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

its jungles, high mountains, lost cities, and, indeed, lost civilisations, as well as extremely exotic (and dangerous) local inhabitants – piranhas, anacondas, native Indians with blowpipes and curare-tipped darts, not to mention ex-Nazis – it is rather surprising that it was not the setting for more tales of high adventure.

      In the same year that Snake Water was published, however, Desmond Bagley produced another top-notch one in High Citadel, a rip-roaring thriller set in the High Andes where the survivors of a plane crash not only have to contend with the inhospitable terrain, but are pursued by an army of rebel soldiers. Fortunately, among the ranks of the survivors are a couple of medieval historians who are able to construct medieval weapons to fight off their attackers.⁷

      Then John Blackburn – who specialised in exotic, sometimes downright Gothic, scenarios – in The Young Man from Lima (1968) had his ageing spymaster hero General Charles Kirk endure a Heart of Darkness journey up a jungle river to a ghost town guarded by an army of very protective soldier ants. In the same year, the veteran Geoffrey Household produced a spooky slice of the picaresque in Dance of the Dwarfs, featuring a lone hero (as usual) manning an experimental agricultural station on the edge of the Colombian jungle. One of Household’s strangest offerings (the first-person narrator is dead before the book starts and the ‘dwarfs’ of the title are not human) the novel is ripe with the author’s obvious closeness to the landscape and the local population, whether human or animal, which is hardly surprising given that Household knew South America from his pre-war days as an importer of bananas into Europe, and then as a travelling salesman selling printer’s inks there, before turning to fiction.

       Running Blind, The Companion Book Club, 1971

       High Citadel, Fontana, 1967

      A less frenetic use of South American settings can be seen in the series of thrillers featuring Peter Craig, a special agent of the Diplomatic Service, which began in 1969 with Twenty-fourth Level by Kenneth Benton. A retired diplomat, Benton had served in the Diplomatic Corps for some 30 years (in fact he was an MI6 officer), including postings to Brazil and Peru, and his hero, Peter Craig (not to be confused with James Munro’s John Craig, a much rougher beast) is a specialist overseas police advisor on security matters who follows in the footsteps of his creator’s diplomatic postings. Craig is, in essence, a consultant who lectures foreign police forces on counter-insurgency strategies and anti-terrorism, often finding he has to leave the lecture theatre and take to the battlefield to prove that the sword is mightier than the whiteboard marker. After his Brazilian baptism of fire, Craig’s assignments took him to Europe and then back to South America, to the High Andes in Peru in Craig and the Jaguar in 1973, which reads in part like a textbook on agricultural economics. The detailed topography may be absolutely accurate, but the reason Peter Craig (and Kenneth Benton) did not become better-known was because Craig was simply not exciting enough a character. There was little, if any, mystery about him and he was rather staid, calmly smoking his pipe while machine guns rattled all around him. You got the feeling that if he wore a jacket with leather elbow patches he would easily be mistaken for a geography teacher.

      No such mistake would be made over the adventurers in the distinctly harsh environments provided by South African author Geoffrey Jenkins. His heroes are usually grizzled sea-dogs with wartime experiences they would rather forget, even if the reader is anxious to know more (although in one case the central character is a research scientist dedicated to electrocuting sharks after losing his legs in a shark attack).⁸ However fanciful his plots, Jenkins was the master of his Southern Hemisphere locations, especially the ‘Skeleton Coast’ and the notorious Namib, ‘the desert of diamonds and death’ in south-west Africa, the Mozambique Channel and the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic and Antarctica. In A Grue of Ice in 1962, he also set a thriller in the world of commercial whaling (although the nub of the plot is the hunt for something much more rare and more valuable than whale meat), possibly the first, and perhaps the last, thriller writer to do so after Hammond Innes in those Greenpeace-free days.⁹

      Those early Jenkins novels were ‘Adventures’ with a capital ‘A’, the characters being explorers into strange and dangerous environments rather than soldiers or secret agents on a mission. Jenkins spiced his stories with the latest scientific discoveries as well as traditional explorer’s folklore as it surrounded the bizarre landscapes (and seascapes) he described. It was perfectly possible in a Jenkins novel to find the wreck of a top secret Nazi U-boat, a fifteenth-century Portuguese sailing ship stranded in the middle of a desert, blind scarab beetles, a mysterious island seen only twice in a hundred years, the meteorological phenomenon of ‘two suns’, strandlopers – rather unpleasant seashore hyenas, very big and very deadly composite jelly fish (imagine a long string of Portuguese man-of-wars joined together to increase their voltage), and, even, in the Indian Ocean, a giant ‘Devil Fish’ – a manta ray large enough to attack a submarine.

      His 1964 novel The River of Diamonds had all his trademark ingredients and then some. This updated pirate tale set on the desolate Sperrgebiet coast of modern-day Namibia, centres on an expedition to mine diamonds from the sea-bed where they were deposited by a prehistoric river – or is that merely a cover to find the hidden treasure, diamonds again, of Heinrich Göring (Hermann’s father) the colonial governor when Namibia was an Imperial German protectorate? As the Daily Telegraph reviewer noted, there are also ‘killer deserts, grizzled prospectors, mass (animal) suicides, savage nomads and a vanished U-boat patrol’ to which could be added some powerful and very deadly natural phenomenon, quicksands, oxygen-less sea, and an attack by Russian torpedo boats. The American magazine Kirkus Reviews called it ‘Good Hollywood’.¹⁰

      The River of Diamonds, Fontana, 1966

      If there had been a prize for the most convoluted journey taken by a hero in an adventure thriller published in 1962, then A Captive in the Land by James Aldridge would surely have been in the running. The story opens with the rather uptight British meteorologist hero Rupert Royce on a flight back from the Canadian Arctic when a crashed Russian plane, with a stranded sole survivor, is spotted on the ice below them. Royce hastily grabs some survival gear and parachutes down to the ice whilst his plane goes off to get help, but then it too crashes, leaving Royce and a badly-injured Russian pilot stranded, 300 miles from the US base at Thule in Greenland. After months of hardship surviving the weather and fighting off polar bears waiting for a rescue that isn’t coming, Royce decides to walk off the ice, grimly dragging the injured Russian with him. Amazingly they survive the gruelling trek and are eventually rescued by Eskimo seal-hunters. Royce returns to England to find himself – embarrassingly – a hero of the Soviet Union and after some rather tedious soul-searching, agrees to accept the offer of Russian hospitality and embarks with his family on a journey to Leningrad, then Moscow, then down to the Crimea where he has expressed a desire to scuba-dive in the Black Sea on the archaeological ruins of the Ancient Greek settlement of Phanagoria.¹¹ With his status as a Soviet Hero and seemingly unlimited access to Russia, Royce has naturally been recruited by British Naval Intelligence to do a bit of spying whilst there, but his heart isn’t in it and in the end he throws away unused his fountain-pen full of invisible ink!

      It seemed that James Aldridge, a respected war correspondent in WWII and author of numerous novels, children’s books and non-fiction, started A Captive in the Land as an adventure story. He toyed with the idea of a spy novel, and then almost moved into a man-alone-in-a-foreign-land thriller, but somewhere along the line, in a very long book, lost any sense of making it thrilling. Even the sub-texts of his hero’s Russian love affair and his sympathetic observations of day-to-day Russian life, about which little was known in the West, fail to generate much excitement or suspense and absolutely no tension (the dramatic highlight is when Royce is robbed and his trousers stolen!). You can’t help thinking that an Alistair MacLean hero under the