Graham & Hugh Greene, ed. The Spy's Bedside Book. 1957. Introduction by Stella Rimington. Illustrated by Nick Hardcastle. London: The Folio Society, 2006.
There's a wonderful moment at the beginning of the BBC adaptation of the John le Carré thriller
Smiley's People when a young British intelligence officer is rung by an old, off-the-books agent who has some important information to impart. They agree to meet. "Moscow Rules," mutters the old man, before hanging up the payphone.
Moscow Rules, it turns out, means assuming that you're in a maximally hostile environment, and that therefore all precautions must be observed - even in the heart of London. Alas, this time they're insufficient. The old Russian general Vladimir is killed before he can pass on his vital tip, and it takes George Smiley another six episodes to disentangle the mystery he's left behind.
"I lost my first Joe," the young intelligence operative laments. "He was my Joe, and I failed him." Fade-out.
There's something intensely atmospheric about the spy game, as authors such as
Graham Greene and
John le Carré are well aware. Both had worked in British intelligence (as did many of the other authors discussed below), and they knew what an boring, interminable, pettifogging business it could be.
Up at the Smiley level, though, small details can bring about the fall of Empires. The Russian arch-spy Karla is seen walking into exile at the end of the series solely as a result of Smiley's hunches and intuition.
The other day I bought a handsome copy of the Folio Society edition of the Greene brothers', Graham & Hugh's classic anthology
The Spy's Bedside Book from the
Hard-to-Find bookshop in Benedict Street."Barabbas was a bookseller," as fellow-bibliophile Smiley complains in
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
I'd been looking for the book for quite some time. Not so much because I'm obsessed with spies, real or fictional, but because it's the second of two very influential anthologies
Graham Greene edited at vital stages of his life, pre-war and post-war. And I
am interested in him.
The first of these anthologies,
The Old School, was an important expression of the disillusionment of the postwar generation in Britain.
Graham Greene, ed. The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands. 1934. Oxford Paperbacks. London: Oxford University Press, 1984.
W. H. Auden's contribution begins with the much-quoted sentence: “The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a Fascist state.” As I commented in a
previous post on the subject:
For Auden, the Honour system that dominated the minor Public School he attended – the oath that he and all the other children were forced to take to inform on any of their companions they saw doing anything “beastly” or dishonourable – was the essence of Fascism.
Auden was homosexual, and so this did entail, in his case, literally living a lie – a life of deception and false façades, since nothing in his most basic instincts was regarded as “natural” by the potential spies who surrounded him (despite the obvious prevalence of homosexual attitudes and activities in most large British Public Schools).
This equation between public schools and espionage, in particular, finds perhaps its most potent expression in the film
Another Country, written by Julian Mitchell and based (very loosely) on the early life of Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, which argues that it was the rigid intolerance of their school which led its two young lovers to a life of warfare against the establishment:
An epilogue reveals that Bennett [Rupert Everett] later became a Soviet spy and defected to Russia, while Judd [Colin Firth] died fighting in the Spanish Civil War.
Let's take it as read, then, that the
British version of spying, at any rate, emanates - albeit by a somewhat circuitous route - from the playing-fields of Eton. One of John le Carré's thrillers is even called
The Honourable Schoolboy.
Or, as the poet Gray put it in his eighteenth-century "
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College":
Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day:
Yet see how all around 'em wait
The ministers of human fate,
And black Misfortune's baleful train!
Ah, show them where in ambush stand
To seize their prey the murth'rous band!
Ah, tell them they are men!
The introduction to the Folio edition of the Greene brothers' spy anthology was supplied by a certain Stella Rimington. At first I couldn't work out why, as the piece is poorly written and not particularly well-researched. As an example of just one of her howlers, Rimington has somehow decided that the first edition of the book appeared in 1967, rather than 1957.
This leads her to connect old Etonian Ian Fleming's creation James Bond with the tongue-in-cheek absurdities of the film series (which began in 1962, with
Dr. No), rather than the far grittier set of four hard-bitten, Raymond Chandler-inspired novels which contained all that was then known about the already famous OO7.
Terence Young, dir.: Dr. No (1962)
I assumed that she must be a thriller-writer in her own right - and she is. What I
didn't guess was that she was also the "former Director General of MI5, a position she held from 1992 to 1996." As well as the first female head of the agency, she was, apparently, "the first DG whose name was publicised on appointment."
Say no more. She must have been some kind of mini-celebrity at the time, 2006, when the new fiftieth anniversary edition of the Greenes' book was issued. And she can, I suppose, be forgiven for being less well-read in the field than mere armchair spooks like me when you consider that she was once a spy-master for real!
The actual date of the anthology,
1957, places it in the intermediate era between
1951, "after the sudden flight of Donald Maclean ... and Guy Burgess ... to the Soviet Union", and
1963, when KGB Colonel and Intelligence mole Kim Philby fled to the Soviet Union. Graham Greene himself eventually provided a preface for Philby's 1968 autobiography
My Invisible War.
Given the suspicions already surrounding consummate insider Philby after Burgess and Maclean's escape, even in 1957 Greene must have known that there were more revelations to come in this immensely damaging spy saga.
Following Philby's flight, British intelligence obtained confessions from Anthony Blunt ... and then John Cairncross ... who have come to be seen as the last two of a group of five. Their involvement was kept secret for many years: until 1979 for Blunt, and 1990 for Cairncross. The moniker "Cambridge Four" evolved to become the Cambridge Five after Cairncross was added.
Given that
Sir Anthony Blunt was - as is now notorious -
Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures from 1945 to 1972, the degree to which this set of "
moles" had been embedded in the English establishment seems quite absurd. Despite their obvious guilt and numerous indiscretions, not one of them was ever arrested or prosecuted - nor were their efforts to convey sensitive information to the Soviet Union seriously curtailed at any point until 1951. Even then Philby stayed active for another decade.
No wonder their old friends in the CIA found it impossible to believe that the British could be regarded any longer as trustworthy allies, when the Old School tie and the fact of being "one of us" seemed to render these ruthless and destructive spies untouchable by any outsider.
More to the point, the British spy story was forced to change tack from the "Clubland heroes" (in Richard Usborne's phrase) who had hitherto prevailed, to the seedy, faceless world of betrayal and compromise familiar to us from the works of Graham Greene (
The Third Man) and John le Carré (
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold).
So where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you through?
The origins of the spy genre are not really easy to pinpoint.
The oldest known classified document was a report made by a spy disguised as a diplomatic envoy in the court of King Hammurabi, who died in around 1750 BC. The ancient Egyptians had a developed secret service, and espionage is mentioned in the Iliad, the Bible, and the Amarna letters. Espionage was also prevalent in the Greco-Roman world, when spies employed illiterate subjects in civil services.
Sun-Tzu's
Art of War "identifies five types of spies that are essential for gathering intelligence and achieving victory":
- local spies (citizen informants within the enemy's territory)
- inward spies (recruited double agents within the enemy ranks)
- converted spies (recruited defectors converted to serve your side)
- doomed spies (expendable fabricators used to spread disinformation)
- surviving spies (spies that provide accurate intelligence from the enemy)
Of these, I guess only no. 5 would fit the brief of the contemporary spy novel.
They're the secret agents - the others are simply informants, willing or unwilling. I'm by no means sure of the fact, but the first major novel to be concerned directly with espionage would probably be Fenimore Cooper's
The Spy, set during the American Revolutionary War.
The genre received a definite leg-up in the UK during the period of the German invasion scares, which can be roughly dated from the appearance of George Tomkyns Chesney's
The Battle of Dorking (1871) to Saki's just-under-the-wire satire
When William Came (1913).
Irish revolutionary Erskine Childers's brilliant thriller
The Riddle of the Sands is one of the select few among these books which can really be called spy novels, though - as well as (probably) the only one still worth reading all these years later.
Despite its title, is Conrad's
The Secret Agent really a spy story? It's a considerable work of literature, and it does concern a spy - although he's more of an anarchist than an information-gatherer.
Under Western Eyes (1911) is probably closer to our modern sense of the genre. It, too, is a great novel - sophisticated both in its grasp of Central European politics and of human psychology in general.
The same could not be said of John Buchan's
The Thirty-Nine Steps (1913). Written on the eve of the First World War, it set the template for the breakneck thrillers of the future, as I mention in my
brief biographical note on its author below.
Both befoe and after the Great War, British spy stories tended to play variations on the "Great Game" narrative familiar from Kipling's
Kim (1900-01). Peter Hopkirk's succession of books on the subject have outlined the dramatic facts behind these fictions. A whole series of Clubland heroes - Bulldog Drummond, Richard Hannay, Berry & Co. - had to be dreamed up to engage with the sinister Arabs, Chinks, and Teutons variously conspiring to take over the world.
Eventually, by the later 1930s, writers such as
Eric Ambler were getting tired of these unrealistic free-for-alls:
In contrast to most other spy novels published before his, the protagonists in Ambler's novels are rarely professional spies, policemen or counterintelligence operatives. They are usually amateurs who find themselves unwillingly in the company of hardened criminals, revolutionaries or spies. The protagonist usually begins out of his depth, but nonetheless eventually manages to surprise himself as well as the professionals with decisive actions that outwit his far more experienced opponents.
Another, perhaps even more prescient "recurring plot element in his thrillers":
is statelessness and exile: characters who are exiled from their homelands or who face the danger of being exiled and not granted residence in any country.
Poor luvs. Trained to rule the empire; trained to rule the world. Englishmen could be proud then. They could, George. All gone. Taken away. Bye bye world.
- Beryl Reid as Connie Sachs in John le Carré: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, as dramatised by Arthur Hopcraft for BBC TV (1979)
The quote above is taken not from any online TV website, but from p.107 of Jon Savage's great state-of-the nation book
England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991). Savage detects, with icy precision, the relationship between punk bands such as the Pistols and the Establishment icons they set out to deconstruct in such songs as "God Save the Queen", "Anarchy in the UK" and "Pretty Vacant."
It might seem a bit of a leap to connect this to the spirit of national decline and retrenchment chronicled in the progress from Bulldog Drummond to James Bond to George Smiley and on to Len Deighton's bespectacled nerd
Harry Palmer, culminating (for the moment) in disgusting - albeit brilliant - slob Jackson Lamb in the TV adaptation of Mick Herron's
Slough House novels.
I don't think it's difficult to argue that the true measure of a nation's morale is to be found in its popular culture, though - and detective and spy stories has been integral to Britain's sense of identity for over a century now. On the one hand, Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey - Establishment through and through, but with a humanising critical edge. On the other hand, Jack the Ripper and Jackson Lamb - they're a long way from pretty, but they get the job done.
Authors:
- John Buchan (1875-1940)
- Ian Fleming (1908-1964)
- Frederick Forsyth (1938-2025)
- Graham Greene (1904-1991)
- Hugh Greene (1910-1987)
- Geoffrey Household (1900-1988)
- John le Carré (1931-2020)
- Secondary & Miscellaneous
Books I own are marked in bold:
I've already had a few things to say about grim old Scotsman John Buchan here: particularly the immense success of his Richard Hannay books.
The adventures of sinister aristocrat Sir Edward Leithen and gormless Glasgow grocer Dickson McCunn also gave rise to large numbers of sequels (and their own omnibus volumes), but they can't compare with Hannay for sheer insane derring-do.
The Thirty-Nine Steps is seen by many as the proto-thriller which set the standard for all that was to come afterwards. Its sequel Greenmantle (1916) - inspired by the exploits of Buchan's friend Aubrey Herbert (rather than Lawrence of Arabia, not yet known to any but a few close associates) - outdoes it, though.
Whatever one thinks of Buchan's reactionary politics, it's impossible to deny the sheer readability of his work: his early work, at any rate - roughly from Prester John (1910) to The Courts of the Morning (1929) - before the dreary maunderings of The Island of Sheep (1936) and Sick Heart River (1941)
Ian Fleming has now become almost as iconic a character in his own right as his brainchild James Bond: witness the large number of films which continue to be made about him and his life. It's a bit hard to say why, but certainly he comes across as quite a sympathetic correspondent in the collection of answers to fan letters collected by his nephew Fergus Fleming in The Man with the Golden Typewriter (2015).
As for the ideological assumptions behind the Bond books themselves, in his structuralist analysis "Narrative Structures in Fleming"" (2003), Umberto Eco remarks:
the Bond villains tend to come from Central Europe or from Slavic or Mediterranean countries and have a mixed heritage and "complex and obscure origins". Eco found that the villains were generally asexual or homosexual, inventive, organisationally astute, and wealthy.
Jeremy Black, in his 2005 book The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen, makes essentially the same point:
Fleming did not use class enemies for his villains, instead relying on physical distortion or ethnic identity ... Furthermore, in Britain foreign villains used foreign servants and employees ... This racism reflected not only a pronounced theme of interwar adventure writing, such as the novels of Buchan, but also wider literary culture.
The Bond books certainly portray a state of national decline: traitors and moles abound on all sides; the simple certainties of the Second World War have dissolved into a Cold War haze. All that really remains is the "special relationship" between Bond and his CIA counterpart Felix Leitner, as well as an assortment of Bond girls, roughly one per novel (the ratio in the films is, of course, much higher).
As far as their status as literature goes:
Fleming said of his work, "while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as 'thrillers designed to be read as literature'". He named Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene as influences. William Cook in the New Statesman considered James Bond to be "the culmination of an important but much-maligned tradition in English literature. As a boy, Fleming devoured the Bulldog Drummond tales of Lieutenant Colonel H. C. McNeile (aka "Sapper") and the Richard Hannay stories of John Buchan. His genius was to repackage these antiquated adventures to fit the fashion of postwar Britain ... In Bond, he created a Bulldog Drummond for the jet age."
While he may lack the cultural gravitas of Chandler, Greene, or Hammett, Fleming is increasingly difficult to dismiss as a mere concocter of thrillers. His Bond, as written, has many real-life echoes and subtleties that the film caricatures lack.
Bibliography
Novels:
- Casino Royale (1953)
- Casino Royale. 1953. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1964.
- Live and Let Die (1954)
- Live and Let Die. 1954. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1973.
- Moonraker (1955)
- Moonraker. 1955. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1963.
- Diamonds Are Forever (1956)
- Diamonds Are Forever. 1956. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965.
- From Russia, with Love (1957)
- From Russia with Love. 1957. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1976.
- Dr. No (1958)
- Dr. No. 1958. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1963.
- Goldfinger (1959)
- Goldfinger. 1959. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1964.
- Thunderball (1961)
- Thunderball. 1961. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1976.
- The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)
- [with Vivienne Michel]. The Spy Who Loved Me. 1962. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963)
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service. 1963. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965.
- You Only Live Twice (1964)
- You Only Live Twice. 1964. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.
- The Man with the Golden Gun (1965)
- The Man with the Golden Gun. 1965. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.
Short Stories:
- For Your Eyes Only (1960)
- For Your Eyes Only: Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond. 1960. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1976.
- Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966)
- Octopussy. 1966. [with 'The Property of a Lady']. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1968.
Non-fiction:
- The Diamond Smugglers (1957)
- The Diamond Smugglers. 1957. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965.
- Thrilling Cities (1963)
- Thrilling Cities. 1963. London: Jonathan Cape, 1964.
Children's Books:
- Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang (1964)
- Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Illustrated by John Burningham. 1964 & 1965. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1968.
Letters:
- The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming's James Bond Letters. Ed. Fergus Fleming. London & New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.
Secondary:
- Amis, Kingsley. The James Bond Dossier. 1965. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.
- Amis, Kingsley [as ‘Robert Markham’]. Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure. 1968. London: Pan Books Ltd., n.d.
- Pearson, John. The Life of Ian Fleming. 1966. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.
- Pearson, John. The Authorized Biography of 007: James Bond. A Fictional Biography. 1973. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1975.
Biographical films:
- Goldeneye: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming - with Charles Dance - (UK, 1989)
- Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming - with Jason Connery - (UK, 1990)
- Ian Fleming: Bondmaker - with Ben Daniels - (BBC, 2005)
- Ian Fleming: Where Bond Began - with Joanna Lumley (BBC, 2008)
- Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond - with Dominic Cooper - (BBC mini-series, 2014)
- Operation Mincemeat - with Johnny Flynn - (UK / USA, 2021)
I first read The Day of the Jackal many years ago, as a teenager, and found it an unforgettable experience. None of the various dramatisations and feature films have really come close to capturing its clockwork perfection, I think.
It wasn't till many years later that I read Forsyth's autobiography, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, and found out how much of his work had a firm basis in fact.
Wikipedia sums up this aspect of his career as follows:
According to Forsyth, his turn to writing fiction was born of financial need; he did not think himself cut out to be a novelist. As a boy, he said, he wanted to be "a fighter jock," and when he traded his career in the RAF for journalism, it was "to see the world" as a foreign and war correspondent. As for becoming a novelist, he confessed "I never wanted to be a writer," but wrote his first full-length novel, The Day of the Jackal, because he was "skint, stony broke." He applied similar research techniques to those used in journalism. Published in 1971, the book became an international bestseller and gained its author the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel.
Was he a good writer? Yes, indeed. His brass-tacks, no-nonsense approach to narrative has been influential on most subsequent thriller writers - particularly in the USA. He wasn't a literary writer, mind you, but there are plenty of other places to go if that's your bag.
Bibliography
Novels:
- The Day of the Jackal (1971)
- The Odessa File (1972)
- The Dogs of War (1974)
- The Devil's Alternative (1979)
- The Fourth Protocol (1984)
- The Negotiator (1989)
- The Deceiver (1991)
- The Fist of God (1994)
- Icon (1996)
- The Phantom of Manhattan (1999)
- Avenger (2003)
- The Afghan (2006)
- The Cobra (2010)
- The Kill List (2013)
- The Fox (2018)
- [with Tony Kent] Revenge of Odessa (2025)
Short Stories:
- The Shepherd. Illustrated by Chris Foss (UK); Lou Feck (US) (1975 / 1976)
- No Comebacks (1982)
- Sharp Practice [audiobook read by Edward de Souza] (1992)
- The Veteran (2001)
Non-fiction:
- The Biafra Story [aka "The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend", 1977] (1969)
- Emeka [Biography of C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, President of Biafra] (1982)
- The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue (2015)
- The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue. G. P. Putnam's Sons. New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2015.
Edited:
- Great Flying Stories (1991)
Filmscripts:
- The Day of the Jackal (1973)
- The Odessa File (1974)
- The Dogs of War (1980)
- The Fourth Protocol (1987)
- The Jackal (1997)
- The Shepherd (2023)
Television:
- Money with Menaces (1973)
- Cry of the Innocent (1980)
- Two by Forsyth [2 episodes] (1984)
- Soldiers [13 episodes: as presenter] (1985)
- Frederick Forsyth Presents [6 episodes: as writer & presenter] (1989-90)
- Code Name: Wolverine (1996)
- Icon (2005)
- Avenger (2006)
- The Day of the Jackal (2024)
Theatre:
- Love Never Dies [adapted from "The Phantom of Manhattan"] (2010)
I've already had a good deal to say about Greeneland, "the seedy, despair-filled imaginary of his novels," in a previous post.
When it comes to spies in particular, his attitudes varied. Sometimes, as in The Heart of the Matter (1948) or The Human Factor (1978), they're simply overworked bureaucrats, variously plagued by their own personal demons.
At other times, as in Our Man in Havana (1958), the absurdity of the whole subject is played for laughs. This is very much the approach of The Spy's Bedside Book (1957), also.
Perhaps the most interesting of all of these takes on the demon profession of espionage and backstairs intrigue is The Quiet American (1955). The book has been praised for its prescience about the implications of American involvement in Vietnam, but it's really much more than that: Greene shows the tragedy of naïve good intentions combined with colossal ignorance and self-assurance: a blueprint for the past half century or so of failure on the part of the West to give up on its arrogant colonial assumptions.
If you combine this with the atmospheric magic of that quintessential post-war film noir The Third Man (1949), it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Greene is the most considerable author since Joseph Conrad to concern himself with this field.
Hugh Greene may seem an anomalous inclusion in this list. He was, after all, a journalist rather than a writer in the usual sense of the word, and his main area of influence was in broadcast journalism:
After working for newspapers in the 1930s, Greene spent most of his later career with the BBC, rising through the managerial ranks of overseas broadcasting and then news for the main domestic channels.
He served as director-general of the BBC from 1960 to 1969 and, while encountering opposition from some politicians and activists opposed to his modernising agenda:
under his leadership the BBC was recognised to be outperforming its commercial rival, ITV, and was awarded a second television channel (BBC 2) by the British government and authorised to introduce colour television to Britain.
He's here for two reasons: 1/ because he was the co-editor of The Spy's Bedside Book, alongside his older brother Graham; and 2/ because in his later years, after retiring from the BBC, he made something of a specialty of editing anthologies and series of "Golden Age" thrillers and detective stories, which I've listed below.
While he may have been very go-ahead as a broadcaster, as a reader his taste was clearly formed by the pre-war canon of writers represented by his "Bow Street Library," or his even more famous series of "Rivals of Sherlock Holmes."
This is something he shared with his brother, who wrote a play about the "amateur cracksman" Raffles, and made no secret of his admiration of Rider Haggard and Kipling. It's a point-of-view which the two brothers did a good deal to revive during the greyest days of British imperial decline.
Bibliography
- The Third Floor Front: A View of Broadcasting in the Sixties (1969)
Edited:
- [with Graham Greene] The Spy's Bedside Book (1957)
- The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Early Detective Stories (1970)
- Cosmopolitan Crimes: More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes [aka "Foreign Rivals of Sherlock Holmes"] (1971)
- The Crooked Counties: Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1973)
- The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1976)
- The Pirate of the Round Pond and Other Strange Adventure Stories (1977)
- [with Graham Greene] Victorian Villainies (1984)
The Bow Street Library (The Bodley Head, 1974-75):
James Owen Hannay ["George A. Birmingham"] (1865–1950)
- George Birmingham: The Search Party (1909)
- George Birmingham: Spanish Gold (1908)
Joseph Storer Clouston (1870–1944)
- J. Storer Clouston: The Lunatic at Large (1899)
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863-1933)
- Anthony Hope: Sophy of Kravonia (1906)
- Sophy of Kravonia. 1906. Introduction by Hugh Greene. The Bow Street Library. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1975.
William Wymark Jacobs (1863-1943)
- W. W. Jacobs: Selected Short Stories (1896-1926)
- Selected Short Stories. Ed. with an introduction by Hugh Greene. The Bow Street Library. London: The Bodley Head, 1975.
John Edward Masefield (1878-1967)
- John Masefield: Captain Margaret (1908)
- Captain Margaret: A Romance. 1908. Introduction by Hugh Greene. The Bow Street Library. London: The Bodley Head, 1974.
Alfred Edward Woodley Mason (1865–1948)
- A. E. W. Mason: At the Villa Rose (1910)
Stanley John Weyman (1855–1928)
- Stanley Weyman: A Gentleman of France (1893)
My main association with Geoffrey Household's work is watching Peter O'Toole in the movie Rogue Male on television sometime in the late 1970s. It was pretty electrifying stuff. I'd never seen anything quite so visceral as the film's defining scene, where our unnamed hero manages to escape from the burrow he's been trapped in.
Wikipedia says of his writing in general:
Many of his stories have scenes set in caves, and there is a science-fiction or supernatural element in some, although this is restrained. The typical Household hero was a strong, capable Englishman with a high sense of honour which bound him to a certain course of action. He described himself, in terms of his writing, as "sort of a bastard by Stevenson out of Conrad ... Style is enormously important to me and I do try to develop my hero as a human being in trouble."
After pre-war periods spent selling bananas in Spain, exporting printers' ink to the Middle East and South America, and writing children's encyclopedias and radio plays in the USA, he worked for British Intelligence during World War II.
After the war, according (again) to Wikipedia, "he lived the life of a country gentleman and wrote."
It's Rogue Male that really sets him apart, though.
Bibliography
Novels:
- The Third Hour (1937)
- Rogue Male (1939)
- Rogue Male. 1939. Illustrated by Richard Willson. The New Windmill Series, 74. Ed. Anne & Ian Serraillier. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1965.
- Arabesque (1948)
- The High Place (1950)
- A Rough Shoot [aka "Shoot First"] (1951)
- A Time to Kill (1951)
- Fellow Passenger [aka "Hang the Moon High"] (1955)
- Watcher in the Shadows (1960)
- Thing to Love (1963)
- Olura (1965)
- The Courtesy of Death (1967)
- Dance of the Dwarfs (1968)
- Doom's Caravan (1971)
- The Three Sentinels (1972)
- The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (1973)
- Red Anger (1975)
- Hostage London: The Diary of Julian Despard (1977)
- The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac (1978)
- The Sending (1980)
- Summon the Bright Water (1981)
- Rogue Justice [sequel to "Rogue Male"] (1982)
- Arrows of Desire (1985)
- Face to the Sun (1988)
YA Novels:
- The Terror of Villadonga [aka "The Spanish Cave"] (1936)
- The Spanish Cave. 1936. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
- The Exploits of Xenophon [aka "Xenophon's Adventure"] (1955)
- Prisoner of the Indies (1967)
- Escape into Daylight (1976)
Short stories:
- The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories (1938)
- Tales of Adventurers (1952)
- The Brides of Solomon and Other Stories (1958)
- Sabres on the Sand (1966)
- The Cats to Come [novella] (1975)
- The Europe That Was (1979)
- Capricorn and Cancer (1981)
- The Days of Your Fathers (1987)
Autobiography:
- Against the Wind (1958)
Films:
- Man Hunt [based on "Rogue Male", 1939] (1941)
- Rough Shoot [based on "A Rough Shoot", 1951] (1953)
- Deadly Harvest [based on "Watcher in the Shadows", 1960] (1972)
- Rogue Male [based on "Rogue Male", 1939] (1976)
- Dance of the Dwarfs [based on "Dance of the Dwarfs", 1968] (1983)
If you ever got David Cornwell onto the subject of himself (and, by implication, his alter-ego 'John le Carré') you'd hear a whole lot of rather pretentious pyschological blather about his confidence trickster father - and how the life of deceit the whole family was forced to lead made David (or was it John?) the perfect candidate to end up as a spy.
This is the central conceit of Errol Morris's documentary The Pigeon Tunnel (2023), as well as the 2016 memoir it's based on. It was also the idea behind le Carré's 1986 novel A Perfect Spy, filmed (in its turn) as a BBC miniseries in 1987.
Rather more significant to any dispassionate account of le Carré, I would say, is his unfortunate contribution to the debate over Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses - and the Ayatollah Khomeini's subsequent fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers. While most Western authors and governments thought this an indefensible act of aggression, this view was, alas, not universal:
John le Carré thought the death sentence to be outrageous, but he also criticised Rushdie's action: "I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity"
A few years later, in 1997, there was a rather acrimonious correspondence between Rushdie and le Carré, after the latter complained about being labelled an "anti-Semite" for his refusal to condemn Islamic fundamentalists. Rushdie wrote:
In 1989, during the worst days of the Islamic attack on The Satanic Verses, le Carré wrote an article ... in which he eagerly, and rather pompously, joined forces with my assailants.
It would be gracious if he were to admit that he understands the nature of the Thought Police a little better now that, at least in his own opinion, he's the one in the line of fire.
To this le Carré replied:
Rushdie's way with the truth is as self-serving as ever. I never joined his assailants. Nor did I take the easy path of proclaiming him to be a shining innocent. My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.
I wrote that there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society. I wrote that tolerance does not come at the same time, and in the same form, to all religions and cultures, and that Christian society too, until very recently, defined the limits of freedom by what was sacred [my italics]. I wrote, and would write again today, that when it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie's work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie's royalties.
Strangely enough, this failed to defuse the argument. It's hard not to sympathise with Rushdie's response:
I'm grateful to John le Carré for refreshing all our memories about exactly how pompous an ass he can be. He claims not to have joined in the attack against me but also states that "there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity."
A cursory examination of this lofty formulation reveals that (1) it takes the philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist line that The Satanic Verses was no more than an "insult," and (2) it suggests that anyone who displeases philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist folk loses his right to live in safety.
So, if John le Carré upsets Jews, all he needs to do is fill a page of The Guardian with his muddled bombast, but if I am accused of thought crimes, John le Carré will demand that I suppress my paperback edition.
John le Carré is right to say that free speech isn't absolute. We have the freedoms we fight for, and we lose those we don't defend. I'd always thought George Smiley knew that. His creator appears to have forgotten.
At this point that old windbag Christopher Hitchens jumped in to add some fuel to the flames, accusing le Carré of "open solicitation of murder". Le Carré complained that:
Rushdie sneers at my language and trashes a thoughtful and well-received speech I made to the Anglo-Israel Association, and which The Guardian saw fit to reprint. Hitchens portrays me as a buffoon who pours his own urine on his head. Two rabid ayatollahs could not have done a better job.
After this the last word was left to Rushdie:
If he wants to win an argument, John le Carré could begin by learning how to read. It's true I did call him a pompous ass, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. "Ignorant" and "semi-literate" are dunces' caps he has skillfully fitted on his own head. I wouldn't dream of removing them. Le Carré's habit of giving himself good reviews ("my thoughtful and well-received speech") was no doubt developed because, well, somebody has to write them. He accuses me of not having done the same for myself. "Rushdie," says the dunce, "does not deny he insulted a great world religion." I have no intention of repeating yet again my many explications of The Satanic Verses, a novel of which I remain extremely proud. A novel, Mr. le Carré, not a gibe. You know what a novel is, don't you, John?
While the exchange as a whole is rather unedifying, it's also immensely revealing. Le Carré simply can't grasp the incongruity of comparing his discomfort at being accused of anti-semitism with the immense apparatus of safe houses and police escorts required to preserve Rushdie's life from fanatical zealots determined to kill him at all costs. One of the latter finally managed to stab him multiple times with a knife as he was about to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm on the 12th of August, 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State.
But it's actually far sadder than that. His line about "my thoughtful and well-received speech" is so embarrassing that it makes you squirm. It's almost merciful of Rushdie to mock it directly rather than leaving it hanging there as final proof of the poor mutt's desire to be seen as a "serious thinker" and a "real author" - not just a writer of thrillers.
It's sad because le Carré really is one of the great thriller writers - and possibly the greatest spy novelist - of our time. But he can't be content with that. He wants to be up there in the Senior Common Room, trading gibes with the big boys - the Salman Rushdies, the Günter Grasses, the Graham Greenes - and showing off yet again just how smart he really is.
Sad, too, because most of those "great writers" probably secretly envy him: they'd rather have invented George Smiley and the Circus than created all those elaborate works which so many praise and so few read. When you hear him squaring off with Graham Greene about Kim Philby, or with Salman Rushdie about who can show off the biggest battle-scars, they do try to take him seriously - after all, he did invent Karla - but it's difficult for them. They are smart. They don't have to pretend to be.
I think that must be what went wrong with his work. The Cold War stuff is great: atmospheric, hard-bitten, intelligent, and suspenseful to a fault - and the theme spoke for itself. But after that the fatal propensity to preach and attitudinise gradually possessed him more and more. He - rather than his own fictional creations - became the story.
It's all a bit of a shame. But now that he's dead, I think we can just forget about trying to force our way through those later books, and instead go back to the beginning: to the Berlin wall, and Leamas [Richard Burton] reaching down to hold out a hand to his lover when he could so easily have made it back from the cold to safety.
Bibliography
Novels:
- Call for the Dead (1961)
- Included in: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Looking-Glass War / A Small Town in Germany. 1963, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1979. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1983.
- A Murder of Quality (1962)
- Included in: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Looking-Glass War / A Small Town in Germany. 1963, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1979. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1983.
- The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
- Included in: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Looking-Glass War / A Small Town in Germany. 1963, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1979. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1983.
- The Looking Glass War (1965)
- Included in: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Looking-Glass War / A Small Town in Germany. 1963, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1979. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1983.
- A Small Town in Germany (1968)
- Included in: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Looking-Glass War / A Small Town in Germany. 1963, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1979. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1983.
- The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971)
Smiley Versus Karla:
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)
- The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
- Smiley's People (1979)
- The Little Drummer Girl (1983)
- A Perfect Spy (1986)
- The Russia House (1989)
- The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
- The Night Manager (1993)
- Our Game (1995)
- The Tailor of Panama (1996)
- Single & Single (1999)
- The Constant Gardener (2001)
- Absolute Friends (2003)
- The Mission Song (2006)
- A Most Wanted Man (2008)
- Our Kind of Traitor (2010)
- A Delicate Truth (2013)
- A Legacy of Spies (2017)
- Agent Running in the Field (2019)
- Silverview (2021)
Memoir:
- The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016)
- The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Viking. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2016.
Letters:
- A Private Spy: The Letters of John Le Carré. Ed. Tim Cornwell. Viking. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2022.
Secondary:
- Sisman, Adam. John Le Carré: The Biography. London & New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.
Perhaps the easiest way to sum up the themes I've touched on so lightly in the course of this post might be to provide you with a link to a recording of my 1998 poem "God's Spies." That gives a better sense of how I see the interplay between "ordinary" life and how we shape it into fictions than I could in any other way.
Bibliography
Codes:
- Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence. 1983. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1989.
- Kahn, David. The Code-Breakers: The Story of Secret Writing. 1967. Scribner. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
- Sebag-Montefiore, Hugh. Enigma: The Battle for the Code. 2000. Cassell Militrary Paperbacks. London: Orion Books Limited, 2004.
- Singh, Simon. The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking. 1999. London: Fourth Estate, 2000.
- Singh, Simon. The Cracking Codebook: How to Make it, Break It, Hack It, Crack It. 2002. HarperCollins Children's Books. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2004.
- Urban, Mark. The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes: The Story of George Scovell. London: Faber, 2001.
Deceivers:
- Davenport-Hines, Richard. Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain. 2018. William Collins. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2019.
- Garfield, Brian. The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books Inc., 2007.
- Holt, Thaddeus. The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War. 2004. Rev. ed. 2007. Introduction by Michael Howard. 2 vols. London: The Folio Society, 2008.
- Montague, Ewen. The Man Who Never Was: The Story of Operation Mincemeat. Foreword by Lord Ismay. London: Evans Brothers Limited, 1953.
- Steiner, George. "The Cleric of Treason" [Anthony Blunt]. In George Steiner: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. 178-204.
- Wright, Peter, with Paul Greengrass. Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. 1987. Richmond, Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1987.
The Great Game:
- Hopkirk, Peter. The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia. 1990. John Murray (Publishers). London: Hodder Headline, 2006.
- Hopkirk, Peter. On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire. 1994. John Murray (Publishers). London: Hodder Headline, 2006.
- Hopkirk, Peter. Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game. Illustrations by Janina Slater. London: John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 1996.
- Maclean, Fitzroy. Eastern Approaches. 1949. London: the Reprint Society, by arrangement with Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1952.
General:
- Morrell, David & Hank Wagner, ed. Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads. Longboat Key, Florida: Oceanview Publishing, 2010.
- Usborne, Richard. Clubland Heroes: A Nostalgic Study of Some Recurrent Characters in the Romantic Fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper. 1953. Hutchinson. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1983.
- Watson, Colin. Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and Their Audience. 1971. Preface by H. R. Keating. A Methuen Paperback. London: Eyre Methuen Ltd., 1987.
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- category - Mystery & Occult: Fiction
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