MacLean, Harry Patterson (Jack Higgins) and James Mitchell (the creator of Callan) had also embarked on careers in teaching before they turned to writing fiction, which they did with great success.

The most unusual professional crossovers, however, were those of Brian Lecomber and Ted Allbeury. Lecomber was a flying instructor on Antigua in the Caribbean – just the sort of character likely to appear, say, in a Gavin Lyall thriller – who wrote three successful thrillers with aviation plotlines between 1975 and 1978. He was then given the chance to join the famous Rothmans Aerobatic Team and immediately abandoned thriller writing completely, declaring it ‘boring’ compared to stunt flying. Ted Allbeury served in the Intelligence Corps during and after WWII but, before he became a highly successful and much admired thriller writer, he had dabbled with careers in advertising, in public relations, as a farmer, and in 1964 he embraced one of the icons of the decade by becoming the Managing Director of a pirate radio station! Initially, Radio 390 operated from the decommissioned wartime Red Sands sea fort off the north Kent coast near Whitstable and was the location, in 1966, for the filming of an episode of Danger Man starring Patrick McGoohan. The station then moved out to sea as a ship-board pirate station, renamed Radio 355.

Exotic as some of their work experience was, the one thing necessary for the would-be thriller writer, possibly above all else, was a well-thumbed passport. A solid British thriller delivered danger, suspense, excitement, and possibly an insight into a richer, more privileged lifestyle, but crucially it delivered travel to foreign locations which the average reader could only realistically hope to explore through the printed page.