Tag: Cold War

Call for the Dead by John le Carré

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If you have never read anything by John le Carré I would recommend that you begin at the beginning. George Smiley arrived fully formed in John le Carré’s debut novel Call for the Dead, published in 1961. Everything that was to become so familiar about this much-loved character is there, right from the beginning. We learn how the academically inclined Smiley, who “had dreamed of Fellowships and a life devoted to the literary obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany” was recruited straight from Oxford into the nascent secret service in the 1930s.

He had been let go after a stressful undercover role during the second world war, but recalled to duty in the early days of the cold war. As this novel begins, Smiley is already middle-aged and somewhat at odds with his superiors, a rather marginalised figure. His role in this novel is more that of security officer than spy and may reflect le Carré’s own experiences in MI5. I think he might have had the real-life Portland spy ring, who were arrested at the beginning of 1961, in mind for this tale of spies passing on information in suburban Surrey.  

It’s apparent reading this novel now, that le Carré started his writing career in a very different world from the one we are used to today. It was published a mere fifteen years after the end of the second world war, after all. This is a time when displaced Jewish Germans are worried about the re-arming of West Germany and fear where it may lead. In fact, like so much of le Carré’s earlier fiction, there’s a sense that the real subject here is Germany. After all, Smiley’s love of German literature and language is le Carré’s own.

Smiley is called in to investigate Samuel Fennan, a civil servant who was a communist at Oxford in the 1930s, and who has been anonymously accused of being a spy. Smiley clears him in the vetting interview, but Fennan commits suicide that evening. If he had decided to kill himself, why did the man book an early morning alarm call for the next day?

Fennan’s wife is a concentration camp survivor. A German ex-agent of Smiley’s from the war years turns up in London, with tragic consequences. The introverted and scholarly Smiley may approach the business of counter-espionage as an academic exercise, but here he finds that danger has come to London, in the form of a network of East German spies. He is back in the field once again without leaving home.   

This is a taut, compact and atmospheric novel, only 160 pages or so, written in pin-sharp prose, very different to the more drawn-out style of his later novels. The key themes of loyalty and betrayal that will feature so prominently in the later novels are here. Le Carré’s descriptive talents and gift for believable dialogue are apparent at this early stage and his subtle feel for the nuances of English class distinctions makes its first appearance.

The downbeat atmosphere so associated with le Carré’s fiction is here, too. The only locations are a drab post-war London and its suburbs. It seems to be raining most of the time and the climactic scene takes place in the yellow London fog. Security is depicted as just another branch of the civil service, and a crucial conversation takes place in St James Park, a convenient place for those working in Whitehall to avoid being overheard.

We are told about Smiley’s troubled marriage to the wayward Ann. Characters are introduced who will feature in several future novels, Smiley’s younger colleague, Peter Guillam, and the dogged special branch officer, Mendel.

So much that le Carré was to develop further in later books appears here for the first time. There is Smiley’s prodigious memory, his ability to recall the numbers of all seven cars parked near his home in Bywater Street, Chelsea. The secret service is based in Cambridge Circus, and Guillam refers to it as “The Circus”.  The term “tradecraft”, a le Carré invention, meaning the mechanics of espionage, also originates here.

I am not sure if le Carré originally intended to write another novel about Smiley at this stage, because his career seems to be coming to an end even in this first book and it ends with his future uncertain. Fortunately for us, Smiley did resume his career as an intelligence officer. The events in Call for the Dead have a direct bearing on the plot of le Carré’s hugely successful 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, in which Smiley plays a minor role. Indeed, that later novel is actually a sort of sequel to the earlier one, Another good reason for starting at the beginning, with Call for the Dead.

The Sad Variety by Nicholas Blake

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The Sad Variety is Nicholas Blake’s penultimate novel featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways. It was published in 1964, so at this point the series had been going for almost thirty years, yet there is no sign of any decline in Blake’s powers or interest in his characters. This story is a compelling mixture of Golden Age detection and the harsh realities of the Cold War.

Here, Strangeways is asked by the security service to keep an eye on an important scientist, Professor Wragsby, who is spending the Christmas holiday at a guesthouse with his wife Elena and eight-year-old daughter Lucy. The girl is kidnapped by two British communists working for a Russian agent. She is ransomed, not for money, but for secrets. So far, so obvious you might think, the story will concern the attempts to get her back.

Things become far more complicated very quickly. The kidnappers arrive in the district with a small boy in tow. They cut and dye Lucy’s hair and substitute her for the boy, so as not to arouse suspicion. What will they do with the rather mysterious boy? It becomes obvious to Strangeways that the kidnappers must have a contact at the guesthouse and he has to try and work out who it is.

The guests are a mixed bunch. There’s a retired admiral and his wife, a young CND supporter and her beatnik boyfriend and a rather bland single man. They all have their secrets, as Strangeways discovers. The revelation when it comes is a real surprise to the reader, linked, as it is, to another jaw-dropping plot twist.

Lucy is a very intelligent and resourceful girl and much of the story is seen from her point of view. She comes up with a clever way of communicating her situation. Blake had written about resourceful young people before, in his 1948 children’s book The Otterbury Incident, published under his real name, C Day Lewis.

This novel is a masterclass in increasing tension and sense of threat and it becomes a real page-turner as the plot reaches its climax.

It takes place at a very specific time, the hard winter of 1962/63. The snowbound countryside, described with Blake’s customary poetic skill, almost becomes another character in the story. The really clever thing is the way the wintry conditions that make it so difficult to get anywhere are integrated into the plot. For example, a body lies undiscovered in a snowdrift, and the Russian agent thinks he is about to be arrested, not realising that the soldiers are only there to clear the roads.

Day Lewis was one of the political poets of the 1930s and the novel represents his final break with left-wing politics. It’s no surprise that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 features so prominently here, because this was the event that caused many former left-wing sympathisers such as Day Lewis to take a long, hard look at Russia and the inhumanity of the communist regime.

The Russian agent Petrov is a nasty piece of work, who enjoys violence for its own sake. Paul, the British communist, has been blackmailed by the Russians into taking part in the plot because of his homosexuality. He is thoroughly disillusioned with the Party: “I don’t set myself up as a model of the virtues, but at least I don’t pretend that whatever suits my book is the truth, like you and your bloody Party do.”          

So, farewell then, Anthony Price

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I knew he was quite elderly, but his death wasn’t reported that widely and I only found out some time after the event. He actually died in May 2019. I suppose it wasn’t considered big news, because his books had somehow fallen out of favour in recent years, and most of them are out of print now. I think that’s a great pity, because they are well worth reading for anyone who enjoys the cold war spy genre.

His approach to the spy novel is original, combining as it does a taste for military history combined with cold war intrigue. His first novel, The Labyrinth Makers (1970), opens with the discovery of a wrecked plane from the second world war in the English countryside. Why are the Russians so interested in it so long after the war? This intrusion of the past into the present is perhaps seen to best effect in Other Paths to Glory (1974). Why is someone is prepared to kill to get hold of a piece of first world war trench map? There are two stories here, the tale of a group of soldiers on the western front, and a modern-day espionage plot. They turn out to be connected, the riddle of what happened to the soldiers providing the answer to the main mystery.

Price’s spy master is Dr David Audley, historian and leading light of the counter-intelligence unit known simply as “Research and Development”. He is also a great enthusiast of the works of Rudyard Kipling. He lives in a country house of great antiquity, not unlike Kipling’s Batemans in Sussex. He appears in almost every book, along with a recurring set of characters, but he is not always the main character. Price has a habit of introducing someone completely new at the start of a novel and telling the story from their point of view. The series was not published in chronological order, either. This may be one of the reasons for Price’s comparative lack of popularity. It can’t have been obvious to readers that the books did in fact form a series and I don’t know if his publisher promoted them in a way that made this clear.

Actually, the books that depart from the main chronological sequence and are set entirely in the past are some of the best. The Hour of the Donkey (1980) is the story of two young British officers in France in 1940. It is also a slice of alternative history, with its explanation of why the German tanks stopped short of Dunkirk. Alert readers will spot several characters who appear in the books set later. The ‘44 Vintage (1978) shows the young David Audley in France in 1944, when he becomes a member of a commando unit operating behind enemy lines, along with Jack Butler, who features in many of the other books. This is the start of his intelligence career, the sort of thing that Ian Fleming hinted at in the Bond books but never got round to writing about at length. Soldier No More (1981) is perhaps the closest Price comes to Le Carre, with its complex double agent plot, set just after Suez in 1956 with Audley indulging in a spot of lotus-eating deep in the French countryside.

So why isn’t Price better known today? After all, his novels won prizes and were highly praised at the time. As well as the reasons I have outlined above it may be something to do with the lack of successful film or TV adaptations. The first three novels were televised (under the title Chessgame) but were altered somewhat and Price was unhappy about the casting. A more popular and continuing series might have made Audley a figure to rival Inspector Morse. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone has another go at some point. There is a lot of material there.

Perhaps I’m on the wrong track, though. It’s often difficult to point to one particular reason why a writer’s works fall out of favour. It may be the military history that puts some readers off, but on the other hand I think that is a great deal of the appeal of Price’s writing. Perhaps there was a confusion with his near namesake Anthony Powell. It may simply be the passage of time and the question of availability. When the Cold War came to an end, Price stopped writing new books, about 1990, and his old ones started to drop out of print. If readers can’t find them, they can’t read them. Well, thanks to the internet, secondhand copies are easily obtainable and I believe some of the titles are available electronically. It’s time for an Anthony Price revival.