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

in half the number of pages.

      A Captive in the Land, whatever merits it may have had as a ‘straight’ or ‘literary’ novel, failed as a thriller because it simply wasn’t exciting enough and proved that unusual or unfamiliar locations were not in themselves a guarantee of success. To corrupt one of the favourite phrases of reviewers of the day, there was little blood and hardly any thunder (although there is a scene in a lightning storm over the Crimea) and the novel had, in Rupert Royce, a man of extensive private wealth, an unsympathetic, stubbornly unworldly, hero who acts on the pace of the narrative like a sea-anchor.

      This was the Sixties and new sorts of hero were needed: confident guys who could survive on their wits in exotic and dangerous foreign environments and who knew about guy stuff, such as guns, aeroplanes and engines. In 1961, there was one such guy waiting, quite literally, in the wings.

      I hadn’t been in Athens for at least three months and hadn’t reckoned on being there for another three months, but there I was standing breathing the good fresh petrol fumes of Elliniko Airport and waiting for the starboard engine to get cool enough for me to start an appendectomy on its magneto.

      Thus did Gavin Lyall introduce the first of his buccaneering heroes, freelance pilot Jack Clay, in his debut novel The Wrong Side of the Sky and we soon, from Clay’s rather cynical perspective, get a view of the overnight accommodation provided for air cargo personnel in the parts of Athens tourists were probably wise to avoid:

      We got a couple of rooms in a small hotel just off Omonia Square … The sheets were patched, the windows gave a good view of the vegetable shop across the street and the doors were the sort that any policeman could knock down with a good sneeze – and probably had. But the place was a lot cleaner than a lot of hotels around there, and it cost us five whole drachmas a night more than the neighbourhood rate.

      Here was a hero, British to be sure, but blessed with Raymond Chandler-sharp dialogue, who not only had an interesting way of making a (mostly) legal living, flying cargo planes around the Mediterranean, but who also fitted into the foreign setting with streetwise ease. Here was a first-person narrator who was not lecturing the reader, just telling it as he had experienced it, and so when the hero finds himself in danger – as of course he does – the reader is confident he will get out of that particular scrape by virtue of his wits alone.

      In 1964, Lyall repeated his winning formula with an even more suspenseful plot and a setting well off the (then) tourist track: Lapland and northern Finland. The resourceful hero was again a pilot-for-hire, this time called Bill Cary, and at the opening of The Most Dangerous Game he tells the reader:

      They were ripping up Rovaniemi airport, as they were almost every airport in Finland that summer, into big piles of rock and sandy soil. It was all part of some grand rebuilding design ready for the day when they had enough tourist traffic to justify putting the jets on to the internal air routes. In the meantime, it was just turning perfectly good airports into sand-pits.

      Lyall’s early adventurers may have had military experience and certainly had some special, though not outlandish, skills in that they could drive expertly and could usually pilot an aircraft. They were not masters of disguise, almost certainly not versed in any martial art and relied on gadgets and secret equipment only to the extent that they knew how to use a spanner on a recalcitrant engine. They were the sort of guys other guys wouldn’t mind standing at a bar with, especially if those bars were abroad because Lyall’s heroes fitted in whether in Greece, Finland, France or the Caribbean, and would drink and eat what a regular guy would.

      Fictional spies, of course, were on expenses when abroad and usually travelled first class, especially if they belonged to the Bond school of spy-fantasy. They tended to stay in five-star hotels, had limousines and drivers to meet them at the airport, drank the finest alcohol, ate in the finest restaurants – and could not resist giving the reader pointers on the art of foreign travel with style.

      The Most Dangerous Game, Pan, 1966

      James Bond was the first jet set secret agent – his early appearances in print coinciding with the establishment of commercial jet airline travel – and had seemed happiest when operating abroad. His missions had taken him to America, the Caribbean, Turkey, France, Switzerland and even Japan, with only one of his adventures – Moonraker – being set on home soil. The many candidates to replace Bond in the nation’s affections were just as keen to add to the collection of stamps and visas in their well-worn passports.

      One of the leading pretenders to Bond’s throne was the extraordinary Dr Jason Love, who apart from being a country doctor in general practice, was skilled in martial arts and an authority on vintage cars – and he was always willing to help out British Intelligence at a moment’s notice, whenever or wherever needed. Created by James Leasor, Dr Love’s first outing was in Passport to Oblivion in 1964 and the action spread from Tehran and Rome to the wilds of northern Canada.¹² Further novels, usually with ‘passport’ in the title offering the prospect of foreign locales, followed with settings from Switzerland to the Himalayas, and the Bahamas to Damascus.

      Hot on the heels of Dr Jason Love, 1964 also saw the arrival of Charles Hood, created by James Mayo, who was a clone of James Bond in in his love of the high-life but differed intellectually in that he was a connoisseur of, and dealer in, fine art. With such a day job, or perhaps cover story to maintain, it is of course necessary for Hood to spend quite a bit of time hanging around art galleries in Paris, though he does find time for excursions to the Windward Isles, Nicaragua and Iran in his 1968 adventure Once in a Lifetime, which was re-titled Sergeant Death when it appeared in paperback the following year.

      Another 1964 alumnus of the academy of 007 substitutes was ‘barrister by profession, adventurer by choice’ Hugo Baron, created by John Michael Brett, who had a short fictional career working for an organisation known as DIECAST, which believed in violent means to achieve world peace and the elimination of espionage! Hugo Baron was clearly good at his job and duly found himself unemployed after three novels, though not before an adventurous jaunt to Egypt and Kenya in A Plague of Dragons in 1965.

      Also making his debut in 1964 was John Craig, a distinctly working-class hero compared to most would-be Bond replacements. Created by James Munro (a pen-name of James Mitchell, who was to go on to invent the more famous David Callan) and appearing first in The Man Who Sold Death, Craig’s early adventures centred on the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Morocco but by The Innocent Bystanders in 1969 he was a paid-up member of the jet-set, zipping between New York, Miami, Turkey, and Cyprus.

      Modesty Blaise, one of the few female not-so-secret agents created in the 1960s (or since) already had a cosmopolitan personal background when she first appeared in a newspaper comic strip in 1963 and then a series of novels (and one unlamented feature film) from 1965. Created by Peter O’Donnell, the independently wealthy Ms Blaise not only owns a villa in Tangiers but travels easily through Africa and the Middle East, and in Sabre-Tooth (1966) comes up against an army of terrorists training in Afghanistan in order to ferment revolt in Kuwait – a prescient, though twisted, mirror image of a very modern scenario.

      Johnny Fedora, whose career timeline mirrored that of Bond, had already done his fair share of globe-trotting but by the 1960s, author Desmond Cory had settled him into a series of interwoven missions against his KGB nemesis based mostly in Spain.

      Without doubt, though, the most popular foreign destination for British spies – though only the reader could be said to be the tourist – was Berlin.

      A focal point of diplomatic tension between capitalist West and communist East since the 1940s, the isolated city of Berlin became the espionage hub of the Cold War when the ‘Anti-Fascist Protective Wall’ went up virtually overnight in 1961. A barrier dividing two opposing political systems, complete with armed guards, minefields, and checkpoints in the middle of a city already heavy with history and recent memories of a world war, it was a barrier that could only be crossed in secret ways and on pain of death, or in dramatic rituals of prisoner