Tag: Spy Fiction

The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson

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This was the first biography of Ian Fleming, published in 1966 two years after his death. Pearson had worked with Fleming at the Sunday Times. The great advantage of this is that Pearson was able to interview in person most of the people who had known Fleming at the various stages of his life. Much of what they said is quoted in direct speech, bringing Fleming vividly to life.

The slight disadvantage is that Fleming’s widow Anne was still alive when Pearson was writing the book and certain details of Fleming’s private life had to be left out.

It is a fast-paced, gripping read and Pearson never gets bogged down in the detail, evoking the various worlds that Fleming moved through without boring the reader. It is not like the modern style of biography, more dependent on archive material, that never quite comes to life.

In proper journalistic fashion he answers the questions that the reader might have about some of the more mysterious episodes in Fleming’s life. For example, just how was it that a former journalist working as a city stockbroker was appointed to a senior position in naval intelligence at the beginning of the second world war? You will find the explanation here. Where did Fleming’s interest in underwater swimming that found its way into the Bond books come from? That, too, is explained.

Pearson takes the view that the Bond Books were a sort of fantasy projection of Fleming’s own character and pre-occupations. It is Fleming’s friend Robert Harling who recalls him saying “I’m going to write the spy novel to end all spy novels.”

The long, slow process of turning the Bond books into best sellers is described, with Anthony Eden’s stay at Goldeneye being a key event that brought Fleming’s name to a wider public. It’s fascinating to learn, by the way, just how primitive the accommodation at Goldeneye actually was.

In the end, the film deal that made Bond a household name came too late as by then Fleming’s health was in decline and he couldn’t really enjoy the success he had worked for.

Pearson looks at Fleming’s attitude to money as the second son of a wealthy family whose widowed mother controlled the purse strings. It is suggested here that M was what the Fleming children called their mother. I would have liked a bit more about Fleming’s relationship with his mother, perhaps the source of his rather odd attitude to women.   

This is not really a critical biography, but what Pearson does have to say about the Bond books is shrewd and interesting. He considers Casino Royale to be the best, but that Fleming put so much of himself into it that he couldn’t repeat it. He suggests that Fleming rather lost interest in the later books and he has less to say about those.

Almost hidden away in here is some fascinating stuff about the origins of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I didn’t know that Fleming had been a keen skier in his youth and was actually buried in an avalanche in Switzerland. He brought home a Swiss fiancé but his mother vetoed the marriage. Henry Miller is quoted as saying that Fleming wrote quickly like Rider Haggard and with the same direct access to his subconscious. There was a later girlfriend, not named, who was killed in the blitz. Are we looking at the real-life equivalents of Vesper Lynd and Tracy here? Years later the Flemings went on a nostalgic skiing holiday, just before Fleming wrote the book. Perhaps there was as much of Fleming in this book as in Casino Royale.

Despite later biographies, the reputation of this one has remained high. All in all, a fascinating and highly entertaining read for anyone who likes the Bond books.

 

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

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The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene’s 1943 spy thriller set during the London blitz always seems to be underrated. There could be several reasons for that. It is one of the novels that he subtitled as “an entertainment”, which is always a problematic description with his work, and an invitation to take the book less than seriously. Greene is normally thought of as a realist but the tone here is quite odd, as if the physical displacement of the blitz has caused a psychic shock as well.  

Everything is seen from the point of view of the main character Arthur Rowe, who is himself a damaged person. We gradually learn that he was responsible for the “mercy killing” of his sick wife and served some sort of sentence for it, although whether in a prison or a hospital we are not quite sure. He carries a weight of guilt about with him because of this.

Rowe’s mind moves between the reality of the blitz, his dreams, and his childhood memories. This theme of nostalgia for childhood is introduced right at the beginning,  at a charity fête taking place in a square in bombed-out Bloomsbury. It is because the stalls remind Rowe of his past that he is drawn to the fair and it is at the “guess the weight of the cake” stall that he stumbles into a dark world of espionage. He has guessed correctly and won the cake, but it becomes apparent that it was intended that the cake should go to someone else. The stall was in fact a front for a network of fifth-columnists who have been blackmailed into spying for the Germans. This atmosphere of threat and coercion into spying is “the ministry of fear”. The Nazis have imposed it all over continental Europe and now it has come to London.    

From this point on, the plot becomes very complicated quite quickly. Rowe attempts to contact the organisers of the fair to put things right, but finds himself in a sort of living nightmare. After what appears to be a murder at a séance he becomes a hunted man, fearing that his past will make him the obvious suspect. There was something valuable to the spies in the cake and an attempt is made on his life. This is prevented by the lucky fall of a bomb nearby.   

The narrative takes an abrupt turn, when, after another explosion, the scene switches to a mysterious clinic, where a man called Digby is a patient with amnesia. We slowly realise that Digby is Rowe, who has forgotten most of his adult life and seems far happier living with his memories of the world before the war. Then we find out that the doctor running the clinic was at the séance, his assistant is the man who tried to kill Rowe, and the plot starts to move towards its conclusion. 

A clue as to how we should read the novel is that Rowe is described as follows: “He felt directed, controlled, moulded by some agency with a surrealist imagination.” Indeed, the strange atmosphere of the blitz as rendered here rather calls to mind G K Chesterton’s fantastic vision of London in The Man Who Was Thursday. There is a vein of the absurd running through The Ministry of Fear, for example when we are told after an air raid that “a man with a grey dusty face leant against a wall and laughed and a warden said sharply, ‘That’s enough now. It’s nothing to laugh about.’”

It is these vivid descriptions of London in the blitz that linger in the mind. “Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar-sticks and there was an appearance of slum clearance where there hadn’t really been any slums.”  Apart from its place in the context of Greene’s writing, it deserves to be remembered as one of the creative works recording the blitz for posterity, such as the photographs of Bill Brandt or the paintings of Graham Sutherland.

In Search of The Third Man by Charles Drazin

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The Third Man was a huge success when it came out in 1949, and has been regarded as a classic film ever since. This story of disillusionment and betrayal in a shattered and divided post-war Vienna has become part of the culture and over the years has been referred to in many other films, books and TV series. The title itself has entered the language, helped by its association with the Cambridge spies and Kim Philby’s denial that he was “the third man”. Indeed, it has been suggested that Graham Greene had his former intelligence boss Philby in mind when he wrote the character of Harry Lime.

It’s a measure of the impact of The Third Man that there is a museum devoted to the film in Vienna. There are even guided tours of the Vienna sewers, where the film’s dramatic climax takes place. In Search of The Third Man by Charles Drazin was published in 1999 for the film’s fiftieth anniversary.    

The circumstances of the making of the film have almost become a myth. Part of the reason for this is that it was brought to the screen by three high-profile creative artists. Over the years, Graham Greene, Orson Welles and Carol Reed gave their own versions of the making of the film. Each had their reasons for embellishing the facts or suppressing inconvenient truths.

Drazin goes back to primary sources to get behind these accounts, to establish the truth about the film, and in the process to explain how and why the myths became accepted as the truth in the first place.

For example, when the film was made, Carol Reed was regarded as one of the world’s great film directors, whereas Welles’ reputation was rather in the doldrums. Over the years, this position reversed itself, so it became easy for people to believe the claims that Welles had directed whole sections of the film himself. Drazin confirms once and for all that Welles’ only contribution beyond his acting was the famous “cuckoo clock” speech.

Appropriately, for a story that is so concerned with the difference between appearance and reality, it turns out that nothing is quite as it seems in this film. While watching it, you would assume that it was all filmed on location in Vienna, yet many shots were filmed in the studio back in England, and then knitted together seamlessly with the location footage by director Carol Reed. And it is assistant director Guy Hamilton’s looming shadow rather than Orson Welles’ that Joseph Cotton chases.

Drazin identifies how the theme of betrayal, so prominent here, runs through all Graham Greene’s writing. He explores in detail just how and why Greene might have based Lime on aspects of Philby’s early life. He suggests that Reed’s approach as a director was peculiarly in sympathy with the tone of Greene’s writing.

He also establishes that filmmaking is a collaborative process and the success of a film can never be wholly attributed to the work of only one or two individuals. There is a sort of mysterious alchemy about the whole process, and a certain amount of luck. The Third Man was one of those rare occasions in cinema when everything just aligned the right way, as if it was meant to happen like that. Yet a good deal of that luck could be put down to the creative intuition of Carol Reed and Drazin sees The Third Man as his film, more than anyone else’s. For example, it was Reed who tracked down the unknown zither player Anton Karas and insisted that his music should be used, rather than an orchestral score as was normal at the time.

Several people who worked on The Third Man in a junior capacity, and who are interviewed here, went on to great things. John Hawkesworth was later responsible for the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes TV series and Guy Hamilton directed several James Bond films, as well as the Len Deighton adaptation, Funeral in Berlin.

This is a thoroughly well-researched, highly readable and enjoyable book, essential reading for anyone who loves the film. Sometimes, a “behind the scenes” book can lessen one’s enjoyment of a film. That is not the case here. Knowing the difficulties behind the production makes the film even more fascinating.        

Welles almost didn’t play the part of Harry Lime. Another actor prevaricated for so long about accepting the part that he had to be dropped from the production. Yet would we find the film so compelling today if it had been Cary Grant standing in that doorway?             

The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton

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It’s difficult to know where to start with this book. G K Chesterton’s 1908 novel is subtitled “a nightmare” and certainly resembles a dream rather than a conventional, realistic novel. After all, it starts with a sunset and ends with the dawn. This tale of an undercover policeman investigating an organisation of bomb-throwing anarchists has something in common with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, written at around the same time, but Chesterton treats the same theme completely differently.

The members of the Central Anarchist Council are known by the days of the week, and Gabriel Syme, a poet who is in reality a policeman, manages to get himself elected to this body as “Thursday”. The president of the council is the sinister and grotesque “Sunday”, but who is he really?

The story proceeds by a succession of surreal and bizarre incidents, such as hidden rooms, chases, and confrontations to a conclusion that reveals some sort of logic was operating all along. It anticipates Kafka, whose writing career was to start some years later; perhaps of British authors of the time, it is closest to H G Wells.

Just what sort of book is it? A thriller? It’s quite short and very fast paced. Plainly, some sort of allegory is intended, but whether political, philosophical or religious, or a mixture of all three is hard to say. A lot of people have expended a lot of effort over many years to work out just what Chesterton might have meant by it all.

Chesterton was a poet as well as a writer of prose, and initially trained as an artist. It is not surprising that one of the great strengths of this book is the visual quality of the descriptive prose. The images are so striking that they lodge in one’s memory. This is particularly the case in the scenes set in London. The red-brick suburb of Saffron Park in the sunset and the relentless chase through the city streets in the falling snow are unforgettable. The effect is almost psychedelic and rather like an episode of a late-1960s TV show.

He also makes considerable use of the idea originated by Poe that the best way to keep something hidden is to leave it in plain sight.

Chesterton is best known today as the author of the Father Brown stories. His catholic priest detective is something of a riposte to Sherlock Holmes, solving crimes by intuition and knowledge of human nature, rather than logical deduction. Given that he was also a notable Christian apologist and converted to Catholicism in 1922, it seems sensible to concentrate on the religious interpretation of The Man Who Was Thursday.

It is a peculiarly enjoyable book; the experience of reading it is quite cheering. Just when you think you know what might be going on, Chesterton throws in another twist that makes you question what has just happened. That may be why it has stayed in print, despite the difficulty of interpreting it. If you are new to the writing of G K Chesterton, though, I would recommend that you start with Father Brown, before tackling this one. 

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.

Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich

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I haven’t written about a film for a while, but I enjoyed this one so much I really felt I had to. Night Train to Munich is an earlier film directed by Carol Reed, now most famous for The Third Man.

Rex Harrison plays a British agent who impersonates a German officer in order to exfiltrate a Czech engineer and his daughter from Nazi Germany at the very beginning of the second world war. His manner is very characteristically English: flippant on the surface and deadly serious underneath.

This 1940 film is best described as a comedy thriller. If you like the earlier sort of spy fiction, the chances are you will enjoy this, because it feels like a compendium of John Buchan, Eric Ambler and Sapper. Indeed, at one point our hero says “I’m not Bulldog Drummond, you know”. It’s also an example of that genre of films and novels set on long-distance trains that flourished in the 1930s.

One of the things that is striking about this film today is the strength of the anti-Nazi propaganda message. No opportunity to either ridicule or criticise the Nazi regime is missed. It’s depicted as a mixture of brutality and absurd bureaucracy. Early scenes take place in a concentration camp, at this stage depicted as a place for political prisoners. Even Mein Kampf is sent up: “They give a copy to bridal couples over here.” “I don’t think it’s that sort of book, old boy.” It’s almost shocking to hear Harrison, in his guise as a loyal Nazi, say that “England is controlled by the masons and the jew Churchill”.

An awful lot is packed into a suspenseful and brisk ninety minutes or so and the whole thing moves along at a cracking pace, with several clever plot twists, and one in particular that is a real surprise, even today.

I found myself thinking that this is like a Bond film before there were Bond films, and indeed, wondering if Ian Fleming saw it. The finale on the Swiss border will seem familiar to anyone who has seen Where Eagles Dare, so again, I wonder if Alistair Maclean saw the earlier film at some point.

The film has been considered as a sort of follow-up to the earlier and more famous The Lady Vanishes, also written by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, the scriptwriters here. Despite the repeat appearance of the Charters and Caldicott characters and Margaret Lockwood, I think the resemblance is overstated. For a start, despite the title, far less of Night Train to Munich actually takes place on the train. Carol Reed’s directorial style is also quite different to Hitchcock’s, grittier and more realistic and this, as well as the urgency of the wartime situation, gives the film a very different atmosphere.

John Buchan wrote that thrillers should have “a story that marches just within the bounds of the possible” and that is very much the case here. If you fancy a bit of lockdown escapism, Night Train to Munich is available free on Amazon Prime.

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.”          

N or M? Agatha Christie’s wartime spy story

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Agatha Christie did not only write whodunnits; from time to time she dabbled in the spy story. I think N or M? is by far the most effective of those. It sees the return of her married couple sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. In the summer of 1940, with invasion looming, they are enlisted to winkle out German spies in a quiet south coast seaside town. Or rather, Tommy is enlisted and Tuppence very cleverly gets herself into the game.

It was published during the war in 1941 and it’s intriguing to read a story of this sort written in the heat of the moment when invasion was still a real possibility. This is not a completely realistic novel, but it does reveal some of the atmosphere and attitudes of the time.   

I suppose this is what would today be called a comedy thriller, because as well as the air of suspicion and menace, where anybody might be someone other than who they seem to be, there is a good deal of humour running through the story.

The couples’ children are rather sorry for their middle-aged parents and their desire to find active roles in the war effort. They remain convinced, almost to the end, by the cover story that Tommy is a sort of filing clerk and Tuppence is visiting an elderly sick aunt.

In fact, both the elder Beresfords have put themselves back in harm’s way, by going undercover at Sans Souci, the guest house in Leahampton which the secret service is convinced is the centre of an enemy spy network, with its male and female leaders, codenamed N and M.

Playing roles themselves, both  are only too aware of how the other guests conform almost too perfectly to stock “types”. There is the young mother with her toddler, the young German refugee, the large, elderly Irish woman, the retired gent fussy over his health with his wife whose only purpose in life sems to be to minister to his needs, the retired army man; and so on. Which of them are spies?

Both Beresfords use spy tradecraft. Tuppence puts an eyelash in the fold of a letter she leaves out on view, and checks the paper with fingerprint powder later. The couple’s contact is a man who appears to be fishing at the end from the pier.  

It’s interesting that in a novel that mentions codebreaking work and features a personal code used between Tommy and Tuppence, there should be a character called Major Bletchley. Questioned by MI5 about this, Christie claimed that she had once been on a train for a long time as it waited at Bletchley station.

The novel has quite a resemblance to the final chapters of The Thirty-Nine Steps, with the seaside house making a convenient location for boat landings and signalling out to sea. The vision of the upper echelons of the armed forces and government being riddled with spies and nazi sympathisers also owes something to Buchan. Indeed, it is the uncertainty about who to trust that leads to the Beresfords becoming involved. Having been out of the intelligence game for so long, they are not known to the enemy spies.

The pace picks up towards the end with chases over the downs and a bewildering series of revelations as to who is and isn’t a traitor.

There’s a good deal of sympathy here for German refugees, and a grudging respect for enemy spies who risk their lives, as opposed to traitors who sell their own country out. Tommy and Tuppence were involved in this sort of thing in the last war and remember Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by the Germans for spying, and her statement “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone”.

Tuppence recognises that although people are encouraged to hate the German people as a whole, that doesn’t mean that she does not sympathise with the feelings of individual Germans caught up, like the British, in this awful situation. This applies particularly to the mothers of those involved in the war, and indeed maternal feeling is one of the main clues leading to the eventual solution.     

Christie offers an interesting explanation of how the Nazis plan to take over Britain, not by an armed invasion, but by an internal coup of British nazi sympathisers. The appeal of nazism is to “pride and a desire for personal glory”. It is “the cult of Lucifer”. As always with Christie, there is a firm basis in Christian morality. After all, the title is taken from the Book of Common Prayer.

The Secret Trilogy by John Gardner

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John Gardner is mainly remembered today for his series of James Bond continuation novels, published between 1981 and 1996, but he wrote many other espionage stories. The Railton family saga is a trilogy of long novels. They are The Secret Generations (1985), The Secret Houses (1988) and The Secret Families (1989). The family trade of the British Railtons and the American Farthings, to whom they are linked by marriage, is intelligence work.

On the back of the first volume there is a quote from Len Deighton, who says that this is the first book to combine a family saga with the history of British intelligence. This is interesting, because Deighton’s Berlin Game had been published in 1983, and was the first volume in his long sequence of novels involving Bernard Samson, which covers fairly similar territory. Who had the idea first? It may well be that Gardner was influenced not so much by Deighton as by Douglas Reeman. Badge of Glory by Reeman was published in 1982 and was the first in his sequence of Blackwood family novels, a family who all served in the Royal Marines. Gardner himself was an ex-marine.

The first volume makes more of the historical angle than the later ones do. Starting before the first world war, we see the origins of what became MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. The complex plot involves German spies in England and Ireland, as well as British spies in Germany, during the naval arms race of this time. In his London house, Giles Railton, the patriarch, has a den, from which he oversees the operations of his espionage network. There is a cabinet containing his huge collection of model soldiers from all eras, with which he replays the great battles of history. His son Caspar is badly wounded in the war. By the end we have learnt that not all the Railtons are loyal to Britain. Giles is revealed to have become a convert to communism, out of guilt at the advantages of the class he was born into. A postscript set in 1935 reveals that his son Ramillies, who went missing in Germany in the war, has become a Russian KGB officer.

The second volume moves forward in time and is set in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is largely concerned with a retrospective investigation into the betrayal and rounding-up of a French resistance group during the second world war. This has some resemblance to the Klaus Barbie affair, although he is not mentioned by name. Caspar’s role in all this now comes into question. His nephew Donald Railton, known as Naldo, becomes a leading character. There is a lot of action on the streets of  early cold war Berlin, convincingly rendered.

We get the “origin story” of Herbie Kruger, who had already featured in another series of books by Gardner. Here, he is a streetwise young Berliner and keen student of English who is recruited by British intelligence. He is devoted to the works of Gustav Mahler. He is a significant character in the third book, too, by which time he has risen through the ranks and is based in London. We suspect that his colourful, not quite correct use of English might be a deliberate ruse to wind up his superiors.

The third volume, which starts in 1964, is perhaps the best. Caspar is now dead, but his connection to the Russian double agent known as “Alex” is under investigation, so once more Naldo must find out if his uncle was a traitor. Anthony Blunt features here, and “Alex” is the code name of the real-life Russian double agent Oleg Penkovsky.

If the first world war spy games of the first volume inevitably recall John Buchan and Somerset Maugham, the two later volumes read a bit like a slightly less realistic version of John Le Carré. It has to be said that Gardner did not really leave his own distinctive stamp on the genre. He was though a highly professional and competent thriller writer, with a polished prose style, a fertile imagination and a knack of fitting his plots to real world events. This was what made him such an inspired choice to step into Ian Fleming’s footsteps.

He had a knack for coming up with good “alternative history” ideas. Here, the Kennedy assassination is cleverly connected to the American role in the fall of the Vietnamese government, prior to the war there. In the first volume, he offers a quite plausible explanation as to why people with all the advantages, such as the Railtons, might have become traitors.

And the Railtons do have all the advantages. They are a landed family of long standing. Their connection with the world of spying goes way back. “They’re mentioned in the bloody history books. One of them was a go-between for Anthony Standen, Walsingham’s agent. Sixteenth-century stuff.”  They all share a fondness for quoting from Shakespeare.

By this third volume, the Railtons have begun to be disillusioned with the secret world. “Why do we do it, Naldo asked himself now. . .then was shocked to realise he was repeating one of his father’s comments on the trade. ’God knows why we do it. The politicians treat us like dirt; the military have trouble in believing us; the general public think of us as superannuated adventurers, while the novelists make a killing from presenting us as candyfloss killers’.”

His colleague Gus Keane is much clearer about his motives. “Ok, why do we do it? Because we believe in freedom of thought, of speech and of movement. Here we can criticise the government in public; here we can read what we like and more or less print and say what we like. Try doing that in a totalitarian state – Communist or Fascist.”

But for Naldo: “Everything my family has ever done has been devious. . . This whole bloody country makes you like that, and when we all become a sort of United States of Europe, we’ll be more devious than ever.”

The book ends in 1989 with the revelation that an IRA plot to attack the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese has been foiled, bringing the whole story full circle.

James Bond returns: Win, Lose or Die by John Gardner

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James Bond goes back into the Royal Navy in Win, Lose or Die, the eighth in the series of  Bond continuation novels by John Gardner, published in 1989. Near the end of the cold war, a secret superpower summit is to take place aboard a navy ship in the Mediterranean. Bond must foil the terrorist group who plan to attack and disrupt it.

There’s plenty of action along the way. Bond engages in air-to-air combat, flying a sea harrier, and dodging a missile. There’s an assassination attempt at a villa near Naples, and a final confrontation with the head villain in the tunnels beneath the rock of Gibraltar. This is a fast-paced thriller written in Gardner’s fluent and elegant style,  and as usual with his take on Bond there is much to enjoy.

There are two women, one in the navy and one in the secret service, but which of them is not quite what she seems? Bond doesn’t find out until near the end. M’s elegant country house, Quarterdeck, makes a re-appearance and there’s a neat reference to Bond having been secretly involved in the Falklands war. The villain is motivated by greed, rather than the cause that his agents think they are fighting for.

I have a couple of minor quibbles, that I wish I could edit out. Bond is promoted to captain. Yes, I know captain is a higher rank, but commander just sounds so much better, doesn’t it. There is also another woman who is introduced merely to sleep with Bond before getting herself killed.

The Fleming estate chose well when they approached Gardner to revive Bond in 1981. He was already an established spy thriller writer. Before that he had served in the Royal Marines and the Fleet Air Arm. His brief was to bring Bond into the 1980s, so M and Bond remain about the age they were in Fleming’s books, but must deal with the geopolitical realities of the new era.

Perhaps the best of them, certainly of the ones I have read, is The Man From Barbarossa, published in 1991. In this book, Bond works with a Mossad officer to collaborate with the KGB, and the assignment takes him to Russia. A terrorist group is threatening the Russian government in an attempt to bring soviet war criminals of the second world war era to justice. But what is behind it? This is set at a very specific historic moment, just before the Gulf war, when the hardliners were trying to regain control of the soon to be extinct Soviet Union. All of this comes to an action climax when Bond goes up against the Spetznatz, or Russian Special forces.

It’s slightly untypical of the series as it’s more like a serious spy novel with a character called James Bond in it. It was reportedly Gardner’s favourite among his Bond novels. I read it in  a state of trepidation, because I was enjoying it so much I was worried that something would go wrong before the end, but I am pleased to say it did not. Certainly, it’s the only Bond continuation by any author that I did not find fault with and that I would put on the shelf next to Ian Fleming.

Other Bond authors have stuck to the original timeline, and this can create problems.

Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis starts brilliantly, with the kidnapping of M, then continues well with a night time fight on the slopes of the acropolis in Athens. But as it goes on, the pace slackens; it’s like a balloon deflating.

Something similar happens with Solo, by William Boyd. It starts strongly, with Bond’s awaking from a dream of being back in the commandos. It was also a good idea to send Bond to Africa, something I believe Fleming was contemplating. Here, he is caught up in something like the Biafran war. But again, the novel slows down alarmingly in the second half, to the point of actually becoming quite boring when the scene shifts to America. There is also too much explaining of the villain.

Anthony Horovitz fell into a couple of traps with Trigger Mortis. He states very specifically that this story takes place just after Goldfinger, yet it is riddled with anachronisms. Again, there is far too much of an attempt to justify the villain psychologically. The modern political sensibility that, for me, mars Horovitz’s TV dramas, is also present. His second attempt, Forever and a Day is much better, but something of a missed opportunity, I feel. This is the Bond “origin story” and takes place before Casino Royale. But surely the Bond origin story that remains to be written is his time in the commandos in the second world war and his transition from that into the secret service? That is the story Boyd hinted at.

The spy novelist Anthony Price did something along those lines when he showed the main character of his espionage series, David Audley, as a young tank officer in Normandy who becomes involved in behind the lines operations in The ’44 Vintage.

Sebastian Faulks had a go with Devil May Care. A title worthy of Fleming, and there’s a neat joke at the beginning when Bond drives up the King’s Road and smells marijuana smoke. It’s a good read, but a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, in that it seems to be assembled from left over parts of Fleming novels. For example, Goldfinger’s cheating at golf becomes cheating at tennis here, with a remote control adjustable net. One can’t quite escape the feeling that Faulks thought the task was beneath him. On the cover it said “Sebastian Faulks, writing as Ian Fleming”, in case anyone should mistake this for one of Faulks’ more serious productions.

It was Gardner, with his thriller writer’s imagination, who came closest to carrying on what Fleming had started. It was the more literary novelists who came a cropper. There’s a lively debate about his Bond novels on the internet, which suggests that they are still being read and enjoyed today.