The Lady Vanishes, or Hitchcock's take on Appeasement

An old black-and-white movie was on the telly the other day – a vintage Hitchcock film from the Thirties, made just before he moved to the States. The film in question is his thriller The Lady Vanishes, and it’s great to watch even now, some 78 years after it was released. Yes, parts of it are faintly ridiculous to modern eyes, but it’s a lot of fun that’s still, well, thrilling.

(A warning: As I’m going to discuss key plot points of said movie, you may wish to avoid the rest of this blog-post if you haven’t seen it yet. Can’t believe that I’ve just done a spoiler alert for a blog-post about a film that was made in 1938, but there you go.)

The plot, based on a long-forgotten novel, is this: A group of British tourists are stranded in the mountainous (and fictional) central European country of Bandrika – an avalanche has meant that their train is delayed. Among them is Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a pretty English girl who’s heading back home to get married; while waiting for the train in the local guest-house, she meets with two fellow-Britons – an older English lady called Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who she gets on well with, and a debonair musician called Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) who winds her up the wrong way. Also waiting for the train are a lawyer who doesn’t want to draw attention to himself because the woman he’s with isn’t his wife, and Charters and Caldicott, a pair of avid cricket fans who are desperate to get back to London because there’s a Test match going on and they want to see the final day’s play. As well as some misunderstandings with the guest-house staff due to their inability to talk the local language, they endeavour, with no success, to find out the latest score (these two are very much the comic Englishmen abroad). Outside, a lone violinist plays a local folk-tune and is quietly strangled.

Iris and Miss Froy adopt each other as travelling-companions for the journey home, although it’s clear to the viewer that someone’s out to get the latter – at the station, Iris receives a bump on the head from a falling pot-plant that was meant for Miss Froy. As a result, Iris passes out after tea, and she’s in for a nasty shock when she awakes as Miss Froy has vanished – and, what’s worse, everyone who’s encountered her denies having done so (cleverly, Hitchcock has them deny this for different reasons – the lawyer doesn’t want to draw attention to himself because he’s with his mistress, Charters and Caldicott think that if Iris’s talk of a missing woman is taken seriously the train will be stopped and then they’ll never get to the Test match, and the various foreigners have, well, somewhat more nefarious reasons for keeping their mouths shut). Was she hallucinating about Miss Froy? Dr Hartz, a brain surgeon who’s also on the train, thinks she might be. Only Gilbert believes her story, and they set out to look for the vanished lady.

In the goods carriage, they’re attacked by one of the foreign passengers who turns out to be a knife-wielding magician in a scene which may well have inspired part of the circus train sequence in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They then figure out that the doc is a wrong ’un who has captured Miss Froy, disguising her as a bandage-covered patient in his care. Far from being the mild-mannered governess she claimed to be, Miss Froy is actually a British secret agent who’s taking a vital message (memorised, in the coded form of a folk-tune she’d heard the late violinist playing earlier) back to the Foreign Office. Dr Hartz is of course trying to stop her – although his co-conspirator, a nun who isn’t really a nun, turns out to be English and is, therefore, appalled when she realises that she’s in a conspiracy against a fellow-Englishwoman; this, clearly, was not what she signed up for. So she switches sides and helps Iris and Gilbert.

As the train reaches the frontier, the doc realises that the pesky Brits have rescued the British spy, and he arranges with the Bandrikan (?) military to have the train uncoupled and shunted to a siding so he can recapture the now-unbandaged Miss Froy. Unfortunately for him, but hilariously for the viewer, it’s tea-time and the part of the train he’s moved to the siding includes the restaurant car, which contains all of the train’s British passengers who are (of course) taking tea. They’re not best pleased about their journey home being interrupted.

As the movie nears its climax, the train is surrounded by soldiers intent of capturing Miss Froy; the plucky Brits – Charters, Caldicott and the nun-who-isn’t-really-a-nun as well as Iris and Gilbert – realise that the only solution is to fight their way out with the two pistols they happen to have between them. The only one who disagrees is the lawyer, who thinks he can negotiate with the baddies; it doesn’t end well for him. Even though the country they’re trying to get out of is fictional, the politics of the time – this was 1938, the year of the Munich crisis when war loomed inexorably on the horizon – are inescapable (coincidentally, the film was released just over a week after Neville Chamberlain waved his piece of paper after flying home from Germany). The message is quite clear: Even though they’re out-gunned and the situation looks hopeless, the best thing the British can do is show a stiff upper lip (naturally, this is a film where, if you get shot in the hand, you calmly borrow your friend’s pocket-square to use as a makeshift bandage), crack a few jokes about the government and fight on in the hope of eventually winning through. I never thought of Alfred Hitchcock as being a critic of Appeasement, but on this evidence, he quite clearly was.

This is really superb stuff from Hitchcock – a train journey where nothing is quite what it seems (he was very good at those) leading onto an attempted kidnapping, tales of espionage and a shoot-out interspersed with some cricket banter. No wonder this was the best British film in 1938! There are some great stand-out performances although as with so many films the show is, of course, almost stolen by the comic relief. Charters and Caldicott proved so popular with audiences that they returned in various not-Hitchcock films made by the same studio like Night Train to Munich (more or less a remake of The Lady Vanishes – it even had Margaret Lockwood in it, playing a similar role). Even after the actors who played them were banned from playing characters called Charters and Caldicott (following a dispute with the studio over how big a role they should have in a movie that they ended up not starring in) they still turned up as similar, cricket-mad characters in a few films (the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, for example, as well as a film called It’s Not Cricket which I now need to find because, let’s face it, there aren’t that many films about cricket).

Hitchcock himself, by the way, makes his trademark appearance in the crowd at Victoria station towards the end; it was only later that he got into the habit of appearing early on in his films in order to avoid detracting attention from the plot, as audiences used to cheer when they saw him.

The modern history books: Spies, conspiracies and Britain in the early Sixties

We live in an age where there’s a lot of popular history about, and some of it manages to combine a high standard of writing with excellent historical research. Here are three of the best that I’ve enjoyed reading recently:

Popping up on TV as well as in print, Dominic Sandbrook is one of those historians who’s pretty good on revisionism – reinterpreting historical facts by looking at the evidence from a different perspective and coming up with something that challenges the accepted historical view of historical events; the old A.J.P. Taylor maxim of nothing being inevitable until it happens is very much Sandbrook’s guiding principle, it seems. In the first of his four books on recent British history, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, he strikes a fine balance between the political, the economic and the cultural, looking below the surface of events. The travails of Harold Macmillan’s various Chancellors (Reggie Maudling strikes me as being one of the most amusing people ever to have held that particular post) are juxtaposed with sections on movies, books (Ian Fleming of course, but also Kingsley Amis and long-forgotten types like Colin Wilson), television (this was the time when ITV started and the BBC entered one of its most creative periods), moral panic in the newspapers over immigration and the sexual behaviour of teenagers (plus ca change…), the early Sixties satire boom and pop music; plenty of stuff in that last bit on Lonnie Donegan, Billy Fury and Acker Bilk (whose presence is explained by the notion that in early 1962 there were those who thought that trad jazz would be the defining sound of the Sixties) before we get to the Beatles (where Sandbrook’s revisionism is clearly shown, with there being nothing inevitable about Beatlemania, the last remark on which goes to Ted Heath of all people – as Trade Secretary at the time, he remarked that the demand for Beatles-style jackets in late 1963 single-handedly saved Britain’s corduroy industry). It’s a long book (738 pages, not including the footnotes) but it’s well worth persevering with. The set-piece chapter is the one on the Profumo scandal – which has quite the build-up by being referenced or alluded to in previous chapters before, following an account of the Vassall scandal, it breaks out in a surprisingly low-key fashion (the central point, a junior minister’s affair with a call-girl, lasted just a few weeks) before becoming something that “might have been scripted to encompass a wide range of sensitive issues of the early sixties: espionage and subversion, sexual wantonness, unchecked materialism, the supposed exoticism and criminality of immigrant communities and the nepotism and ineptitude of the Conservative government ... it touched on public and private anxieties that had already been festering for years.” Interesting times, indeed, and fascinatingly chronicled here.

History of a somewhat different nature is covered by David Aaronovitch in his Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory has Shaped Modern History. If we really do live in a conspiracy-obsessed age – and reactions to recent events both here and in the United States have presented little evidence to the contrary – then perhaps a look at conspiracy theories of the past, the truth behind them and why so many are willing to believe them (the need for a certain type of narrative is a key part of this) is no bad thing. Thus, we have a chapter on the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a document which, despite being exposed as a forgery in 1921, did much to fuel anti-Semitism in the twentieth century and is still doing the rounds in the Middle East) and a somewhat lighter chapter on the pseudo-history concerning the Priory of Sion myth (amusingly entitled ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Shit’). Showing that conspiracy repeats itself, there are links made between the conspiracy theories surrounding the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana, and also (exploring a particularly British vein here) between the deaths of Hilda Murrell and David Kelly. Personally, I’d’ve liked to have seen what Aaronovitch might have to say about the various conspiracy theories surrounding Harold Wilson, but what makes this book so relevant for readers today is the American stuff. When Aaronovitch turns his attention Stateside, there are chapters on conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbour, various Clinton-related cover-ups, the 9/11 ‘truthers’ and the Obama ‘birthers’; those last two show how belief in conspiracy theories has risen with the advent of the Internet (“Cyberspace communities of semi-anonymous and occasionally invented individuals have grown up … the democratic quality of the Net has permitted the release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd”). As this book was published in 2010, there’s nothing about Donald Trump’s involvement in the ‘birther’ nonsense, although if Aaronovitch is going to do a second edition he’d probably need to include a whole chapter (maybe more), building on the post-Internet rise in the popularity of conspiracy theories, about the uses of conspiracy theories as political weapons in this year’s Presidential election. This book is intelligently written and hugely enjoyable, and a good one to have read before the next time someone brings up the subject of the ‘truth’ about, say, 9/11 or the pseudo-history behind The Da Vinci Code.

Conspiracy of a real rather than a theoretical sort abounds in A Spy Among Friends: Philby and the Great Betrayal, the tale of how Kim Philby betrayed, well, just about everyone. Ben Macintyre – an author of espionage-related stuff who I have read before (his Agent Zigzag is excellent) – is on good form here dealing with the story of perhaps the most notorious traitor in British history, aided by being able to access recently-declassified government files and previously unseen private papers. This isn’t a straight biography of Philby, though (there have been plenty of those); this one tells the story of British and American intelligence in the Second World War and the early part of the Cold War, focussing in particular on the friendship between Philby and two of his closest associates, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton of the OSS, and later the CIA. Elliott was a very good friend of Philby – or so he thought; they were of a similar background (public school, Cambridge, made their names in intelligence during the Second World War) and he shared everything he knew with him at a time when people who worked for the secret service were very tight-lipped outside of it, but frequently got drunk and let slip all sorts of interesting information when socialising with colleagues (something of which Philby took full advantage). After the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, which ruined Philby’s intelligence career by virtue of his closeness to the former rather than any concrete evidence, Elliott was instrumental in maintaining Philby’s innocence – blackening the reputation of a particularly troublesome MP who used Parliamentary privilege to ask some questions that some would rather have remained unasked – while trying to bring him back into the fold (he eventually succeeded in having him appointed as an agent under journalistic cover in Beirut, from where Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963). Elliott was also involved in the Crabb fiasco of 1956, the story of which is told here (one wonders how he was able to keep his job after that one, which went against the explicit orders of the Prime Minister). He was deeply affected by Philby’s betrayal, as was Angleton, although the effect on the latter was perhaps more ruinous for the intelligence community; having trusted Philby implicitly, Angleton switched to not trusting anyone and, having convinced himself that there was a mole in the CIA, wasted much time and resources as well as resorting to illegal methods in the chasing of this phantom, to the extent – irony of ironies – that some came to believe that Angleton himself was a KGB mole, charged with causing as much damage to the running of the CIA as possible. It all, it seems, went back to Philby. As retold by Macintyre, this is a truly irresistible read for anyone who, like me, has a penchant for spy fiction.

John Buchan and the fall of Erzerum

Last month, a First World War centenary passed with little notice; perhaps unsurprising, because it happened far away, did not involve British troops and had few lasting effects. On 16^th February 1916, Russian forces captured the eastern Turkish fortress-city of Erzerum after a winter campaign that took the Ottomans, who’d recently beaten back Russia’s Western allies at Gallipoli, by surprise.

Although the Russians capture the Black Sea city of Trabzon as well, the long-term consequences of this campaign were very few. A year later, the Russian Revolution happened regardless, and in 1918 the Bolsheviks gave Erzerum and the surrounding area back to Turkey under the terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk (an echo of two earlier, nineteenth-century wars in which Russia had taken Erzerum and then returned it in the subsequent peace settlement).

The taking of Erzerum did have an afterlife of sorts, though, with a fictional depiction of the climax of that campaign. Several months afterwards, John Buchan published Greenmantle, his follow-up to The Thirty-Nine Steps which he’d published the previous year. In Greenmantle, the resourceful hero Richard Hannay returns; recuperating from wounds received on the Western Front, he’s summoned by the spymaster he met in his previous adventure and briefed on the political situation in the Middle East – British intelligence having received hints that the Germans and their Ottoman allies are trying to kick-start a Muslim holy war or jihad that will, if it comes off, throw everywhere from Africa to India into turmoil, threatening the stability (or even the very existence) of the British Empire. Hannay teams up with a fellow-officer, Sandy Arbuthnot (a master of disguises and expert on all things Oriental) and an American, John Blenkiron (even though the USA was neutral at the time, Buchan was very big on the notion of an alliance between the great English-speaking nations) and the three make their own ways to Constantinople, and from there they travel to the showdown at Erzerum.

The adventure is a good one, and despite the fact that it was written and published during the war it does allow for some reflection on war-weariness and goes beyond mere stereotypes of the Germans; the ox-necked bully Colonel von Stumm, for example, is contrasted with a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of the Kaiser when Hannay briefly meets him, and other ‘good’ Germans can be found in the forester’s wife (who shelters Hannay) and Gaudian, an engineer who would return in The Three Hostages. Very popular at the time, it outsold The Thirty-Nine Steps, was apparently enjoyed by the Romanovs and is still in print – and it can still cause controversy with its references to political tensions in the Middle East (in 2005, the BBC had to cancel a radio adaptation following the 7/7 bombings).

There is some truth behind the fiction, for – strange though it may seem – German attempts to unleash jihad on an unsuspecting British Empire were no figment of Buchan’s imagination. When war had broken out in 1914, the Kaiser had vowed to “inflame the entire Muslim world against this hateful, lying and unscrupulous nation” (by which, of course, he meant Britain). Allied with the declining Ottoman Empire, German agents used Constantinople as a base from which to enter the Great Game – that old struggle for supremacy in Central Asia – cultivating rulers in Persia and Afghanistan with gold and guns, and even spreading rumours that the Kaiser had converted to Islam in order to legitimise Germany’s intentions.

Working as he was for British intelligence, Buchan would have had access to secret reports about what Germany was up to in the Middle East; after the war, his friend T.E. Lawrence (presumably one of the models for the Sandy character) observed that “Greenmantle has more than a flavour of truth”. That he was able to continue to write popular fiction in addition to his official work speaks volumes for his capabilities, especially given that he didn’t always stick to the official propaganda line in his novels; in fact he seems to have regarded novel-writing as some sort of release from his official duties as well as a handy means of earning some extra money. As was the case with The Thirty-Nine Steps (and indeed with his pre-war novel The Power-House), here was a tale of brisk action and indeed escapism set against a background that wasn’t so much realistic as all too real. That it is still readable today says a lot for the man’s capabilities as a storyteller par excellence.

James Bond and the Second World War

Reading Solo by William Boyd recently got me thinking. Specifically, I latched onto the Normandy flashback at the start, and wondered about what clues Ian Fleming gave about his creation’s war experiences. It is well known that the Bond character was based on a number of wartime secret agents and commandos with whom Fleming (a desk-bound naval intelligence officer) was acquainted, and it was with this in mind that I realised that in Fleming’s novels the Second World War is for the most part conspicuous by its absence. From the start, Bond was introduced as a secret agent of the Cold War, with little detail given about how he came to be where he was.

Curious, I delved into the books for details and came up with the following, which has been published on the James Bond Dossier website:

http://www.thejamesbonddossier.com/content/james-bond-and-the-second-world-war.htm

The literary James Bond: Solo and Moonraker

Much though I like James Bond – the books as well as the films – I don’t tend to go for the ‘continuation’ novels much. These are the ones that have been written by authors who aren’t Ian Fleming and there have been a lot of them; a parade of thrillers of varying quality where the hero happens to be a British secret agent by the name of James Bond, agent 007, licenced to kill, etc. Some, like the films, are set in the present day (present day when the book in question was written, at any rate) while others are set within the character timeline as laid out by Fleming (Fifties, early Sixties); the latter are usually better. The people who make the Bond films have never gone for adapting one of the continuation novels for the big screen.

That said, my ears pricked up recently when I heard that Anthony Horowitz had written a Bond novel; I rather liked what he did with Sherlock Holmes so I will get round to reading Trigger Mortis at some point. This was at the back of my mind when I came across a copy of Solo by William Boyd in the library and so I thought I’d give that a go. I’ve had Boyd recommended to me several times and while I doubt the recommenders had his Bond novel in mind, that’s what I went for.

(By the way, this contains spoilers – regarding Moonraker (the novel) as well as Solo. You have been warned.)

Boyd kicks off with a foreword that states that he’s sticking with the chronology of Bond’s ‘life’ as laid out in You Only Live Twice, the last novel to be published when Fleming was still alive and the one which included an obituary of Bond (missing presumed dead following a mission to Japan). This dates Bond to having been born in 1924 (although there is apparently some debate among ‘Bondologists’ regarding the literary character’s precise age as Fleming did change the timelines a bit over the course of his twelve novels and two collections of short stories), and it’s with this in mind that Solo kicks off with some rare war reminiscences on the part of 007 before introducing Bond in 1969 on his 45^th birthday.

After an evening of dining, drinking and mild flirtation, Bond test-drives a new car (a Jensen FF; nice) and is given a new mission – there’s a civil war going on in the West African state of Zanzarim (a thinly-disguised version of the Biafran War in Nigeria; Boyd himself grew up in West Africa which must have helped with the setting). Quite simply, M wants Bond to go there posing as a journalist and take out the main rebel leader. It doesn’t entirely go according to plan (although the rebels are nonetheless defeated) and Bond is shot and left for dead by his supposed MI6 contact in the country (she’s also one of the two love interests here) and a sinister Rhodesian mercenary. After a brief convalescence, he decides to ‘go solo’ in order to get revenge.

Travelling to the United States on a false passport, he manages to track down the people he’s after with surprising ease, although things get complicated when it turns out that the American authorities (among them Felix Leiter’s nephew) are also after the surviving rebel leaders as they’ve set up an aid agency which is actually a front for a massive drug-smuggling operation. As per a lot of Fleming’s villains, the Rhodesian mercenary character is physically disfigured, in this case as a result of his previous fighting experience.

Bond out for revenge: This has been done before in the films – Licence to Kill, Quantum of Solace – but not really in the novels although a running theme, especially in some of the earlier ones, is Bond’s desire to bring down SMERSH after what happened in Casino Royale. Here, the character is older and wiser, but also more impulsive while still being prone to acts of extreme violence when he’s in the mood. He is, after all, a killer.

There are a few aspects of Solo that are rather formulaic of Bond; what he wears, what he eats, what he smokes and what he drinks (I suppose that these details have to be in place so that we can be sure that this is James Bond; authors dealing with Fleming’s creation do have to use some Fleming-esque details). The women with whom he is romantically involved seem to be there for no better reason than because they have to be there in a James Bond adventure (as soon as his contact in Zanzarim is revealed to be a woman, you know it’s only a matter of time before he has sex with her). It gets better outside the Bond comfort zone.

I found the civil war descriptions to be the best part of this novel, while the war reminiscences – Boyd has a young Lieutenant Bond of the RNVR serving in Normandy with 30 Assault Unit, which had been set up by Fleming himself – are a very clever tribute to Bond’s creator. Bond going for a spot of personal vendetta is also a good way of taking the character out of the usual comfort zone (see above). I tend to steer clear of Bond continuation novels for a reason (the formulaic feeling aside, some of them got a bit silly, and I wasn’t much impressed with the Sebastian Faulks one a few years ago) but this was pretty good; I’ll certainly be looking to read more William Boyd novels as a result.

I decided to follow this Bond literary experience up by going back to the original: Ian Fleming. I thought I’d read all of those years ago but it would seem not; while clearing out some old books recently I came across an Ian Fleming omnibus containing three Bond novels. Judging by the position of the bookmark (a card from a scuba-diving club!), it looked as though I hadn’t got as far as the third one, Moonraker. Post-Solo, that is what I read. I remembered that the film was one of those so-bad-it’s-hilarious ones (if you haven’t seen it, four words – Roger Moore in space – will tell you all you need to know), but as the novel was first published in 1955 I doubted whether it went that far. I already knew, thanks to reading a book about the afore-mentioned wartime commando unit that Fleming set up, that the villain of the piece is a former Nazi who changed his identity in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The story begins in London where we find out that Bond is 37 years old, as he reflects that he’s eight years away from hitting 45, at which point he will cease to be a Double O agent and get a desk job instead (evidence here of Fleming changing Bond’s chronology over time, as previously mentioned). He’s flirting with the secretaries, although the principal flirtee is not Miss Moneypenny but one Loelia Ponsonby, secretary to the Double O Section (evidently the makers of the films thought that one secretary was sufficient). Anyway, time for a briefing from M: Sir Hugo Drax is a millionaire businessman who is bankrolling a British missile project known as Moonraker, an act for which he’s been knighted. Not much is known about his background but he’s a member of M’s club, Blades, and M thinks he might be a wrong ’un because he cheats at cards. There follows a card-table confrontation, the sort of thing that Fleming did so very well, as Bond – who, in addition to being the Secret Service’s best card player, also happens to know all there is to know about card-sharping – gives Drax a very expensive taste of his own medicine (£15,000 from a single game of bridge, and that’s at 1950s prices). Drax, foreshadowing several other villains who get bested by Bond in a club or casino, advises him to “spend the money quickly”.

Bond then gets assigned to Drax’s Moonraker project HQ down in Kent, where there’s already an undercover agent called Gala Brand, a Special Branch officer who’s posing as Drax’s secretary. So far, names aside, this seemed more like the basic plot to Die Another Day (which was bad without being funny) rather than Moonraker; proof that there’s always something in the films that can be traced back to the original source material. Between them Bond and Brand find out that Drax (who, by the way, has a facial disfigurement) is up to something, almost getting killed by part of a cliff falling on them in the process; they sort-of figure out what Drax is really up to, and there follows a car chase across Kent (Bond’s vehicle here is a pre-war supercharged Bentley; like many of its successors, it gets wrecked) after which Drax reveals his evil plan to the pair of them (the rocket that’s going to be test-fired actually contains a Soviet-supplied atomic warhead that’s going to destroy London) before leaving them to an elaborate death (specifically, they’re imprisoned close enough to the rocket that they’ll be killed when it launches) from which they are able to escape and foil the plans in such a way that this also results in Drax’s own demise.

Already knowing that Drax was an unrepentant Nazi before reading the book probably didn’t help in terms of the suspense but there are many clues that point the reader to this (all of the rocket technicians and henchmen are German, and Drax even drives a Merc). For an audience reading this in the 1950s, the combination of Nazis and nuclear annihilation would have been a potent mix. However, the main reason why I’ve chosen to divulge so much of the plot is to point out the main thing that I learned from reading Moonraker, which is the extent to which the component parts of your average Bond film can be found here: Early encounter with the villain at a card table, bonkers plan, car chase, ruthless henchman, full explanation of said plan for the benefit of 007 and his attractive female companion prior to elaborate but somehow escapable death – they’re all here.

Moonraker, though, also has a few elements that are not typical of a Bond adventure. It is set entirely in England, and we get to see some of the action from the woman’s point of view as well as that of Bond – and she, not Bond, is the one who actually finds out that Drax is going to fire the missile at London. And there’s a twist at the end – she doesn’t end up getting romantically involved with Bond (this may explain why ‘Gala Brand’ has never been a character name in the films). In creating James Bond, Ian Fleming came up with a winning formula but that didn’t mean that his thrillers had to be formulaic.

The enduring appeal of The Thirty-Nine Steps

This month sees the centenary of the publication of one of my favourite novels, The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1875-1940). That it is still readable today is testimony to the skill of the author, who was nothing if not prolific – he wrote over a hundred books in addition to a political career that culminated in his ennoblement as Lord Tweedsmuir and his appointment in 1935 as Governor General of Canada, where one of his achievements was the instigation of the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

The Thirty-Nine Steps was not only thrilling, it was highly topical for its time; it was set in the months prior to the outbreak of the First World War and dealt with an attempt by a German spy ring to steal Britain's war plans. It was a phenomenal success which in time spawned three films and a stage play, as well as setting the benchmark by which future spy novels would be judged. I have written an article on it   which has been published by the New Statesman; it can be accessed via the following link:

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/08/what-can-spy-novelists-learn-enduring-popularity-thirty-nine-steps

Pilgrim

When a book has a quote on the cover that proclaims it as “the only thriller you need to read this year”, you may think that’s hyperbole but sooner or later you might be interested in finding out what all the fuss is about. Especially if you’ve seen quite a few people reading it on the Tube.

The thriller in question is I am Pilgrim, the debut novel by journalist and screenwriter Terry Hayes. Be warned, though – once you get started on this, you won’t want to put it down. It’s smart, complex and very compelling.

The story begins at a murder scene in New York. The narrator is the Pilgrim of the title, a man of many aliases who used to work for an ultra-secret US intelligence department – he was, of course, their best agent – but left after 9/11. Since then, he wrote a highly-regarded book on forensic pathology (published under a false name) and has used his fieldcraft to disappear under a false identity and move to Paris in a doomed attempt to leave the secret world behind him and try to lead something approaching a normal life. However, he gets tracked down by a determined NYPD homicide cop who has been inspired by his book – which is how Pilgrim ends up helping to investigate a murder in which the killer appears to have drawn inspiration from said book to create a situation where the police can’t even identify the victim, let alone the killer. Subsequently, the US government comes back into his life – as well as a suicide that may not be all it seems in Turkey, there’s a big terrorist plot against America, but they don’t know who’s behind it, where the plot is being hatched or what form the attack will take. Only Pilgrim can figure this out.

Running alongside this are some flashbacks in which we get to see how Pilgrim became involved in, and later disillusioned with, the secret world. We also get to see another series of flashbacks that track the life of the novel’s antagonist, a character known only as the Saracen – a Saudi boy who witnesses his father’s beheading, became disillusioned with his mother’s tentative embracing of Western values and went off to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Having thus become a Muslim fundamentalist, he went on to become a doctor in Beirut but, having adopting a false identity, he is himself nigh-on untraceable. From this position, he sets about planning a spectacular act of bio-terrorism on US soil – without so much as setting foot in the country itself.

This parallel plot device is similar to the cat-and-mouse layout of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, which follows both the titular assassin and the detective who’s on his trail until they finally meet at the novel’s climax. This is somewhat appropriate, for The Day of the Jackal, first published in 1971, was in many senses the first modern thriller (the first thriller having been John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, first published a century ago and never out of print since).

I am Pilgrim is, at 896 pages, a long book but this gives Hayes the chance to go deep into the characters of both Pilgrim and the Saracen. We get the extensive back-stories of both men – the adopted, Harvard-educated spook who’s more than capable of getting information out of Swiss bankers and bumping off just about anyone if required to do so but has a vulnerable side when it comes to the subject of his foster-parents, and the radicalised Islamist who will stop at nothing (in one memorably gruesome scene, he even removes someone’s eyes so that he can beat the iris-recognition software in a top-secret Damascus laboratory) in his quest to bring the mighty USA to its knees. At times, the book’s fast-paced plot, spectacular set-pieces and array of locations feel like it should be a movie (which I don’t doubt it will be at some point), which is in a sense appropriate as Hayes’s background is in movie screenwriting.

All in all, those commuters who were engrossed in this novel really were onto something. I am Pilgrim is definitely worth a read.

Biographies of war heroes

My latest post concerns two books that I’ve read over the past few months – both of which happen to be biographies of men who, among other things, were war heroes.

First of all, I’d been looking forward to reading Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper (2012), as the subject is one of my favourite writers – although it is true that his prose is a little too purple for some tastes (I, for example, am glad that I didn’t stumble across him until I was in my late twenties; had I started reading him when I was younger, I don’t think I’d have appreciated it as much). There is much that is of interest in the life of Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011), or ‘Paddy’ as he was universally known. Here, after all, was a man who walked across Europe before he turned twenty, served in the Special Operations Executive during the war (most famously abducting a German general in Crete in 1944), and after it designed his own house in Greece, could sing folk-songs in at least eight languages, mingled with lords as easily as he mingled with vagrants and swam the Hellespont when he was 70. Oh, and he wrote some of the finest works of non-fiction of the twentieth century, specifically his accounts of that youthful walk, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.

There’s no way a biography of him would ever be dull, although there is always the chance that such a work could never live up to the man’s own prose (as was the case with a biography of Norman Lewis that I read last year). But what Artemis Cooper – who knew him well – does is to bring to light his unpublished diaries, allowing us to see the man behind the prose, as it were. Another side to the man comes through; the often-penniless Paddy was quite the freeloader (the original couch-surfer, maybe?) and an habitual womaniser (to the extent that his wife would even give him money in case he needed to visit a brothel). Despite this, Paddy still comes across as a highly likeable sort – a prodigious networker (as a biographer, Cooper is nothing if not a name-dropper), always curious about exploring new places and wanting to learn new things. He was never, ever dull or boring.

A couple of things I’d always wanted to know about Paddy are explained; for example, why, aside from an uncharacteristically staid report for the Imperial War Museum (which can be read in the Paddy-anthology Words of Mercury), Paddy didn’t write his own account of the kidnapping of the general – something he left to his comrade-in-arms, Billy Moss, whose account, Ill Met by Moonlight, was made into a film in which Paddy was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde. The reasons for this lack are explained in detail; Paddy being Paddy, a blood-feud is among them (which also explains why he didn’t return to Crete for many years after the war). The question of why the long-awaited third volume of his youthful journey was never completed is also explained; Paddy was a notorious perfectionist who took ages over his writing, and in this context, perhaps the most revealing thing in the book is the reproduction of a page of one of Paddy’s drafts – written in longhand (for years, and I for one find this rather shocking, he never learned to use a typewriter) and replete with all sorts of corrections and crossings-out, it was used by his long-suffering publisher whenever anyone asked when Paddy’s next book was coming out! Which brings us to Cooper’s next project; along with Colin Thubron, she’s been editing Paddy’s journals, notes and drafts to bring said third volume to publication. The Broken Road has just been published, and is due out in paperback next year. I can’t wait.

As far as I can tell, Paddy did not cross paths with Airey Neave (1916-1979); the latter, whose name I first encountered in Major P.R. Reid’s The Colditz Story, certainly doesn’t crop up in the pages of Cooper’s biography which at the very least mentions in passing a large number of well-known people who Paddy met over the course of his long life. There are a few similarities between the two men; both visited Germany as young men shortly after the Nazis came to power, and both fought in the Second World War with distinction, being awarded the DSO. But there the similarities would appear to end.

This brings me to the second biography, Public Servant, Secret Agent: The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave by Paul Routledge (2003). This is an at-times fascinating biography about a relatively minor and now largely forgotten politician, albeit one whose career did not end in failure but was tragically cut short by an INLA car-bomb at the Palace of Westminster in 1979. The most interesting part relates to what he did in the Second World War, and Neave’s war was most certainly adventurous – after being taken prisoner at Calais in 1940, he ended up in Colditz Castle – from which he escaped by dressing up in a home-made imitation of a Wehrmacht officer’s uniform and subsequently travelling to Switzerland – before going on to work for MI9 (the wartime secret service responsible for escape and evasion) and playing a role in the Nuremberg trials. These parts of Routledge’s book are very good indeed.

Sadly, the book flags once we get to Neave’s post-war career as a Conservative MP; to make up for the relative lack of excitement as Neave tries to climb the greasy pole and doesn’t do particularly well, the author tries to make something of Neave retaining his links to the secret services but there’s not much to go on here, and Routledge gets bogged down chasing shadows as he attempts to link Neave to various conspiracy theories about right-wing groups trying to overthrow the Wilson government. Even Neave’s greatest political achievement – his central role in Mrs Thatcher’s campaign in the 1975 Tory leadership election – appears somewhat rushed here (Routledge, I think, overlooks Ted Heath’s failure to engage with his own backbenchers while overplaying Neave’s apparent deviousness). Of Neave’s subsequent career as Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, there isn’t really a lot that can be said, as he was shadowing one of the most effective holders of that office, and did not live to put any of his own policies into action – he was killed days after the vote of no confidence that brought down Jim Callaghan. After the account of Neave’s murder, the conspiracy theories, and there are quite a few relating to who exactly would have wanted him dead, take over again – the effect being that rather too much time is given over to the musings of Ken Livingstone and Enoch Powell, and that surely cannot be a good thing.

Much more substantial is the author’s story of how he got to speak to some veteran Irish republican terrorists about the all-too-real conspiracy to murder Neave himself. For sheer guts in his pursuit of this side of the story, Routledge deserves much credit.

To conclude, I’d say that both of these books are worth a read, although both do have a rather limited appeal. The Neave one will probably appeal more to politics-junkies than anyone else, while the Paddy biography is perhaps best tried after a dose of Paddy’s own inimitable prose.

Ian Fleming's war

The creator of James Bond continues to fascinate to this day, and I have found him cropping up in several books I’ve been reading recently. He has, for example a walk-on role in Artemis Cooper’s biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor (Paddy, whose book The Traveller’s Tree was used extensively by Fleming in Live and Let Die, dropped in on him in Jamaica while he was busy writing Casino Royale).

As was the case with Paddy and many others of his generation, Fleming’s life was very much defined by what he did in the Second World War. Indeed, the war came as a release for Ian Fleming, who by 1939 was an ex-public schoolboy who’d flunked Sandhurst, had a go at journalism and ended up in an undemanding desk-job at a stockbroker’s in the City – in contrast to his elder brother Peter who had made a name for himself as a travel-writer. An interview with Rear-Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, changed all that and Fleming was finally able to find his role in life as a naval intelligence officer – a role in which he excelled.

Fleming’s war work is covered by Ian Fleming’s Commandos: The Story of 30 Assault Unit in WWII by Nicholas Rankin which was published last year. If, like me, you like war adventures such as Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches and more recent fare like Agent Zigzag, and find the whole Bletchley Park story to be fascinating, I suspect you will find it hard not to be drawn to a book about a commando unit formed by the creator of the world’s most famous fictional spy with the aim of capturing intelligence data intact.

These men, who Fleming rather unflatteringly referred to as his ‘Red Indians’, all volunteered for commando work from the regular forces (this being a naval intelligence unit, they were mostly Royal Marines with a few naval officers). After being highly trained in the ways of sabotage and silent killing at places like Achnacarry they were blooded at Dieppe before being given the unenviable task of going in with the first wave of troops who went ashore at places like Salerno and the Normandy beaches, with orders to find and capture the Germans’ code books, radar equipment and Enigma machines before they had a chance to destroy them. Fleming, who knew too much to be allowed into the field (much to his own frustration), chose their targets and later used their experiences as the basis of the Bond novels.

I enjoyed this book. It’s well-paced, providing a thorough context in terms of intelligence work and the use of irregular forces before turning the focus on the commandos themselves (as befits a man who was always the brains behind the operation and rarely in the thick of the action, Fleming himself becomes a background figure who occasionally interacts with the commando officers but rarely with the NCOs and men – most of whom had no idea of the wider context of what they were doing at the time). There’s humour and pathos amid the firefights and destruction, and Rankin never stoops to glorify the war. Towards the end of the war, 30 Assault Unit came into its own, capturing a mass of material ranging from weapons blueprints to scientists to submarines to admirals and the entire archive of the German navy going back to the nineteenth century. For obvious reasons that’s not a story that was widely told at the time (and the men of 30 Assault Unit aren’t alone in that; for example, the codebreaking achievements of Bletchley Park weren’t made public until the 1970s), and it’s good that we can finally hear the stories of a very brave group of men.

Rankin has also included a lot of tie-ins with quotes from Bond novels, which is understandable as James Bond is the reason why most people have heard of Ian Fleming (which in turn is why his name features prominently on the title of Rankin’s book) and it’s actually very interesting to see how parts of his books tie in with his war work. A lot of the character names are the names of people who Fleming worked with (rather amusingly, one officer was very disparaging of Fleming at the time but later changed his mind after he ‘became’ a character in one of the books), but there are quite a few plotlines which relate directly to the war. To give three examples: From Russia with Love is all about MI6 trying to get its hands on a top-secret decoding machine; the villain of Moonraker is an ex-Nazi who changed his identity in the chaos surrounding the war’s end (a chaos in which 30 Assault Unit was uncovering all sorts of secrets); and finally, you’ll certainly have a new perspective on the short story Octopussy after reading this.

Ian Fleming also makes an appearance in Op. JB: The Last Great Secret of the Second World War by Christopher Creighton, a supposedly factual account where he accompanies the author on a top-secret mission to Berlin at the end of the war to extract Martin Bormann under the cover-name of ‘James Bond’ (which is what the ‘JB’ stands for). Surprisingly, the publishers of this story didn't market it as fiction, and it comes with an oft-repeated caveat that all official records relating to the events described have been destroyed (some of them by the author!). I don’t believe this. It’s too far-fetched, there are too many cameos by famous people – over the course of the book, the author/narrator meets with Churchill, the King, Eisenhower, Rommel and even Hitler himself – and the overall effect is that of an attempt at a war-story along the lines of The Eagle has Landed. The blurb on the cover boldly proclaimed: ‘Fact or fiction – decide for yourself’. After reading it, I decided that it’s fiction, and rather low-grade fiction at that. Don't bother with this one.

American paratroopers, French wine and a British spy: Three books about the Second World War

I have always been fascinated by the Second World War, from visits to the Normandy landing beaches as a schoolboy and hearing my grandfather tell me about his experiences in the Navy to using the royalist Yugoslav resistance as a dissertation subject, diving to the wreck of a British destroyer off the coast of Malta and undertaking a solo excursion to El Alamein when I was backpacking in Egypt.

Oh, and reading a lot of books.

Recently, I’ve read three more books that have shed further light on different aspects of the war.

I’d seen the TV series, of course, so I reckoned I knew what to expect when I found a copy of Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose in a local charity shop. It follows the officers and men of an American paratroop company – Easy Company, part of the 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101^st Airborne Division – from their training in Georgia to the capture of Berchtesgaden, via the horrors of D-Day, Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge.

It turns out I did not know the whole story, because as is the case with many books that are the inspiration for a film or TV adaptation you get so much more from the book. Ambrose succeeds in taking the reader into the minds of a group of seemingly ordinary men who became extraordinary soldiers (the book is based on extensive interviews with the veterans themselves). One feels with them the fear, the pain and above all the intense cold. In addition, Ambrose does a good job of providing the context for each of the battles before taking us into said battles from the soldiers’ perspective.

I have one quibble. Obviously this is a book about the men in one (American) unit and their war experiences, but I find myself shaking my head every time they find themselves working with British troops as these are invariably portrayed as bunch of poorly-trained bunglers. In this context, I note that Ambrose has also written a book about the British capture of Pegasus Bridge in the early hours of D-Day. Having visited Pegasus Bridge myself, I’d like to give this one a go but I wonder how the men of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry will fare at the hands of this author.

Towards the end of the war, Easy Company and the rest of the 101^st Airborne captured Hitler’s mountain stronghold of Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, which contained (among other things) more Nazi souvenirs that you could shake a swagger-stick at, several staff cars that the soldiers were understandably quick to take for test-drives and enough booze to sink several battleships. That’s where my next war book begins.

The book starts at the end of the war, when one Sergeant de Nonencourt of the French Army found himself in Berchtesgaden alongside the Americans. There, he and his men helped to ‘liberate’ many bottles of the finest champagne that the Nazis had been hoarding. Quite incredibly, Sergeant de Nonencourt was not only from the Champagne region, but his family was (and still is) in the champagne business and he had witnessed the Germans carrying away those same bottles back in 1940.

Thus begins Wine and War by Donald and Petie Kladstrup, a book which tells the wartime story of ‘France’s greatest treasure’ – her wine.It’s an unusual angle, but the Kladstrups succeed in presenting an informative, poignant and highly readable account of how France, with particular emphasis on the French wine industry, coped with the German occupation. Hitler’s teetotalism notwithstanding, many Germans from ordinary soldiers to high-ranking Nazi officials regarded the wine as the best of the spoils of war, and the Wehrmacht requisitioned tens of thousands of bottles to be sent back to Germany. This book is the story of how the vintners of France reacted to this.

There are tales of heroism, ingenuity, black humour, resistance and (it has to be said) a few actions which verge on collaboration – be it with either the Vichy regime or with the Germans. Some vintners, like the owners of Moët & Chandon, engaged in acts of outright resistance whenever they could, while others resisted in more passive ways, such as lying about yields and relabeling inferior vintages to fool the Germans into thinking they were being given the best bottles (which were hidden in walled-up parts of the cellars). Ultimately, it is the extraordinary stories of individuals that shine through, as ordinary people risked their lives and the lives of their families to save something that they believed, with considerable justification, to be worth saving. As such, the wine at times almost becomes a metaphor for France itself.

If you are interested in the war, or interested in wine, I would recommend that you read this book.

The final war book is Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre, which describes the adventures of a lone, rogue Englishman – wartime spy Eddie Chapman.

A hardened if rather unsuccessful criminal, Chapman found himself in a Jersey prison cell when the Germans invaded the Channel Islands. He saw volunteering to spy for Germany as a way of getting back to Britain, where he planned to turn himself in and offer to send false information to German intelligence.

What follows is a cloak-and-dagger escapade that would’ve been denounced as far-fetched if it were the plot of a novel as this unlikeliest of heroes is trained (and wined and dined) by the Germans, survives a parachute drop into East Anglia, turns himself in and, with the full backing of MI5 (who already knew about his mission thanks to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park), embarks on a life of double-cross and deception as he passes false information to German intelligence. MI5 even fakes a sabotage attack on the De Havilland factory in Hatfield at one point to convince the Germans that Chapman is still loyal to the Third Reich.

Although as suspicious of Chapman as his MI5 handlers were (rightly so, given that the man himself even admitted that ordinary people shouldn’t trust men like him), Macintyre has written a highly enjoyable biography which shines a light onto both a fascinating if very disreputable man who for all his faults must’ve had nerves and other body parts of solid steel, and the murky world of wartime intelligence.

It so happens that I was working in Hendon when I read this book, and I noted with interest that Chapman lived there with his MI5 handlers while he was transmitting false information to Germany. A quick perusal of the A-Z told me where the road in question could be found, and naturally I went to take a look. Well, let me tell you that there’s no evidence that the house where he lived was ever an MI5 safe-house. Not that I was really expecting any, of course. But, such is my interest in the war, I couldn’t resist going along to take a look and make sure.