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the sort of local colour the MacLean reader was after.

      The undisputed heir to Hammond Innes, when it came to providing foreign locales and being a similarly enthusiastic traveller, was Desmond Bagley, whose novels from 1965 onwards were framed by carefully and often lovingly described scenery from the High Andes to British Columbia, and Sweden to New Zealand.

      As was often said about Bagley, his books were not so much about spies or even crimes – though they certainly feature – but about a group of interesting people in an interesting, often dangerous, landscape. In the 1982 Whodunit? Guide to Crime, Suspense and Spy Fiction one of the editors (most likely Harry Keating) wrote Bagley’s entry in the ‘Consumer’s Guide’ section:

       [Bagley] derives a good deal of his creative force from the choice of exotic settings, carefully visited in advance. These have ranged from Iceland (Running Blind) to the Sahara (Flyaway), from northernmost Scotland (The Enemy) to southern New Zealand (The Snow Tiger). But he never allows his research, however massive, to get in the way of his story, although what facts he does let on to the pages greatly enhance the authenticity and interest of those stories.

      Bagley’s very natural, almost conversational, style convincingly imparts a local flavour without lecturing to his readers, as in Flyaway (1978) when he gives tips on riding a camel as his protagonists are about to cross the desert in Chad:

      A camel, I found, is not steered from the mouth like a horse. Once in the saddle, the Tuareg saddle with its armchair back and high cross-shaped pommel, you put your bare feet on the animal’s neck and guide it by rubbing one side or the other. Being on a camel when it rises to its feet is the nearest thing to being in an earthquake and quite alarming until one gets used to it.

      In those far-off days before the Internet, Google Earth or Lonely Planet Guides, this was useful information to the sitting-room traveller and had the feel of being written by someone who had been there and done that – as Bagley had. In many ways he could be credited with (or blamed for) being a forerunner of the tsunami of ‘Nordic Noir’ crime novels which was to flood Europe at the end of the century, when he used settings in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and particularly Iceland in his Cold War thriller Running Blind in 1970.

      Bagley and his wife Joan spent a month researching in Iceland in 1969 and their visit was clearly a big news event locally as all the Icelandic media reported a press conference they gave towards the end of their stay. When asked the inevitable question ‘why Iceland?’ Bagley, very honestly, replied: ‘Iceland is a very unusual country. It is also helpful, because so few people live here, so should I write some nonsense, then nobody knows what is right except in Iceland.’ A little more seriously, he said, ‘I choose my setting depending on whether people know a little or a lot about the country,’ and acknowledged that in Britain, the popular awareness of Iceland was limited to newspaper headlines about fishing disputes and ‘Cod Wars’.⁵

       Long Run South, Panther, 1965

       Snake Water, Panther, 1971

      Running Blind, which was filmed by the BBC, was another bestseller for Bagley and in an article in The Writer in May 1973, he said: ‘The plot that was worked out in Running Blind came directly from the terrain and peculiar institutions of Iceland and I do not think that specific plot could have been set in any other country.’

      Certainly the television adaptation was well-received and the week after it was shown in 1979, The Observer newspaper ran an advertisement for an ‘Icelandic Safari among the glaciers, hot springs, and volcanoes’ – holiday with the adventurous imprimatur ‘In the trace of Desmond Bagley’.

      Yet Bagley was not the first British thriller writer to discover Iceland. Journalist and foreign correspondent Alan Williams had used it as the setting for a key section of The Brotherhood (later retitled The Purity League) in 1968, where the hero, (a cynical, fairly right-wing journalist), flees for his life from the puritanical and very right-wing Brotherhood across an Icelandic glacier, before moving to the final shoot-out climax in communist Poland.

      From the start of his career as a thriller writer, Alan Williams had offered exciting foreign locations, recalled from first-hand experience as a foreign, or often war, correspondent. His first novel, Long Run South (1962), was set in Morocco and quickly followed by the excellent Barbouze, which begins among ancient Greek monasteries and meals of bread, olives, dried fish, ouzo, arak, and retzina, all of which (including bread other than white sliced) being rare and exotic things in most of Britain in 1963. Barbouze then becomes both more exotic and also politically topical by switching the action to Algiers, slap-bang – literally – in the middle of civil strife caused by the de-colonisation of Algeria by France.

      In his third novel, Snake Water (1965)⁶, Williams pulled out all the stops when it came to impressing the armchair explorer, setting his treasure-hunt thriller in a rather vaguely located South American country blessed not only with a corrupt ‘banana republic’ government but a topography which included volcanoes, mountains, deserts, swamps, and jungle, not to mention a tribe of native Indians with a ferocious reputation. The plot concerns an ill-assorted quartet of two innocents and two natural-born killers following a treasure map to a hidden cache of diamonds, first across a desert called The Devil’s Spoon:

      They woke with the sun hanging like a fireball in the corner of the sky. The glare had gone and they could now see the great hollow of The Devil’s Spoon below. From here it looked less like a spoon than a frying-pan full of steam. The rim ran the length of the horizon in a dark line that was the cliff called the Chinluca Wall. The sky above was the colour of asphalt; below there was not a single land-mark – not a drop of water or blade of grass or cacti or weed or insect; not the smallest thing.

      Having crossed this heartless terrain, our intrepid travellers then have to face the hostile wildlife. Blocking their path through the mountains is a phenomenon which any natural history presenter, Sir David Attenborough included, would give their eye-teeth for: the mating dance of highly poisonous snakes seen by the light of a full moon:

      Less than ten feet along the ledge were about a dozen snakes. They were thin and long, striped yellow, black and green, twisting and looping with astonishing speed, their scales making a soft rustling sound on the scree. About half of them were moving flat on the ledge in rapid figure-of-eight patterns, the others crawling in and out of holes in the rock, streaking upwards, their diamond heads flashing like the points of spears, then plunging back into the sand to reappear a few feet away, always in the perfect arabesque movements of a meticulous ritual.

      This being a red-blooded thriller and not a nature programme, however, the scene does not end well for one of the treasure hunters – nor for the snakes ‘dancing’ in the moonlight. Yet more dangers lurk in ambush for the ragged bunch of adventurers along the way, this time as they enter insect- and leech-infested swamp country.

      Then, under the mangroves about thirty feet away, he saw a movement. At first he thought it was a trick of the shadows: a broad undulating mass of copper-red helmets, each the size of a soup-plate, moving slowly towards them like a battalion of surrealist troops without heads or bodies. There must have been more than fifty of them, stretching back under the trees, creeping round the roots in several streams; and along the front ranks, where the faces should have been, there were hundreds of thin white legs like macaroni, treading the mud in a steady rhythmic motion … Ryderbeit studied them for a moment, then frowned. ‘We’d better get out o’here. Swamp crabs – can paralyse you in a few seconds’.

      As Ryderbeit is a leathery, not-to-be-trusted, hard-nosed character (and one of Williams’ finest creations), the South American wildlife, once again, does not come off well.

      South America proved a happy hunting ground for several thriller writers, just as Africa had for Rider