Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed. Mike Ripley

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