Tag: Spy Fiction

White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell

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White Eagles Over Serbia is an unusual book among Lawrence Durrell’s many works. It is a cold war spy story that was published in 1957. Intriguingly, that was also the year that he published Justine, the first volume of his most celebrated work, The Alexandria Quartet.

The opening in London’s clubland recalls Ian Fleming and this intelligence unit is called Special Operations, Q Branch. The shabby office where the lifts don’t work, known as “The Awkward Shop”, and Boris, the specialist in disguise, anticipate John Le Carré or Len Deighton.

I don’t know if this was intended as the first of a series, because the hero, Methuen, is on the point of retirement from the service and is tempted back for one last mission. Realism is given by the mention of a recent mission in Malaya. There are no first names here; his boss is known simply as Dombey.

Methuen is despatched to Yugoslavia to investigate the death of a British agent and to try to find out about mysterious goings-on in the mountains of Serbia. A royalist, anti-communist organisation known as the White Eagles is up to something. They distrust the British because of British wartime support for the Partisans, the group led by Tito who now rules communist Yugoslavia.

There are patriotic poems broadcast on the radio that may be coded messages of some sort. Methuen is of course expert in the language, an old hand in the area.

Durrell makes his political opinions quite clear with the descriptions of the degraded state of ordinary people under the communist regime. Methuen is struck by the change in the people since he was last in the country, before the communist takeover. “These ragged creatures seemed to have lost all self-respect in the struggle to make ends meet.” The officials on the other hand look secure and well-fed. The secret police or “leather men” as they are known, are everywhere.

Methuen is based at the Belgrade embassy under a false identity. His cover for his journey to the mountains is that he is on a fishing trip, and he gains the support of the ambassador through their shared love of fly fishing. Once his real mission begins, he lives rough in a cave in the mountains.

Here, the book takes on the flavour of John Buchan or Geoffrey Household as an outdoor adventure, allowing Durrell free reign with his landscape descriptions. The bulk of the story concerns Methuen’s solitary investigations among the forests and rivers. He realises the danger he is in when he sees a fisherman sitting still on the riverbank for some time. When he goes to check, he finds that the man is dead and a placard with the word “traitor” is round his neck.

The code by which Methuen keeps in touch with Dombey in London is based on Thoreau’s Walden. He selected this book simply as a code book long ago, but has come to love it after “many re-readings in solitary places”.

The story bursts into action when Methuen infiltrates the White Eagles and discovers just what they have been involved with.

I don’t know the extent of Durrell’s involvement, if any, with the espionage world. Certainly, he worked on and off for the Foreign Office, his duties described as press officer. This novel draws on his time in the Belgrade embassy, as do his comic stories of diplomatic life.

I’m also not sure if this was intended as a children’s book. The paperback I had in the 1980s was published by Peacock, a “young adult” offshoot of Puffin books. The novel was re-issued by Faber in 1993, perhaps because of the war in the Balkans. It is packaged as an adult book and described as “an early novel that continues to appeal to readers of all ages”.

If this is not quite up to the level of Ian Fleming or Eric Ambler, this realistic and enjoyable spy thriller is not far off it. It shows just how talented and versatile a writer Lawrence Durrell was.

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.

 

Site-specific reading

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I wasn’t at all well that summer. My doctor had diagnosed a balance problem and there was going to be a long wait to see the specialist.  A gentler than usual holiday was called for, so we booked a room in Broadstairs. We had asked for a sea view and there were two comfortable chairs that we moved to face the big window. One of the books I had taken with me was Agatha Christie’s N or M. I found that I was sitting in a seaside guest house, reading a second world war spy thriller about the search for a German spy in a seaside guest house. I can’t remember, though, whether I had chosen that book because of its setting or whether the match of reading and location was a happy accident.

Certainly, I was aware of other literary associations in Broadstairs. On one of the walks I was able to manage, we had a look at the North Foreland and wondered which set of steps cut into the chalk were the ones that had given John Buchan the title The 39 Steps.

On a later visit, the literary allusions came to us, without our looking for them. It was autumn this time. We went for a walk along the beach as the light was fading. As we turned to come back, we noticed a figure in the distance. The figure seemed to be following us. We stopped and the figure stopped too, moving off again as we did and keeping the same distance. We were experiencing in reality the situation from M R James. Eventually, the figure turned towards the cliffs. When we looked again, it had disappeared. Perhaps it had gone up the steps.

We stood under the cliff, discussing this strange occurrence. It was almost dark now, but on the edge of the cliff,  we could make out a sinister figure looking down at us. It appeared to have its arms folded. After a few minutes peering into the near darkness, the penny dropped as we realised that the strange figure was actually a chimney stack.

That was not the only time that I felt I had walked into the pages of M R James. We stayed at a hotel in North Norfolk, not far from the beach and with a golf course nearby. The hotel was quite old and in the past guests had come for seaside golf, like James’ characters. An old framed menu on the wall told us that dinner at 7.30 would be followed by bridge. A reassuring lack of choice in those days. There was a small sitting room, with some books on a shelf. Among them was a battered paperback copy of James’ stories. So I had the experience of reading Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad and A Warning to the Curious in a place very like the fictional locations.

It started to rain, and we went to the bar for a drink. We sat looking out at the hotel grounds and beyond them the now deserted beach. It seemed a far less friendly place in the wind and rain. The cloth canopy of one of the tables on the terrace flapped against its pole. As the wind and rain whipped it back and forth, it looked to me, with my imagination no doubt primed by reading James, like the ghost under the sheet in Whistle.

The hotel might well have had its own ghosts. Another old framed menu was from the second world war.  It was for a very special occasion, the farewell dinner for the officers who had been billeted there, while training for D-day.  A poignant artefact that made me wonder how many of them had returned from Normandy. I would not have been at all surprised to encounter the shade of a young subaltern on the lonely beach at twilight.

One final thing. During our stay at the Norfolk hotel, there was a fellow guest, a lady, who could be seen each evening sitting quietly and writing in a notebook. Perhaps we weren’t the only ones to find our imaginations refreshed by this stretch of coast.

Man Overboard by Tim Binding

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Tim Binding’s 2005 novel, Man Overboard, is the story of the World War 2 frogman, Commander Lionel Crabb, who disappeared, presumed drowned, during a mission to spy on a Russian cruiser in Portsmouth harbour in 1956.

The unauthorised dive caused a political furore at the time, as the Russian ship was carrying Kruschev on an official  visit to the UK. There has been much speculation over the years as to what really happened. A headless and handless corpse that washed up some months later in Chichester harbour was identified by the Coroner and buried as Crabb, but his widow insisted that it couldn’t have been him.

It’s been suggested that he was killed by the Russians, or captured and brainwashed by them. This fictionalised account of his life offers an alternative solution to the enduring mystery, which is unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved in our lifetime, as the relevant documents are not due to be made public for many years.

Crabb himself is the narrator of a comparatively short book, written in an intense and poetic prose, with suitably watery imagery. There is an awful lot packed into its 244 pages. Without giving too much away, Crabb looks back in old age from a sanatorium somewhere behind the iron curtain. He did not die beneath the murky, cold waters of Portsmouth harbour.

We get a clear picture of the sort of man Crabb is: Conservative, patriotic, royalist, religious and fatalistic. Yet he is a strange, dual personality, who needs to belong and yet somehow be an outsider at the same time. He is not one of those who believed in a better world to come after the war. It is the revelation of the Katyn forest killings that makes him realise the true nature of Russian communism.

He finds himself out of sympathy with what post-war England has become (“a land of buff-coloured envelopes”), but then he was always something of a square peg in a round hole. Although he didn’t know it, he was a man searching for something. He found his element, in every sense, when he first dived under the water in Gibraltar harbour. On your first dive, you feel as though you “have walked through a magic mirror or travelled in time”, as he puts it.

There is a touch of the visionary about him, but he undercuts his musings with a curt “lot of rot, probably”. His clipped, slightly old-fashioned language with its colourful slang seems completely appropriate for a man of his generation.

In Italy, clearing mines from the canals of Venice, he finds the catholic church and almost marries an Italian girl, but shies away at the last moment. His hesitant relations with women are something of a recurring problem. He is not gay, but oddly reticent about sex, prudish about lower-deck language. He finally seems to have found the right woman, who enjoys the pub and club life of London as much as he does, when circumstances, or rather Crabb’s patriotic devotion to duty, force them apart.

Many historical figures walk through the pages of this novel, such as Kruschev and Yuri Gagarin. Several names are familiar from spy scandals of the period; Anthony Blunt pops up from time to time and towards the end, Greville Wynne, businessman and part-time agent appears. Gordon Lonsdale and Peter Kroger, members of the Portland Spy Ring, are skilfully woven into the story. Sidney Knowles, Crabb’s wartime diving partner appears under his own name. However, Nicholas Elliott, who we now know to have been Crabb’s MI6 handler, is turned into the completely fictional “Smithy”, for reasons that become clear by the end.

There is no author’s note, so it is not clear what sources Tim Binding may have used to create his portrait of Crabb. I found myself wondering if he himself has underwater experience. Crabb does allude to the feature film that was made, The Silent Enemy, and also the biography by Marshall Pugh, both of which appeared after his presumed death.

Crabb’s wartime exploits in Gibraltar, the underwater battle with the Italian frogmen, are generally considered to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, Bond’s underwater mission to plant a limpet mine on the hull of the motor launch in the earlier Live and Let Die also owes something to Crabb. I assume that Fleming, as a senior official in Naval Intelligence during World War 2, knew all about Crabb’s adventures before the general public did.

Recent events mean that the passage where Crabb is told about the Russians’ development of an underwater special forces unit seems strangely contemporary. But then Crabb tells us that “The England you know was made in the fifties and the rest of the world too”.

I enjoyed this book hugely when it came out, and found more in it on a recent re-reading. It is a powerful and haunting novel that deserves to be better known.

The Ipcress File by Len Deighton

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The Ipcress File made a big impact when it was published in 1962, partly because it coincided with the release of the film of Dr No. Critics tended to see Deighton’s book as a more realistic take on the world of espionage.

Re-reading it again recently I was struck by just how cryptic and complex it remains. It’s a playful and modernist take on spy fiction. This is reflected in the visual presentation of the book. The black and white photograph on the dust jacket of the first edition, a stark image of a revolver and a coffee cup, was something new in book design. The novel is subtitled “Secret File No. 1” and the prologue starts with what looks like a copy of a memo, summoning the narrator to the Minister’s office to explain the case to him.

The conceit that this is actually a secret document is continued with the use of appendices. Quite important information about major characters, that would be incorporated into the main text in a more conventional novel, is given in this way.

We never find out the narrator’s name. When someone hails him as “Harry” he tells us: “Now my name’s not Harry, but in this business it was hard to remember whether it ever had been.” He has several sets of false identity documents as “a spy’s insurance policy”. Nor do we ever find out the full name of the department he works for, WOOC (P). War Office something something (Provisional) is as near as we get.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that when the novel was filmed in 1965, it was perceived as a more downbeat alternative to Bond, despite being co-produced by Harry Saltzmann, one half of the Bond production team.

The book actually has some things in common with Fleming’s work, most specifically Moonraker. There is the authentic civil service atmosphere at the beginning and also the fact that it is the hero’s female assistant who discovers the crucial clue that cracks the case in both novels.

The film is justly remembered as one of the most gripping and believable of all espionage films, but it is quite different from the book. The book does have quite a lot of description of a changing London, although Deighton was to develop this further in Funeral in Berlin. There’s a sharp contrast between the “official” London of Whitehall and the War Office, and the location of the provisional unit in Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia (“one of those sleazy long streets in the district that would be Soho, if Soho had the strength to cross Oxford Street”).

Whereas the film mostly takes place in London (possibly for budget reasons), in the book our hero travels to Beirut, as well as to a Pacific atoll where a hydrogen bomb test is about to take place.

One of the most interesting changes from book to film is the character of Jay. The book gives a lot of information about his Polish origins and earlier career as a spy and peddler of information. He is rumoured to have been the figure behind the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Crucially, he has friends in very high places, as the phone call to the mysterious “Henry” reveals. He ends up working for the British. So that’s why we are told his codename has been changed to “Box Four” in the memo right at the beginning! You really do need to read this more than once, and pay attention while you are doing so.

The title of the novel is an acronym. IPCRESS stands for Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress. The treatment of the brainwashing theme is more realistic in the book than in the film. It is based on recognised techniques, such as disorientation and sleep deprivation. In the film, crucially made a few years further into the 1960s, it has become a psychedelic sound and light show.

What was behind the 1960s obsession with brainwashing? I suppose it was the idea that “altered states” could have a military as well as a hedonistic purpose. There were those crazy American ideas about putting LSD in the Moscow water supply, for example. I believe there was also a fear at the time that television advertising, then relatively new, was manipulating peoples’ minds in ways they were not aware of.

I think the first novel to deal with it was Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate in 1959. A Clockwork Orange, with its suggestion that the minds of criminals could be re-programmed to alter their behaviour, was published the same year as The Ipcress File. Many books and films used the brainwashing idea and the interest was still going strong in 1967, when the first episode of The Prisoner shared a certain feel and a couple of cast members with the film of The Ipcress File.

On a more personal note, it is wonderful what a little internet research can reveal these days. The first TV screening of The Ipcress File was in 1972, 28 May I think. That’s when I saw it for the first time and thought it was the best film I had ever seen. I vividly remember the preview clip, the land rover crashing through the factory door, and thinking this was something I had to see.

Also running on TV around the same time, was a series called Spy Trap. The BBC in their wisdom have wiped the tapes of this one, so it exists in memory only. It was actually very good, with Paul Daneman as the ex-navy officer head of a counter-intelligence department. The funny thing is, it was originally shown in the early evening slot across four days of the week. A spy soap opera! This was the cold war and spies were the thing, not the lives of people in east London. Perhaps these were the formative experiences that pointed me towards a lifelong interest in spy fiction.

 

Goodbye Bernie Gunther, farewell Philip Kerr

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For many years now the publication of a new Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr has been something to look forward to, but this time it’s a sad occasion as well, because Philip Kerr died in 2018, before this book was published. It is therefore our goodbye to Bernie Gunther and our farewell to his creator.

It was a brilliant idea to take a Raymond Chandler-style, wise-cracking narrator and make him an ex-policeman, now a private detective, trying to make a living in Nazi-era Germany.

For this last appearance, Kerr takes us back to where the whole story began, Berlin in 1928, with a youngish Bernie still haunted by his experiences in the trenches and newly appointed to the murder squad. Despite the first three novels being re-issued as an omnibus volume under the title Berlin Noir, not all of the saga takes place there. Over the course of 14 novels and approximately 30 years, Bernie finds himself in many of the conquered territories of the Third Reich and, after the war, in Vienna, the South of France, Greece, and South America, re-visiting Berlin in flashback.

For me, though, the scenes set in Berlin have a special quality, so this last novel is a real treat, as Bernie delves into the neon-lit night of the metropolis in search of a serial killer. Or is it two killers? Bernie has to offer himself as a potential victim to find out. Detection isn’t really the point here, though, it’s merely the pretext for a portrait of Berlin in all its 1920s wildness.

Kerr has always mingled real-life characters with his fictional ones, but as this is the only one of the books set before the Nazis came to power, several of the real-life characters here, rather than the familiar villains such as Goebbels and Reinhardt Heydrich, are the artists of the Weimar era.

Thus, Bernie becomes a somewhat unwilling sitter for both George Gross and Otto Dix. Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang’s wife and screenwriter, asks for Bernie’s inside help with a crime story she is planning. Bernie’s impersonation of a disabled war veteran brings him into contact with the theatre world as well. At the theatre where his make-up is being applied, the music that Bernie doesn’t care for is The Threepenny Opera. The singer he thinks can’t carry a tune turns out to be Lotte Lenya. There’s a sly vein of humour in that Bernie’s taste in art and music is conventional. He’s quite disdainful of the works that we readers of 2019 regard as modern classics.

There is a another film reference too, when Bernie “accidently on purpose” mistakes the actor Gustaf Grundgens for Emil Jannings. Grundgens was the basis for the character in the film Mephisto, the actor who stayed in Germany and worked under the Nazis.

Kerr has planted film references in his Bernie novels before. In A German Requiem, set in Vienna in 1948, there’s a British film crew shooting in the streets at night, a nod to The Third Man. Dalia Dresner in The Woman from Zagreb, was a (fictional) UFA star.

And so to the neatest film reference of all. The novel takes its title from Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s futuristic fantasy film. The black joke about the killer having the word “murderer” chalked on his back, and the witnesses’ accounts of the suspect whistling a classical tune, point us in the direction of another Lang film, however. The attentive reader who has seen the film in question, will spot what is going on here by the appearance and behaviour of one character in particular.

Bernie has already suggested to Thea von Harbou that, in a film about serial murder, the audience might inclined to think that if the victims were prostitutes, they deserved their fate. It would work better with children as victims. He has also told her that detectives need contacts in the criminal underworld. And so, after the way events play out towards the end of the story, Bernie says he has another film idea for her. It’s left for the reader to realise that this is Lang’s classic M, and it’s a clever conceit that the idea for it came from Bernie Gunther, based on his own experience.

I saw M for the first time on TV, on the BBC many years ago. Now, the world in which one could stumble by accident on a classic film such as this in the middle of the evening, seems as remote as the Weimar republic itself.

However, Kerr also suggests that a certain public cruelty is not unique to the Berlin of that era. The Cabaret of the Nameless, where talentless individuals are tricked on to the stage to be mocked by the audience, is alive and well on British television today.

Of course, no novel in English as steeped in Weimar culture as this one is, would be complete without a reference to Christopher Isherwood and there it is, at the visit to the grisly Berlin mortuary. Philip Kerr takes his place alongside Isherwood, Len Deighton and John le Carre as a British author who has found literary inspiration in Berlin.

We will never know where Kerr might have taken the series had he lived to write more. There’s an intriguing loose end in the penultimate novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts. There is a suggestion that the 60-year-old Bernie is going to work for the Israelis hunting down Nazi war criminals on his return to Germany. This would have fitted in nicely with Bernie’s dealings with Eichmann in earlier books. Bernie could have played a role in the capture of Eichmann, which would have been atonement for the things he was forced to do on the Eastern front.

I must say I enjoyed this book hugely and it might even rival The Lady From Zagreb as my favourite of the whole series. I particularly like that one for its delving into a murky area of history, and the nice black joke when the clean-cut young SS officer who is chauffeuring Bernie reveals that his name is Kurt Waldheim. And the lady herself, Dalia Dresner, has to be the ultimate femme fatale.