Mister 8

As I’ve written before, Jason @ Spy Vibe is running a fantastic series on set design, part of the stylishness of 60s spy cinema that influenced the creation of the term for which Jason named his site. As part of this series, he’s asked a bunch of spy fiction experts and aficionados to submit their top five lists for publication on the site as well, yours truly included (in the aficionados category, certainly).

Now Jason didn’t specifically instruct us to choose from the worlds of film and television, but I’m willing to wager that most of his respondents did just that. But while giving my own list some thought, I wondered about spy fiction in other mediums, and began to think about my favorite non-film and TV “sets.” I thought I might make a series of posts here on the subject, presenting maybe my top two from each “other” medium, or at least discussing a few things, and to solicit your opinions on the matter as well.

Today, I want to spotlight two sections in two books that I love, to demonstrate different methods of scene-setting. Set in a book doesn’t work the same way as it does when it can be physically represented, as in a film, or television, or a play. Settings are filtered through the narrator, the tone of the book, the mood of the characters. The best scene settings read like poetry, as in one of my favorite sections from Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana:

He walked home. The long city lay spread along the open Atlantic; waves broke over the Avenida de Maceo and misted the windscreens of cars. The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arms, smudged and featureless, was set over the doorway of a shabby hotel, and the shutters of a night-club were varnished in bright crude colours to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea. In the west the steel skyscrapers of the new town rose higher than lighthouses into the clear February sky. It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield, and perhaps Milly resembled a little the flower on an old rampart where an attack had been repulsed with heavy loss many years ago. Women passed him in the street marked on the forehead with ashes as though they had come up into the sunlight from underground. He remembered that it was Ash Wednesday.

This selection describes the atmosphere of pre-revolution 1950s Havana–the mixture of old and new world, the juxtaposition of nightlife and battlefields–and relates quite effectively the personality of Wormold, despite only mentioning his name once. I don’t want to spoil the book for you, because you should go out and read it. Greene has a knack, in most of his books, for providing only those perfect details of place, and no more. Writing is not a process of addition, it’s an exercise in subtraction, paring down the words until only the most essential truths remain.

For the more fantastic, and this certainly fits in more with Jason’s concept of “spy vibe,” turn to Ian Fleming’s Moonraker:

It was like being inside the polished barrel of a huge gun. From the floor, forty feet below, rose circular walls of polished metal near the top of which he and Drax clung like two flies. Up through the centre of the shaft, which was about thirty feet wide, soared a pencil of glistening chromium, whose point, tapering to a needle-sharp antenna, seemed to graze the roof twenty feet above their heads.

The shimmering projectile rested on a blunt cone of latticed steel which rose from the floor between the tips of three severely back-swept delta fins that looked as sharp as surgeons’ scalpels. But otherwise nothing marred the silken sheen of the fifty feet of polished chrome steel except the spidery fingers of two light gantries which stood out from the walls and clasped the waist of the rocket between thick pads of foam-rubber.

Where they touched the rocket, small access doors stood open in the steel skin and, as Bond looked down, a man crawled out of one door on to the narrow platform of the gantry and closed the door behind him with a gloved hand. He walked gingerly along the narrow bridge to the wall and turned a handle. There was a sharp whine of machinery and the gantry took its padded hand off the rocket and held it poised in the air like the forelegs of a praying mantis. The whine altered to a deeper tone and the gantry slowly telescoped in on itself. Then it reached out again and seized the rocket ten feet lower down. Its operator crawled out along its arm and opened another small access door and disappeared inside.

“Probably checking the fuel-feed from the after tanks,” said Drax. “Gravity feed. Ticky bit of design. What do you think of her?” He looked with pleasure at Bond’s rapt expression.

“One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” said Bond. It was easy to talk. There was hardly a sound in the great steel shaft and the voices of the men clustered below under the tail of the rocket were no more than a murmur.

Drax pointed upwards. “Warhead,” he explained. “Experimental one now. Full of instruments. Telemeters and so forth. Then the gyros just opposite us here. Then mostly fuel tanks all the way down until you get to the turbines near the tail. Driven by superheated steam, made by decomposing hydrogen peroxide. The fuel, fluorine and hydrogen” (he glanced sharply at Bond. “That’s top-secret by the way”) “falls down the feed tubes and gets ignited as soon as it’s forced into the motor. Sort of controlled explosion which shoots the rocket into the air. That steel floor under the rocket slides away. There’s a big exhaust pit underneath. Comes out at the base of the cliff. You’ll see it tomorrow. Looks like a huge cave. When we ran a static test the other day the chalk melted and ran out into the sea like water. Hope we don’t burn down the famous white cliffs when we come to the real thing. Like to come and have a look at the works?”

Bond followed silently as Drax led the way down the steep iron ladder that curved down the side of the steel wall. He felt a glow of admiration and almost of reverence for this man and his majestic achievement. How could he ever have been put off by Drax’s childish behaviour at the card-table? Even the greatest men have their weaknesses. Drax must have an outlet for the tension of the fantastic responsibility he was carrying. It was clear from the conversation at dinner that he couldn’t shed much on to the shoulders of his highly-strung deputy. From him alone had to spring the vitality and confidence to buoy up his whole team. Even in such a small thing as winning at cards it must be important to him to be constantly reassuring himself, constantly searching out omens of good fortune and success, even to the point of creating these omens for himself. Who, Bond asked himself, wouldn’t sweat and bite his nails when so much had been dared, when so much was at stake?

As they filed down the long curve of the stairway, their figures grotesquely reflected back at them by the mirror of the rocket’s chromium skin, Bond almost felt the man-in the-street’s affection for the man whom, only a few hours previously, he had been dissecting without pity, almost with loathing.

When they reached the steel-plated floor of the shaft, Drax paused and looked up. Bond followed his eyes. Seen from that angle it seemed as if they were gazing up a thin straight shaft of light into the blazing heaven of the arcs, a shaft of light that was not pure white but a shot mother-of-pearl satin. There were shimmers of red in it picked up from the crimson canisters of a giant foam fire-extinguisher that stood near them, a man in an asbestos suit beside it aiming its nozzle at the base of the rocket. There was a streak of violet whose origin was a violet bulb on the board of an instrument panel in the wall, which controlled the steel cover over the exhaust pit. And there was a whisper of emerald green from the shaded light over a plain deal table at which a man sat and wrote down figures as they were called to him from the group gathered directly beneath the Moonraker’s tail.

Gazing up this pastel column, so incredibly slim and graceful, it seemed unthinkable that anything so delicate could withstand the pressures which it had been designed to meet on Friday-the howling stream of the most powerful controlled explosion that had ever been attempted; the impact of the sound barrier; the unknown pressures of the atmosphere at 15,000 miles an hour; the terrible shock as it plunged back from a thousand miles up and hit the atmospheric envelope of the earth.

Drax seemed to read his thoughts. He turned to Bond. “It will be like committing murder,” he said.

A perfect merger of science fiction and the thriller, encapsulated in a stroll through a rocket chamber. This is, perhaps, the closest to Ken Adams that Fleming’s writing ever gets, or perhaps later, when Bond and Gala Brand are…well, as I said before, I don’t want to spoil it for you! Read the book!

Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.

I found this article in the NY Times Historical Database, and thought it might be a good introduction to discussing The IPCRESS File (remember, our discussion starts on Monday!). This is a brief overview of the state of spy fiction a few years after publication of Len Deighton’s first novel, with astute commentary by mystery writer / editor / Borges translator / reviewer extraordinaire Anthony Boucher. There are inevitably a number of thoughts and questions this article raises, that I’d be happy to discuss in the comments, although I plan on touching upon them in my discussion of IPCRESS.

* * *

Originally published: June 7, 1964

There’s A Spy Between the Covers

By Anthony Boucher

Close observers of the bestseller list on page 8 have noticed an unprecedented phenomenon in recent months: the persistence in the top sales brackets of three novels of espionage–John Le Carre’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” Helen MacInnes’s “The Ventian Affair,” and (until quite recently) Ian Flemings “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”

Actual sales figures on these books are even more impressive. The Fleming has sold over 70,000–well above any previous Fleming. The MacInnes has sold over 80,000 (and is still selling over 1,000 a week)–again well above any of the author’s earlier books. And “The Spy” has sold around 163,000, or probably about 25 times the sales of both previous Le Carré novels. The initial print order on the paperback edition will be in the neighborhood of 750,000. His first spy novel, “Call for the Dead,” is now in paperback in an edition of over half a million. The softcover edition of “O.H.M.S.S.” will be one million, bringing the total of Ian Fleming in print in this country to over 12 million.

Spy novels, even those of the acknowledged master, Eric Ambler, have never sold like this before, nor is this strictly an American phenomenon. A recent London Daily Mail bestseller list of 10, fiction and non-fiction, includes four novels, all of them dealing with espionage. (The just-mentioned Le Carré and MacInnes titles, plus the new Fleming, “You Only Live Twice”–to appear here in August–and Gavin Lyall’s “The Most Dangerous Game.”)

A spy writer, the late Jean Bruce, is the most successful popular novelist in France since Simenon; and espionage novels make up an even larger part of publishing in France than they do here, where they seem to constitute almost half of my reviewing duties in the suspense field. Two of the annual French literary prizes are awarded solely for romans d’espionnage (One of them is attractively named, in honor of the most entertaining spy of World War II, Le Prix Cicéron). And there is even a Russian spy novelist Lev Ovalov (but he got a bad review in Pravda–his American secret agent was properly sinister but much too capable).

Spy stories we have always had with us. Like everything else, they can be traced back to the Bible. (See for instance, Joshua ii for the fine story of Rahab the harlot and the spies of Israel.) There are spy narratives in the Sherlock Holmes canon (including the classic “His Last Bow”); and even before World War I there flourished such specialists in spy fiction as E. Phillips Oppenheim and the earlier and even less remembered William Le Queux.

This was all (save, of course, the Biblical accounts) in the unrealistic school of glamour-espionage to which Fleming still adheres. Still colorfully theatrical, but with some closer adherence to the laws of both life and literature, were the magnificent pursuit stories of John Buchan (“The Thirty-Nine Steps,” 1915). The first reasonably realistic stories of espionage may be in “Ashenden” or “The British Agent” (1928) by Somerset Maugham, who had himself served the Foreign Office during the war.

It was in the late 1930′s with the people of England and America becoming more and more aware of international politics ander their implications, that the spy novel came of age. First there was Eric Ambler with “Background to Danger” (1937), then Graham Greene with “The Confidential Agent” (1939); and it became apparent that a spy novel could be as well written and meaningful as an other form of fiction.
With the approaching rumbles of World War II, a number of admirable writers turned for the first time to chronicling international intrigue. Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, Helen McCloy, Ngaio Marsh and many others, most notably Michael Innes, saved the free world from fascism in skillfully written entertainments; and Peter Cheyney, in this “Dark series, starting with “Dark Duet” (1943), brought the bitter techniques of Hammett to this most suitable of topics. Even Kay Boyle joined the throng.

Afterwards (one is tempted to say, “between wars”) these writers returned to their usual more private violences; and it is only in the past few years that the publication of spy stories has equaled and even surpassed (in quantity, and once in a while in quality) its wartime level.

Now there are a number of writers devoting apparently full time to such fiction. Most noteworthy, aside from those already mentioned, are England’s William Haggard, who possesses, in addition to a dry wit, a fine eye and ear for the subtle intricacies of top-level political intrigue, and America’s Donald Hamilton, who demonstrates, in a series of paperback novels about a professional killer in counter-espionage, an authentic toughness of mind unmatched in this field since Cheyney (and possibly in any field since Hammett). On the more flamboyant and colorful side are England’s Desmond Cory and John Blackburn and America’s Edward S. Aarons and Stephen Marlowe.

The most austere chronicler of the slogging day-by-day dullness of much spy-activity is Simon Harvester; Len Deighton, on the strength of one book (“The IPCRESS File,” 1963) seems to be developing an odd and unclassifiably amused viewpoint of his own. Gavin Lyall (mentioned above as an English best seller) is unrivaled for vigor of storytelling and clear complication of plotting. Michael Gilbert, who has written in almost every type of suspense, is now creating a memorable series of espionage short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

The spy story is, by and large in good shape today. So is what Julian Symons calls “the modern crime novel”–which attempts, and so often successfully, to combine the mainstream novel’s probing of character with the whodunit’s ability to puzzle and surprise. Yet there is no comparable build-up for Mr. Symons or Margaret Millar or Charity Blackstock, who are as good in their way as Le Carré. Why these phenomenal sales for only one aspect of the widely variegated “novel of suspense”? Why is everybody suddenly reading spy novels?

There are certain obvious contributory factors; such as President Kennedy’s endorsement of the work of the then only moderately successful Ian Fleming, or the superb promotional job that an enthusiastic publisher performed for “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” But let me venture a more basic guess.

Espionage is a reality closer to the average man than at any previous time in history. The C.I.A. has had far more detailed news coverage than did ever the O.S.S. We are more aware of the spy behind the arras when we read of international affairs, and the reality of espionage presses upon us even more closely than that. Our businesses have their own methods of spying upon each other, and upon us. We know, thanks to George Orwell in prophecy and Vance Packard in recent reportage, that few moments of our lives are inaccessible to someone’s spy. We have, in short, come to accept espionage as part of the certain human condition, and thereby to accept is as a normal part of any kind of fiction.

According to Boucher’s Third Law, the microcosm repeates the macrocosm. Within the spy novel, you will find everything that you find in the novel itself, from extravagant romance to sober realism, form trash to serious literature. And all these aspects are no longer ghettoized as The Suspense Novel: Subdivision X, Espionage. Today, they are subsumed into general fiction, and sell just as they would if they were about–

Wasn’t it Jane Austen who said, “I write about love and money; what else is there?” In this world of 1984 minus 20, make it love, money and espionage.