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

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.

       Chapter 6:

       TRAVEL BROADENING THE MIND

      One of the main attractions of British thrillers in the boom times of the Sixties and Seventies, apart from the excitement and escapism provided by their fantastical plots, was their ability to provide extremely cheap foreign travel without the reader having to actually move. It was, to be sure, the era of cheap packaged holidays at a time when a relatively young population had disposable incomes and between 1960 and 1967, the number of Britons holidaying abroad more than doubled to around the 5 million mark. For the vast majority, though, ‘abroad’ was still an undiscovered country.

      The first charter flight of holidaymakers from Britain had taken off for Corsica back in 1950 and the first passenger jet flew in 1952. The Convention on International Civil Aviation in 1954 relaxed their rules to allow for more charter flights and in 1957 BEA (British European Airways) established a route to Valencia in Spain and it is said that the term ‘Costa Blanca’ was invented to promote it. Dover–Calais car ferries offered the motorist a chance to explore the continent from 1953, the first Channel crossing by a hovercraft in 1959 offered the prospect of a far shorter (though notoriously more turbulent) journey, and in 1962 the first Thomson package holiday took eighty-two sun-seekers to Palma for thirteen days at a cost of around £42 a head.

      British governments, however, seemed determined not to let the population have too much travel, or too good a time when they got there. Currency restrictions imposing a £50 allowance on travellers were introduced after WWII as an austerity measure, abolished in 1959 by a Conservative government to prove that we had never had it so good, and then reintroduced in 1966 by a Labour government desperate to fend off a devaluation of the pound.¹ One disgruntled Conservative MP commented that the paltry allowance resulted in impoverished British travellers abroad being ‘regarded as lower than Albanian tourists’. Victor Canning called it ‘scraping along on a £50 travel allowance’ but writers, of course, would almost certainly have got away with a larger allowance on the basis that their trips abroad were vital ‘research’.

      Foreign travel may have been a minority sport² but the possibility was now there and certainly there was a thirst for knowledge – at least in popular fiction – of foreign locales for, after all, foreign parts invariably meant thrills and excitement. For most Britons the very act of crossing a border was seen as an adventure in itself, an attitude which was said, unfairly, to apply to the English rather than the British as a whole – even when they travelled to Scotland.

       1960s

      The Old Masters, Greene and Ambler, had been proving that ‘abroad’ equalled mystery, suspense, and intrigue for years and were continuing to do so.

      Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (Indo-China) in 1955, Our Man in Havana in 1958, and The Comedians (set in Haiti) in 1966 are among his most famous novels. Eric Ambler, who had made his name with serpentine tales often set in old Byzantium, returned to the exotic eastern Mediterranean with The Light of Day in 1962 (filmed as Topkapi) and then tackled Africa in Dirty Story in 1967.

       Our Man in Havana, Heinemann, 1958

       The Dark Crusader, Fontana, 1963

      One group who could travel more than most were journalists. There was certainly a tradition of having a journalist as a sleuthing hero in detective fiction, back to the days of E. C. Bentley, Philip MacDonald and Anthony Berkeley. Some of them, certainly, were rather dodgy characters though as Eric Ambler had warned his readers: ‘The transition from newspaper man to desperado is a more arduous process than some people would have you believe.’³

      Hammond Innes – originally a journalist – was generally accepted to be the master of the ‘going foreign’ adventure thriller and he extended his research trips to include settings in south-east Asia, Greece, Malta, and Australia. Not far behind was another veteran, Victor Canning, and although Canning tended to limit his adventures to Europe and the Mediterranean in the Sixties he always preferred to set dangerous adventures involving Englishmen, in foreign locations because ‘in this country you could always call a policeman’.⁴

      The big beast of the thriller pack, Alistair MacLean, certainly varied his settings, though the geographical location of his plots was always somehow secondary to the travails of the hero. In one of his lesser known works, The Dark Crusader, first published in 1961 under the pen-name Ian Stuart, British secret agent John Benthall, posing as a rocket scientist, ends up on a Polynesian island which at first glance could be the home of Dr No or Dr Moreau, possibly both. The reader, however, is not invited (or given the time) to dwell on the exotic setting other than to be reassured that the food served there by a Chinese cook ‘was none of this nonsense of birds’ nests and sharks’ fins’, as the more important concerns by far are: what’s going on, who can Benthall trust and how does he get past the armed guards and those Dobermann-Pinscher attack dogs which weigh between eighty and ninety pounds, have ‘fangs