Читать книгу Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed - Mike Ripley, Mike Ripley - Страница 14

In the Fifties and Sixties, the majority of secondary school pupils in Britain studying for ‘O’ and ‘A’ Level examinations would be issued with a Philip’s Modern School Atlas in which, on every world projection, the countries of the Commonwealth were coloured pink. Quite why pink was never explained, but every student could see at a glance, and be reassured, that British influence extended from Baffin Island to the Falklands, and from Sierra Leone to New Zealand.

Editions of the same Atlas from before World War II would have displayed even larger swathes of pink, perhaps two-fifths of Earth’s land surface, to designate the British Empire rather than Commonwealth – perhaps that particular shade was called Imperial Pink¹ – but the significance of the Empire, in economic and political terms, was fading from the map.

Should it have mattered in terms of the British psyche? After all, Britain had bravely stood alone and had won the war, hadn’t it?

Except of course it hadn’t. There was the perception that Britain had stood alone defying terrible odds from the fall of France and the Battle of Britain in 1940, although even in that iconic engagement, 20 per cent of aircrew defending British skies were non-British (Poles, Czechs, Belgians, French and Irish as well as ‘Empire’ contingents)² and Britain’s effort in the land war in all theatres had been heavily reliant on troops called in from the Empire. Canadians had fought with great distinction in France, Australians and South Africans in the deserts of North Africa, Indians and New Zealanders in Italy, with many smaller colonies more than pulling their weight for the imperial good. Yet even with that magnificent straining of all the sinews of a global network, only the most die-hard of empire loyalists would seriously claim that Britain and its Empire had won the war. It had fought an outstanding holding action until the manpower of the Soviet Union and the economic and industrial strength of the United States had been brought into play.

In 1939, the British Empire had been the sole world super-power. By 1950 it was clear it was the junior of three super-powers and its imperial building blocks were crumbling away.

The dissolution of the Empire should have come as no surprise as the very ‘jewel in the crown’, India, had been promised independence during the war and achieved it, although far from peacefully, in 1947. Burma and Ceylon followed suit in 1948, and over the following decade (despite some foot-dragging by Conservative governments) the British gave up their interests in Palestine, the Sudan, the Gold Coast and Malaya. For the Caribbean territories, Cyprus, Malta and most of the African colonies, the political break from the ‘mother country’ came in with something of a rush in the 1960s, when it seemed that hardly a year went by without another country familiar to every schoolboy stamp-collector became a disappearing pink spot on the world map: British Somaliland, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Kenya, Malawi, Northern Rhodesia, Gambia, Guyana, Botswana, Basutoland – the process seemed, and was, inevitable. The undignified stalemate when Southern Rhodesia adopted a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the Empire (following the rather more famous example set by certain rebellious American states in 1776) in 1965 was perceived as yet another symptom of international impotence.

The emergence of new nations from their colonial cocoons even impinged, albeit tangentially, on the daily routine of one very special civil servant: James Bond. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) Bond is researching for his mission with a visit to the College of Arms, where he is told that the College’s workload has recently increased due to ‘The new African states … Much work has to be done on their flags, the design of their currency, their stamps, their medals …’ Our hero is not, however, unduly inconvenienced.

De-colonization, which may have been caused or hastened by the war, was not a sudden, or violence-free, process but it was inevitable and the majority of Britons accepted the change from Empire to Commonwealth. By May 1959 Empire Day had become Commonwealth Day, and in February 1960 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had delivered his famous ‘Wind of Change’ speech to the South African parliament in Cape Town. The official seal of approval, were one to be needed, came in April 1960 when that arbiter of all things British, The Times, abandoned the term ‘Imperial and Foreign News’ in favour of ‘Overseas News’.

Not everyone accepted the loss of empire with good grace. In 1954 Arthur Chesterton, a former member of the British Union of Fascists and cousin of Detection Club President G. K. Chesterton, started the League of Empire Loyalists as a ‘ginger group’ on the far right-wing of the Conservative party.³ Yet even the most ardent imperialist had to admit that the debacle of the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Britain and France opted for military intervention in the Middle East but were forced by international outrage into ignominious withdrawal, showed that an era had well and truly ended.

To mis-quote (and take out of context) Richard Usborne:

‘England was no longer governess of half the globe. Ius Britannicum did not apply over so many lands of palm and pine. There were fewer – far fewer – Government Houses flying the Union Jack. The Embassies and Consulates that have replaced them cannot summon the gunboats to revenge a British traveller thrown to the sacred crocodiles.’⁴

The British had to come to terms with no longer being the major world power – and so did its thriller writers. Pre-war fictional heroes such as Richard Hannay, as created by John Buchan, and ‘Sapper’s’ Bulldog Drummond were, it is fair to say, imperialists by both nature and nurture. In the 1950s it seemed that Britain was resigned to giving away its proud imperial heritage, was being out-stripped in living standards by the United States, and was constantly looking apprehensively and impotently over its shoulder at the USSR. When it did flex its muscles, it was in messy colonial ‘emergencies’ or ‘insurgencies’ (never ‘wars’) in places such as Cyprus, Malaya, or, embarrassingly, in Egypt.

To some, the deployment of American missiles in the UK in 1958 was another sign of the country’s military emasculation and, as the Cold War warmed up over the Cuban crisis, there were mutterings that the ‘USS Britain’ was no more than an American aircraft carrier conveniently anchored within range of the Iron Curtain. To the cynical, the ‘USS Britain’ was likely to be an expendable vessel should the war turn hot.

The final insult, or so it was perceived at the time by the Daily Express (who called it a ‘stab in the back’), came when former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, almost as an aside, in a speech at West Point in December 1962: ‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role’.

Britain, the noble war hero, was diminishing before its very own eyes and those, it seemed, of its closest ally with whom it thought it had a ‘special relationship’. Despite the feel-good factor generated by the social and cultural revolutions in music, art, and fashion during the ‘Swinging’ Sixties, the malaise was still felt. It was eloquently summed up by an unlikely source, Adam Diment’s fashionably rebellious Philip McAlpine, The Dolly, Dolly Spy himself in 1967:

Our Empire has gone and our people remain lazy. We are clever, original, class-ridden and small. The sooner we can get back to being another small country and forget our now useless role of world arbitrator the better. Nobody has listened to our advice for years; it is just accepting this fact which is painful.

The villains in many a thriller could not, of course, resist reminding plucky British characters of their loss of Imperial power. In that same year, 1967, in James Eastwood’s Little Dragon from Peking the heroes are berated by the villainess: ‘You British, since losing India, are never sufficiently ruthless. In trade, politics, even espionage.’ The reference to India, which had been independent for twenty years by then, would not only have been lost on one of the characters to which it was addressed but also on many a reader under 35, and probably says more about the respective age of the authors: Adam Diment was 23 when The Dolly, Dolly Spy was published, James Eastwood would have been in his fifties.

Britain’s reputation for being exceedingly good at playing ‘the great game’ of spying, however, was seriously being called into question. Britain’s secret intelligence services had achieved a reputation for efficiency during both world wars. There had been few German spies operating in the UK – at least not for long – and even though the code-breaking achievements of Bletchley Park were to be kept from the public for many more years, the exploits of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) which sent immensely brave agents into occupied Europe were well-known through books such as Odette in 1949 (filmed in 1950) and Carve Her Name with Pride (filmed in 1958); yet the reality of the situation was far from a model of efficiency. The defection to Russia of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 caused scandal and provoked paranoia and mistrust, not the least on the part of America’s CIA. The situation was hardly calmed by the shambolic announcement and press conference in November 1955 that Kim Philby was not the ‘third man’ (he was) who had tipped off the defectors. In 1961 more Soviet agents were uncovered in a flurry of headlines; the Portland Spy Ring and the double agent George Blake, who received an unprecedented forty-two-year jail sentence after being tried in camera. His sentence was unexpectedly commuted by his dramatic escape from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 to follow Burgess, Maclean, and Philby to Russia.⁵

How could British thriller writers cope with the changing world order? The Empire was fading and no longer would provide a nursery for adventure heroes as it had in the days of Rider Haggard or John Buchan.⁶ One of the last of that generation of fictional heroes who had a ‘colonial’, though not privileged, upbringing was probably Idwal Rees, as created by Berkely Mather in The Pass Beyond Kashmir in 1960. Although proud of his Welsh heritage (as was Mather), the bulk of Rees’ early life had been spent far away from Wales (as had Mather’s) and he introduces himself to the reader thus:

My old man had been the Far Eastern correspondent for a London paper and he never seemed to have any money so I had spent all my life up till 1939, and much of it afterwards, in India, Burma and China … the man who says he really knows the Far East is talking through his hat but I can claim to know just enough about the undercurrents to get by and to earn my modest fees. I’m built on wiry lines and sun and fever have burned my naturally dark hide to a uniform teak colour which makes me inconspicuous in most company where the features aren’t Mongolian – that’s if I’m dressed the same way. I’m not a master of disguises but if you look like me and can speak Cantonese and Hindustani with a bit of kitchen Arabic and a convincing pidgin-English with, when necessary, a bastard potpourri of the lot, you can get by as almost anything from Aden to Okinawa. Somebody who didn’t like me once spread it around that I was half Bengali. That wouldn’t worry me if it were true, but it’s not. I’m pure Welsh on both sides.

The Pass Beyond Kashmir, Fontana, 1969

A character Kipling would have warmed to, one feels sure.

The imperial network of trading, cultural, and legal links as well as job opportunities were formative influences on the lives of many a British thriller writer, let alone actual ‘colonials’ such as Wilbur Smith and Geoffrey Jenkins, who instinctively turned to the mother country when seeking a publisher. Before WWII, William Haggard had been a career civil servant and magistrate in India, and Francis Clifford had been in the rice trade in China and Burma. Desmond Bagley had left England in 1947 and after an epic journey across the Sahara to Uganda, eventually settled in South Africa until 1964. Another journalist, Barry Norman, who was to become the nation’s favourite film critic after trying his hand at thriller-writing, also worked in newspapers in South Africa.

Many more, of course, had visited or been stationed in the colonies whilst on active military service but peacetime National Service in the Fifties offered less exotic, albeit safer, opportunities for gathering colourful background material, although Jack Higgins and the award-winning crime writer Reginald Hill (who was to occasionally dabble in spy thrillers) no doubt had their horizons broadened whilst serving with the British army on the border between West and East Germany.

True, Britain’s armed forces still had a reputation for professionalism and bravery – and tough secret agents such as James Mitchell’s David Callan had learned their deadly skills in the army, fighting communist insurgents in Malaya – but now there were fewer gunboats to spare to send to foreign hot spots and everyone knew that only America could actually afford to pay for a war. After all, Britain was still paying for the last one, its WWII debt repayments only completed in the twenty-first century. And Britain’s intelligence services seemed ill-equipped to play any effective part in the Cold War, riddled as they were by some of the best (Cambridge) educated traitors in the world.

So without an Empire to defend, no real power to wield or misuse, and security services that were far from secure, what was the British thriller writer to do for inspiration?

The answer was blindingly obvious – especially to the many would-be authors who had journalistic backgrounds – never let the facts spoil a good story. Britain had won the war, it still ruled the waves and when the world was in trouble, there would always be a British hero to save the day. In fact, writers almost had a patriotic duty to reassure readers that Britain still mattered on the world stage, even if it could not actually afford to compete in the accelerating arms race between America and the Soviet Union.

The economy may be a mess, its spies defecting to Russia in droves, its armed forces humiliated at Suez and its Empire going, if not gone; but dash it all, we had put up a jolly good show during the war, hadn’t we? We had stood alone, bravely and defiantly, and kept smiling through as our ships were torpedoed and our cities blitzed. We had marched into battle as if striding out to the crease and even when captured we had been determined to escape by the most ingenious (preferably cheekily humorous) method possible.

The British had punched above their weight during the war and, although the world had changed and the villains were different, there was no reason why, when heroes were needed, they should not come from plucky Britain with the advantage of usually being underestimated by an arrogant enemy.

In 1957, in From Russia, with Love, Ian Fleming wryly allowed a Soviet spymaster to display his ignorance of the British (‘English’) psyche. The character is General Vozdvishensky of the Intelligence Department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and he is addressing a meeting of Russian spy agencies planning the elimination of James Bond:

The English are not interested in heroes unless they are footballers or cricketers or jockeys. If a man climbs a mountain or runs very fast he also is a hero to some people, but not to the masses … But the English are not greatly interested in military heroes. In England, neither open war nor secret war is a heroic matter. They do not like to think about war.

The good general had only to look at what the ‘English’ were reading that year (apart from From Russia, with Love that is), namely Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone, and what they were queuing to see at the cinema, The Bridge on the River Kwai, to see how badly he had misjudged them when it came to military heroes. True, he was right when it came to climbing mountains, as when Edmund Hillary (albeit a New Zealander, as was Keith Mallory the mountaineer leader of the mission to spike those pesky guns on Navarone) had conquered Everest in 1953, and about men running fast, as Roger Bannister proved by breaking the four-minute mile barrier in 1954. English footballers and cricketers certainly could and still do become national heroes, even if only briefly, and in 1956, a certain jockey, Dick Francis, became a tragically heroic figure when his mount, the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch, collapsed fatally within sight of the finish of that year’s Grand National. Dick Francis was to go on to become if not a hero, then certainly a National Treasure, when he began to write bestselling thrillers at a steady gallop virtually every year from 1962 to the end of the century and beyond.

To emphasise that it was always dangerous to underestimate the British, Ian Fleming returned to the point in You Only Live Twice in 1964. James Bond is in Japan trying to get the Japanese secret service to provide access to intelligence which the Americans (clearly worried about double agents such as Kim Philby) are refusing to share. Bond befriends the top Japanese spy Tiger Tanaka, but before he agrees to anything, Tanaka tests Bond, not by torture or threatening a female (methods we know don’t work on 007), but by criticising the British in a way which could have come out of the KGB handbook – or even the mouth of a former Colonial Officer now retired to Tunbridge Wells or possibly Bournemouth:

You Only Live Twice, Panther, 1966, photography by Horst Tappe

Bondo-san, I will now be blunt with you, and you will not be offended, because we are friends. Yes? Now it is a sad fact that I, and many of us in positions of authority in Japan, have formed an unsatisfactory opinion about the British people since the war. You have not only lost a great Empire, you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands … We will not go deeply into the reasons for this policy, but when you apparently sought to arrest this slide into impotence at Suez, you succeeded only in stage-managing one of the most pitiful bungles in the history of the world, if not the worst. Further, your governments have shown themselves successively incapable of ruling and have handed over effective control of the country to the trade unions, who appear to be dedicated to the principle of doing less and less work for more money. This feather-bedding, this shirking of an honest day’s work, is sapping at ever-increasing speed the moral fibre of the British, a quality the world once so much admired. In its place we now see a vacuous, aimless horde of seeker-after-pleasure – gambling at the pools and bingo, whining at the weather and the declining fortunes of the country, and wallowing nostalgically in gossip about the doings of the Royal Family …

It is interesting to note that Tanaka cannot resist needling Bond by reminding him of Britain’s ignominious climb-down over Suez. Clearly it still struck a discordant note with many proud Britons, not the least Ian Fleming, but the most pitiful bungle in the history of the world? Surely the author doth protest too much, but it does have the required effect on Bond who shows his (and Britain’s) mettle in his response:

Balls to you, Tiger! And balls again! … England may have been bled pretty thin by a couple of World Wars, our Welfare State politics may have made us expect too much for free, and the liberation of our Colonies may have gone too fast, but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at plenty of sports and win Nobel Prizes. Our politicians may be a feather pated bunch, and I expect yours are too. All politicians are. But there’s nothing wrong with the British people – although there are only fifty million of them.

Bond’s answer proves him worthy of Tanaka’s trust and Japan’s intelligence secrets: ‘I thought your famous English stoicism might break down if I hit hard enough’ says Tiger, and Bond’s response shows there is ‘still an elite in Britain’ which is clearly capable of a world role.

By the end of the Fifties, a disappearing Empire and obvious relegation from the top table of super-powers had been successfully ignored by British thriller writers. They had created heroes – be they soldiers, secret agents, or private adventurers – who could stand up and be counted whatever villains or the elements could throw at them. They were not standing up to restore the Empire, and often not necessarily for patriotic reasons, but they had the tradition (or myth) of empire-building in their genetic make-up – they were British, decent and honest – and all that meant they were heroes almost by natural selection and their skills could be put to good use in any part of the globe.

Among the adventure writers, MacLean and Hammond Innes were the undoubted pace-setters. MacLean had moved from the wartime settings which had made his early reputation, into a spy thriller with a topical political background (Hungary) in The Last Frontier⁷ and then explored new territory, literally, with Night Without End set in the frozen wastes of Greenland in 1959; a novel quickly bought by Hollywood for a film which was to have been written by Eric Ambler and starring William Holden, but was never made. Hammond Innes, an inveterate traveller in real-life had criss-crossed the world, or at least the western half, to provide tales of high adventure in Canada (Campbell’s Kingdom, 1952), Morocco (The Strange Land, 1954), the stormy waters off the Channel Islands (The Wreck of the Mary Deare, 1956),⁸ and then back across the Atlantic to icy Labrador (The Land God Gave to Cain, 1958) before ending the decade with ‘his best yet’ according to the critics: The Doomed Oasis set in the ‘Empty Quarter’ of Arabia. More at home in Europe (Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and Majorca), Victor Canning was also broadening the horizons of his readers with adventures set in Brazil (The Man from the Turkish Slave, 1954), on the Red Sea coast (His Bones Are Coral, 1955), and Somalia in The Burning Eye in 1960. The expert on Africa, though, was a newcomer – Geoffrey Jenkins used the Namib Desert coastline for his debut thriller A Twist of Sand in 1959 and the Mozambique coast for his second, The Watering Place of Good Peace, the following year.

The Wreck of the Mary Deare, Fontana, 1960

The Python Project, Hamlyn, 1967, illustrated by Mike Charlton

All these authors, firmly in the adventure thriller market, did very well in the 1950s through sales of hardbacks and book club editions.⁹ They were to do even better in the 1960s through mass market paperbacks which sold by the millions internationally, in more countries than even those once coloured pink in the Atlas.

The British may have begun to divest themselves of their empire but by the end of the 1950s, British spy fiction, or more accurately spy fantasy, had a clear and unchallenged emperor – Ian Fleming. The nearest rival to Fleming’s James Bond was probably Desmond Cory’s Sean ‘Johnny’ Fedora, who also had the distinction of applying for his licence to kill before Bond did, making his debut in Secret Ministry in 1951. Of Spanish–Irish parentage, Fedora was very much a British hero with a distinguished war record and a very British ‘Dr Watson’ sidekick – Sebastian Trout of the Foreign Office. By 1960, Fedora had appeared in more books than Bond (eleven, compared to seven Bond novels and a collection of short stories) and had taken readers to many an exotic location, from the Himalayas to the Congo to Venezuela on missions initially against ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis, but latterly against the KGB. In theory, Fedora should have been as well-known as Bond in this period – his adventures were well regarded in America and well-reviewed by no less than Anthony Boucher¹⁰ who publicly preferred him to 007 – but UK titles such as Johnny Goes East, Johnny Goes North, Johnny Goes West and, you’ve guessed, Johnny Goes South, perhaps made him sound more a competitor to Biggles rather than Bond. (His adventures in American editions had far more exciting titles such as The Swastika Hunt, Overload, and Mountainhead.)

Two new heroes – both very British but spymasters rather than spies or secret agents – came on the murky espionage scene in 1958 and both were to attract strong, if not numerically overwhelming, supporters. Neither was remotely like James Bond, although John Blackburn’s General Charles Kirk did have a secretary called, cheekily, ‘Miss Bond’. The ageing General Kirk, with his war-damaged hand and a phobia about feeling cold, was billed as the Head of Foreign Office Intelligence and he made his debut in A Scent of New-mown Hay. In a nod to the traditions of the genre, Kirk is described in another novel (Broken Boy) as looking ‘like one of Buchan’s aristocratic villains, plotting a very low blow against the Crown’. Blackburn’s novels took spy fantasy to the limit, often including elements of supernatural horror and even science fiction and as a result he attained a cult rather than a mass following, though several of the books reflected the development of, and paranoia about, biological weapons of mass destruction. The other leading man (he was far too refined to be labelled anything as common as a popular hero) to emerge was Colonel Charles Russell, of the mysterious and seemingly autonomous Security Executive, created by William Haggard in Slow Burner. The urbane and patrician Russell, who could get on with traitors and his KGB opposite number far better than he could with his own political masters, was of similar mature years to General Kirk – and more the equivalent of ‘M’ than Bond – but not the old warhorse that Kirk was; more a rather superior, very senior, civil servant, which is exactly what his creator was.

The Night of Wenceslas, Penguin, 1962

One other promising character, although reluctant spy and certainly no match for James Bond, to appear in 1960 was Nicolas Whistler who found himself, much against his better judgement, up to his neck in espionage in Czechoslovakia in the award-winning The Night of Wenceslas by Lionel Davidson. The book was soon filmed as the romantic comedy Hot Enough for June, starring that quintessentially British hero Dirk Bogarde, but no more was ever heard of Nicolas Whistler. His creator Davidson, though, went on to become one of Britain’s most respected – and best – thriller writers.

That debut novel of Lionel Davidson is as good a punctuation point as any. The 1950s had well and truly ended and the Swinging (and Spying) Sixties were upon us.

Lots of things, especially thriller-writing, were about to change.