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

Copyright

Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Copyright © Mike Ripley 2017

Foreword © Lee Child 2017

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover illustration: detail from When Eight Bells Toll by Alistair MacLean © HarperCollinsPublishers 1981 (front); Robert Kyle’s Kill Now, Pay Later by Robert McGinnis © Dell Publishing/Penguin Random House 1960 (back).

Author photograph © Mike Ripley

Mike Ripley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions on the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008172237

Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008172244

Version: 2017-11-20

Dedication

For Len Deighton,

who has a lot to answer for.

SPOILER ALERT

There will be spoilers. Live with it. Many of the thrillers referred to here were published fifty years ago. You’ve had time.

THRILLERS

‘A book, film, or play depicting crime, mystery, or espionage in an atmosphere of excitement and suspense.’

Collins English Dictionary

‘What exactly is a thriller? The term seems to cover a multitude of sins and quite a fair proportion of virtues.’

Margery Allingham, 1931

‘You after all write “novels of suspense” – if not sociological studies – whereas my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.’

Ian Fleming in a letter to Raymond Chandler, 1956

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Spoiler Alert

Thrillers

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1: A Question of Emphasis

Chapter 2: The Land Before Bond

Chapter 3: Do Mention the War

Chapter 4: Tinkers, Tailors, Soldiers, Spies. But Mostly Journalists.

Chapter 5: End of Empire

Chapter 6: Travel Broadening the Mind

Chapter 7: Class of ’62

Chapter 8: The Spies Have It, 1963–70

Chapter 9: The Adventurers, 1963–70

Chapter 10: The Storm Jackal Has Landed – The 1970s

Chapter 11: The New Intake

Chapter 12: Endgame

Appendix I: The Leading Players

Appendix II: The Supporting Cast

Notes & References

Acknowledgements & Bibliography

Index

Also by Mike Ripley

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

Some time ago Mike Ripley e-mailed and asked if I would write a foreword for his new book. I knew roughly what it was about: Mike and I bump into each other a couple of times a year, at industry junkets, and like writers everywhere we always ask about works in progress – secretly hoping, I suppose, that the other guy is having it even worse than we are. So I knew the project was a survey of British thriller fiction during the two golden decades between the mid-Fifties and the mid-Seventies. Knowing Mike, I knew the scholarship would be meticulous; I knew the writing would be pleasantly breezy, but always willing to seize passionately upon a point, and render a clear and acute conclusion, without fear or favour. It would be a book I would want to read – maybe even pay for – so why not get it early and free? So I said yes.

Mike is a slightly older codger even than I, so there was no immediate e-mail response to my response. I got the impression he treats e-mail like the country squire he pretends to be, treats the post, perhaps once a day, perhaps in the early morning, at the breakfast table. I spent the rest of my own day writing a newspaper article commissioned by the New York Times. I was never quite sure what they wanted, but it seemed to require a retrospective mood, even elegiac, starting right back at the beginning, which in my case meant growing up in provincial post-war Britain. I polished the piece and sent it off.

Then – bing – the attachment arrived from Ripley.

For the New York Times, I had started, ‘Objectively I was one of the luckiest humans ever born.’

Ripley’s preface started, ‘I am of the luckiest generation.’

He’s a couple of years older than me, which makes us a typical older brother–younger brother age pairing right in the middle of the luckiest demographic in history. For the Times I said we were a stable postwar liberal democracy, at peace, with a cradle-to-grave welfare system that worked efficiently, with all dread diseases conquered, with full employment for our parents, with free and excellent education from the age of five for just as long as we merited it. We had no bombs falling on our houses, and no knocks on our doors in the middle of the night. No previous generation ever had all of that, not in all of history, and standards have eroded since. We were very lucky.

But, I said, it was very boring. Britain was grey, exhausted, physically ruined, and financially crippled. The factories were humming, but everything went for export. We needed foreign currency to pay down monstrous war debt. Domestic life was pinched and austere.

We escaped any way we could. Reading was the main way. Thrillers were the highest high, and British writers were never better than during our formative years. But finding out about them was entirely random. Obviously there was no Internet – electricity itself was fairly recent in some of our houses – and it was rare to meet a fellow aficionado face to face, and enthusiast bookshops were inaccessible to most of us, and so on. We blundered from one random find to another. Some of us had older brothers blazing the way, and really that’s exactly what this book is – the perfect older brother, equipped with 20/20 hindsight, saying, ‘Read this, and then this, and this, and this.’

I can follow my own snail-trail across the landscape that Ripley so comprehensively describes. I can pick my way from A to Z, book to book, zigging and zagging. I can remember the joy of escaping, and the thrill of immersion in a fast and gaudy world, and wanting to do it again and again. In that sense this book feels like my own personal memoir, and inevitably it will to thousands of others too, with their own unique zigzag snail-trails, and as such it seems of great sentimental value, like a long-lost diary, like a list of the way stations that carried us through a time that promised to be forever grey.

It’s also sad, in a way. We all missed so much. Zigging and zagging are all very well, but must always conspire to pass by most good things, simply by the law of averages. But what’s done is done. Instead we should treat this book like a catch-up manual, and fill in what we didn’t read the first time. Some of it might be really good. Some of it might recapture the feeling.

Which would be worth something. A book I might pay for, indeed.

Lee Child

New York

2016

PREFACE

I am of the luckiest generation, the one which avoided National Service and enjoyed a fee-free university education – they even gave you a grant for going.

I spent my early teenage years, and all my pocket money, reading thrillers. It was the first half of the 1960s and I could, by haunting second-hand bookshops and market stalls, usually pick up two, sometimes three, recent paperbacks for the same price as a ‘Top Ten’ 45 rpm vinyl single, which seemed a far better use of my limited disposable income. At least that was my thinking until I discovered girlfriends, and the Rolling Stones recorded Beggar’s Banquet.

I was brought up in a house where a large pile of library books, all fiction, were refreshed every fortnight. Even in a small coal mining village in the West Riding of Yorkshire, there was a public library attached to the infant school which was open two or three evenings a week and allowed four books to be borrowed on each library ticket. My father was a voracious reader of Westerns whilst my mother’s passion was for historical novels. I read thrillers and I knew exactly what I meant when I said that then, although today I would differentiate and describe myself as having started out on adventure thrillers and then moved on to spy thrillers. Unlike many of my peers, science fiction did not entice and detective stories or ‘whodunits’ to me were stale and unappetizing (with the singular exception of Raymond Chandler).

A thriller would offer excitement and almost certainly a connection to WWII. This was a familiar and important reference point as the comic books I had been brought up on as a young lad did not feature Batman, Superman or a Hulk, but soldiers – invariably British or Commonwealth troops – fighting on land, sea, and air against implacable German, inscrutable Japanese and unreliable, if not cowardly, Italian foes. These 64-page book-format magazines were published, rather grandly, as ‘Libraries’. There was War Picture Library, Battle Picture Library, Air Ace Picture Library and, from a rival stable, Commando. They cost a shilling (5p) each and were, as far as I could tell being a bit of a military history buff, pretty accurate when describing the campaigns of World War II.

Why the obsession with WWII? I do not come from a military family, had no career aspirations in that direction (not even the Boy Scouts), and the war itself had ended more than seven years before I was born. Yet it somehow dominated my childhood. The headmaster of my village primary school was a former Royal Navy chief petty officer, the village priest had been a Chaplain with the 14th Army in Burma, I had an impressive collection of toy soldiers, and war films always seemed to be on television – mostly proving that no prison camp could ever hold plucky British escapees when they set their mind to it. When the minor public school I attended took the revolutionary step of starting up a Film Club, the first feature it showed was The Guns of Navarone. (The Headmaster who sanctioned the formation of that Film Club also prohibited any boy from going to the local cinema to see Lindsay Anderson’s If … in 1968. He was clearly a man who understood the power of film.)

It was inevitable that I would discover Alistair MacLean’s wartime classic about the Arctic convoys, HMS Ulysses, and although it is (honestly) more than fifty years since I read it, I can vividly recall incidents from it, not least the scene in a snowstorm when the ship’s pom-pom guns are fired whilst their metal muzzle covers are still in place.

This was a war novel, but it was a tense, dramatic and thrilling story with lashings of suspense and mystery. Not ‘mystery’ as in ‘whodunit?’ but rather ‘how can they survive this?’ The next MacLean I tried, South by Java Head, was also set during WWII but with more skulduggery than actual combat. Other MacLean books were devoured in quick succession and these were not war stories, yet the heroes were resourceful and brave, the stakes life-and-death, the settings ranging exotically from the South Seas to Greenland, and the action fast and furious. These were not only ‘what is really going on?’ mysteries but also ‘how do they get out of this?’ adventures.

I was no longer reading war stories, I was reading thrillers and then, at the age of 12, I discovered James Bond and realised there was more than one type of thriller out there.

With the benefit of half a century of hindsight I realise that there was a real purple patch of British thriller writing in the Sixties and into the Seventies and I had been hungrily reading my way through it. The ‘Golden Age’ of the British detective story (usually accepted to be the Twenties and Thirties) had well and truly lost its lustre by the Swinging Sixties, but a new generation of thriller writers had emerged after the war, appealing to a much wider audience. Thanks to the expansion of public libraries and attractive, mass market paperback editions British writers dominated the national and international bestseller lists. Nobody, it seemed, when it came to action-adventure heroes, secret agents, or spies, did do it better.

After the dull, austere post-war period as Britain declined as a world power, its thriller fiction had – like British pop music and Carnaby Street fashion – moved from black-and-white to Technicolor. The thrillers just kept coming: bigger, brasher, and more fantastical than ever. The early death of Ian Fleming in 1964 did nothing to slow the rush of would-be successors to Bond, in fact it accelerated the flow as did the success of the Bond films. New voices joined in, establishing a school of more realistic spy fiction born in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and more films followed. The year 1966 seemed to have been a peak year, with twenty-two spy or secret agent films released in the UK – admittedly several of them spoofing the genre and only a few of which have stood the test of time.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang attempts to be a reader’s history – specifically this reader – of that action-packed period around the Sixties when, having lost an Empire, Britain’s thriller writers and their fictional heroes saved the world and their books sold by the million. It was very much a British initiative and it only faltered in the mid-Seventies when American thriller writers began to flex their muscles, different types of thriller emerged, and the detective or crime story began to enjoy a renaissance.

This book concentrates unashamedly on the British spies, secret agents, and soldiers, and their creators and publishers, who saved the world from Nazis, ex-Nazis, proto-Nazis, the secret police of any (and all) communist country, super-rich and power-mad villains, traitors, dictators, rogue generals, mad scientists, secret societies, ruthless businessmen and even, on one occasion, an ultra-violent animal protection league which kills anyone who kills animals for sport! I will shamelessly ignore the fictional heroes of other countries and concentrate on British authors, with the exception of a handful of Australians and South Africans, whose primary publishers were in the UK.

It will also limit itself to thrillers rather than ‘detective stories’ or ‘whodunits’. This means that some famous names hardly feature at all, those authors who may well have dipped a toe into the thriller pool but are far better known for their crime novels; for example, the wonderful and much-missed Reginald Hill. Similarly, I will down-play one of my favourite writers, that supreme stylist P. M. Hubbard, who wrote novels of suspense on a domestic, almost micro, level. The thriller-writers taking centre-stage here are those who worked on a broader canvas with sweeping brush-strokes and who came to prominence in the period 1953 to 1975. Some who had established themselves before the Second World War were still writing and experienced something of a ‘second wind’ in the Swinging Sixties.

I should insert here a warning: fans of Eric Ambler (1909–98) and Graham Greene (1904–91) will feel themselves short-changed. Both these authors were immensely influential on the form and tone of the thriller genre (novels and films); indeed, their surnames became adjectives frequently used by reviewers. It was high praise indeed for a thriller to be called ‘Ambler-esque’ and everyone knew exactly where ‘Greene-land’ was. Yet neither of these giants were a product of the period under scrutiny as they had cemented their reputations two decades previously, although both were still producing work of high quality, notably Ambler’s Passage of Arms (1959), The Light of Day (1962) – famously filmed as Topkapi, and The Levanter (1972); and Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958), and The Comedians 1966). Their legacy and importance in the genre will be acknowledged, though not in enough detail to satisfy their dedicated fans. I have also relegated Leslie Charteris and Dennis Wheatley to the pre-war era for, although ‘The Saint’ was an immensely popular figure on British television in the early Sixties, Charteris had ceased to produce full-length novels and Dennis Wheatley’s novels in the period under scrutiny tended towards the historical or the occult stories with which he had made his name in the Thirties.

One limitation is not self-imposed, and that is the absence of women writers. Adventure thrillers and spy stories tended to be what is known in the book trade as ‘boys’ books’ or, pejoratively, ‘dads’ books’ and were to a very great degree, written by men – some might say men who had never grown out of being boys. A notable exception was Helen MacInnes, a Scot based in America, whose first novel had appeared in 1939. By the Sixties, she was a well-established and popular writer and had three notable bestsellers in that decade, but she, like Ambler and Greene, was not a product of that period when Britain ruled the thriller-writing waves and so gets an honourable, but passing, mention here. And it should not be forgotten that it was in the Sixties that some rather talented female writers, notably P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, were laying the groundwork for a revival in the British detective story and crime novel.

It is difficult to pin-point the exact end of this ‘Golden Age’ (or purple patch) of dominance by British thriller writers. One option would perhaps be the death of Alistair MacLean – the biggest name in the adventure thriller market – in 1987, or alternatively the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which threatened to put many a spy-fiction writer out of business. In truth, the writing was on the wall (if not the Berlin one) from roughly the mid-Seventies onwards as the Americans, slightly late as usual, entered the fray.

The beginning of the boom is rather easier to identify. The 1950s were grey and austere for a supposedly victorious wartime nation whose empire was starting to crumble. You might say Britain had been expecting you, Mr Bond …

Chapter 1:

A QUESTION OF EMPHASIS

You can smell fear. You can smell it and you can see it and I could do both as I hauled my way into the control centre of the Dolphin that morning. Not one man as much as flickered an eye in my direction … they had eyes for one thing only – the plummeting needle on the depth gauge.

Seven hundred feet. Seven hundred and fifty. Eight hundred. I’d never heard of a submarine that had reached that depth and lived.

Alistair MacLean, Ice Station Zebra

Was it a Golden Age or an explosion of ‘kiss-kiss, bang-bang’ pulp fiction which reflected the social revolution – and some would say declining morals – of the period? Both are reasonable explanations, depending on your standpoint, for the extraordinary growth in both the writing and reading of British thrillers, between 1953 and 1975.

Popular fiction, as opposed to literary or ‘highbrow’ fiction was always, well – popular; but suddenly the thriller seemed to be out-gunning all other forms. Writing in the middle of the Swinging Sixties, in his economic history Industry and Empire, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that since 1945, ‘that powerful cultural export, the British detective story, has lost its hold, conquered by the American-patterned thriller.’ Professor Hobsbawm was certainly correct in that the traditional British detective story had been replaced by the thriller as a cultural, and in fact economically valuable, export but wrong in suggesting they were ‘American-patterned’. This was a very British boom.

The British, or probably more accurately the English detective story had flourished in the period, roughly, between the two World Wars, a period which earned the epithet ‘Golden Age’ and was characterized, often unfairly, as the era of ‘the country house murder mystery’ or the ‘whodunit?’ It had given rise to the concept of ‘fair play’ whereby the reader was presented with clues to solving the puzzle presented, ideally before the fictional detective did, and the puzzle element was very important. There were even ‘rules’ (fairly tongue-in-cheek ones) on what was and was not allowed in a detective story, and a self-selecting, totally unofficial, Detection Club of the leading practitioners of the art to set the standards of good writing – or just standards in general.

After WWII tastes changed and readers began to demand something other than an intellectual puzzle. Cynics may say that the launch of the board game Cluedo in 1949 was an ironic final nail in the coffin of the ‘whodunit?’ – all those fictional cardboard characters being reduced to actual pieces of cardboard. Of course, it wasn’t the end; it was a period of cyclical dip and transition. Readers were looking for exotic settings, not country houses; heroes and heroines who often acted outside the law rather than plodding policemen; suspense rather than a puzzle; more realistic violence rather than a ridiculously over-elaborate murder method; and, above all, action and excitement at a time when, in the Sixties, everything seemed exciting and moved much faster.

For a period of more than two decades the British thriller delivered on all counts, and on a truly international level. It may not have been a Golden Age but it was certainly a boom time.

This is not a work of literary criticism or comparative literature; it is a reader’s history of one specific category, or genre, of popular fiction – the thriller – over a particular period when British writers dominated the bestseller lists at home and abroad. There will be little, if any, discussion of heroic mythology, social individualism, the atemporality of the appeal of the thriller, the symbiotic relationship between hero and conspiracy, or genre theory. Those debates are left to others on the grounds that, to paraphrase E. B. White: dissecting a thriller is like dissecting a frog – few people are really interested and the frog dies.1

But there has to be some attempt to define the term ‘thriller’, a term used as loosely in the past as ‘noir’ is today (‘Tartan Noir’, ‘Scandi Noir’, etc.) to describe an important segment of that exotic fruit which is generally known as crime fiction. Whether it matters a jot to the reader who simply wants to be entertained is debatable, but again, it probably does. Crime fiction is a recognised genre, just as horror, science fiction, romance, fantasy, westerns and supernatural are all genres of popular fiction and genres tend to have dedicated followers.