To some, the deployment of American missiles in the UK in 1958 was another sign of the country’s military emasculation and, as the Cold War warmed up over the Cuban crisis, there were mutterings that the ‘USS Britain’ was no more than an American aircraft carrier conveniently anchored within range of the Iron Curtain. To the cynical, the ‘USS Britain’ was likely to be an expendable vessel should the war turn hot.
The final insult, or so it was perceived at the time by the Daily Express (who called it a ‘stab in the back’), came when former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, almost as an aside, in a speech at West Point in December 1962: ‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role’.
Britain, the noble war hero, was diminishing before its very own eyes and those, it seemed, of its closest ally with whom it thought it had a ‘special relationship’. Despite the feel-good factor generated by the social and cultural revolutions in music, art, and fashion during the ‘Swinging’ Sixties, the malaise was still felt. It was eloquently summed up by an unlikely source, Adam Diment’s fashionably rebellious Philip McAlpine, The Dolly, Dolly Spy himself in 1967:
Our Empire has gone and our people remain lazy. We are clever, original, class-ridden and small. The sooner we can get back to being another small country and forget our now useless role of world arbitrator the better. Nobody has listened to our advice for years; it is just accepting this fact which is painful.
The villains in many a thriller could not, of course, resist reminding plucky British characters of their loss of Imperial power. In that same year, 1967, in James Eastwood’s Little Dragon from Peking the heroes are berated by the villainess: ‘You British, since losing India, are never sufficiently ruthless. In trade, politics, even espionage.’ The reference to India, which had been independent for twenty years by then, would not only have been lost on one of the characters to which it was addressed but also on many a reader under 35, and probably says more about the respective age of the authors: Adam Diment was 23 when The Dolly, Dolly Spy was published, James Eastwood would have been in his fifties.
Britain’s reputation for being exceedingly good at playing ‘the great game’ of spying, however, was seriously being called into question. Britain’s secret intelligence services had achieved a reputation for efficiency during both world wars. There had been few German spies operating in the UK – at least not for long – and even though the code-breaking achievements of Bletchley Park were to be kept from the public for many more years, the exploits of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) which sent immensely brave agents into occupied Europe were well-known through books such as Odette in 1949 (filmed in 1950) and Carve Her Name with Pride (filmed in 1958); yet the reality of the situation was far from a model of efficiency. The defection to Russia of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 caused scandal and provoked paranoia and mistrust, not the least on the part of America’s CIA. The situation was hardly calmed by the shambolic announcement and press conference in November 1955 that Kim Philby was not the ‘third man’ (he was) who had tipped off the defectors. In 1961 more Soviet agents were uncovered in a flurry of headlines; the Portland Spy Ring and the double agent George Blake, who received an unprecedented forty-two-year jail sentence after being tried in camera. His sentence was unexpectedly commuted by his dramatic escape from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 to follow Burgess, Maclean, and Philby to Russia.5
How could British thriller writers cope with the changing world order? The Empire was fading and no longer would provide a nursery for adventure heroes as it had in the days of Rider Haggard or John Buchan.6 One of the last of that generation of fictional heroes who had a ‘colonial’, though not privileged, upbringing was probably Idwal Rees, as created by Berkely Mather in The Pass Beyond Kashmir in 1960. Although proud of his Welsh heritage (as was Mather), the bulk of Rees’ early life had been spent far away from Wales (as had Mather’s) and he introduces himself to the reader thus:
My old man had been the Far Eastern correspondent for a London paper and he never seemed to have any money so I had spent all my life up till 1939, and much of it afterwards, in India, Burma and China … the man who says he really knows the Far East is talking through his hat but I can claim to know just enough about the undercurrents to get by and to earn my modest fees. I’m built on wiry lines and sun and fever have burned my naturally dark hide to a uniform teak colour which makes me inconspicuous in most company where the features aren’t Mongolian – that’s if I’m dressed the same way. I’m not a master of disguises but if you look like me and can speak Cantonese and Hindustani with a bit of kitchen Arabic and a convincing pidgin-English with, when necessary, a bastard potpourri of the lot, you can get by as almost anything from Aden to Okinawa. Somebody who didn’t like me once spread it around that I was half Bengali. That wouldn’t worry me if it were true, but it’s not. I’m pure Welsh on both sides.
The Pass Beyond Kashmir, Fontana, 1969
A character Kipling would have warmed to, one feels sure.
The imperial network of trading, cultural, and legal links as well as job opportunities were formative influences on the lives of many a British thriller writer, let alone actual ‘colonials’ such as Wilbur Smith and Geoffrey Jenkins, who instinctively turned to the mother country when seeking a publisher. Before WWII, William Haggard had been a career civil servant and magistrate in India, and Francis Clifford had been in the rice trade in China and Burma. Desmond Bagley had left England in 1947 and after an epic journey across the Sahara to Uganda, eventually settled in South Africa until 1964. Another journalist, Barry Norman, who was to become the nation’s favourite film critic after trying his hand at thriller-writing, also worked in newspapers in South Africa.
Many more, of course, had visited or been stationed in the colonies whilst on active military service but peacetime National Service in the Fifties offered less exotic, albeit safer, opportunities for gathering colourful background material, although Jack Higgins and the award-winning crime writer Reginald Hill (who was to occasionally dabble in spy thrillers) no doubt had their horizons broadened whilst serving with the British army on the border between West and East Germany.
True, Britain’s armed forces still had a reputation for professionalism and bravery – and tough secret agents such as James Mitchell’s David Callan had learned their deadly skills in the army, fighting communist insurgents in Malaya – but now there were fewer gunboats to spare to send to foreign hot spots and everyone knew that only America could actually afford to pay for a war. After all, Britain was still paying for the last one, its WWII debt repayments only completed in the twenty-first century. And Britain’s intelligence services seemed ill-equipped to play any effective part in the Cold War, riddled as they were by some of the best (Cambridge) educated traitors in the world.
So without an Empire to defend, no real power to wield or misuse, and security services that were far from secure, what was the British thriller writer to do for inspiration?
The answer was blindingly obvious – especially to the many would-be authors who had journalistic backgrounds – never let the facts spoil a good story. Britain had won the war, it still ruled the waves and when the world was in trouble, there would always be a British hero to save the day. In fact, writers almost had a patriotic duty to reassure readers that Britain still mattered on the world stage, even if it could not actually afford to compete in the accelerating arms race between America and the Soviet Union.
The economy may be a mess, its spies defecting to Russia in droves, its armed forces humiliated at Suez and its Empire going, if not gone; but dash it all, we had put up a jolly good show during the war, hadn’t we? We had stood alone, bravely and defiantly, and kept smiling through as our ships were torpedoed and our cities blitzed. We had marched into battle as if striding out to the crease and even when captured we had been determined to escape by the most ingenious (preferably cheekily humorous) method possible.
The British had punched above their weight during the war and, although the world