Ambling

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Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Helen MacInnes, John Le Carre, Kim Philby, Len Deighton

Back in my teens and early twenties, spy stories probably constituted the bulk of my reading, both fiction (Helen MacInnes, John Le Carre, Len Deighton) and non-fiction (The Penkovsky Papers, Kim Philby’s My Secret War, a rather dense tome on General Gehlen). Through it all, one name kept repeating: Eric Ambler. The recent reprints of Helen MacInnes novels all come emblazoned with exactly the same quote from Newsweek that the editions I read in the early 70s carried: “Helen MacInnes can hang her cloak and dagger right up there with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.” Ambler was inescapable: if you liked this stuff, you had to read him. And yet I never did.

I am not exactly sure why. I think, for whatever reason, I had pegged him as the spy fiction equivalent of Edgar Wallace: populist, slick, rather trashy, and above all a representative of an earlier generation. It is an unfair characterisation, of course. Ambler’s career as a novelist stretched from 1936 to 1981, which isn’t all that different from Helen MacInnes’s career, 1941 to 1984. To say that, as spy writers, they belong to different generations is probably stretching it a bit. As for the identification with Edgar Wallace, I have no idea where that came from, but if I’d thought about that Newsweek quotation I’d have realised how far off the mark it is. After all, Ambler is being compared with MacInnes and Greene, neither of whom is exactly in the Edgar Wallace camp.

Be that as it may, it all means that Journey into Fear, a very gratefully received Christmas present from Maureen which I have just finished, is the first thing by Eric Ambler I have read. I should have been reading him 40 or 50 years ago.

Apart from the early chapters being told largely in flashback, it is a very straightforward story, straightforwardly told. Graham (no forename is ever given) is a British armaments engineer in Turkey to wrap up a deal essential for Turkey’s defence in the war that is just starting (it is the early months of 1940). On his last night in Istanbul Graham is shot at as he returns to his hotel room. Graham is inclined to dismiss it as a robbery gone wrong, but Colonel Haki, the head of Turkish intelligence, knows better. Any delay to the deal could be fatal to Turkey’s interests, and if Graham were killed it would put things back by at least six months. Haki therefore persuades Graham to change his plans; instead of travelling back to England by train, where he would be a sitting duck, he joins an old tramp steamer heading for Genoa, from where he can more safely return home.

The bulk of the novel is set aboard this boat as Graham slowly comes to recognise the parlous position he is in. The whole is a brilliant exercise in creating an atmosphere of fear which Ambler orchestrates by repeatedly offering hope and then dashing it. Graham realises that one of his fellow passengers is the Bulgarian assassin that Haki identified, but he can’t convince the ship’s crew that he is not delusional. He has been given a gun for his protection, but the gun is stolen from his cabin. A fellow passenger, an erotic dancer who is clearly trying to seduce Graham (for money, as we later discover), offers to steal her husband’s gun and pass it to Graham, but she isn’t able to deliver the goods. Another passenger proves to be a Turkish agent sent by Haki to protect Graham, but the agent is killed. The German mastermind of the assassination plot offers Graham what seems like a way out, but it turns out to be a deception to make it easier to kill Graham once they get to Genoa.

There are moments of dramatic action, the climax of the novel is quite spectacular, but in the main the novel works as a slow, quiet, accumulation of tension. There’s a way out, no it’s closed off; there’s another way out, no it’s closed off again. And Graham is an ordinary, middle class, middle aged man who has never before found his life in danger, and has never before had to act the way he must act now if he is to stay alive. And all of this is played out in the narrow confines of a rusty old boat, where the handful of fellow passengers may be allies who cannot be relied upon, or enemies who cannot be identified.

What struck me about the novel was how appropriate the comparison with Helen MacInnes is, although Journey into Fear is about half the length of an average MacInnes novel. There is, for a start, the sense of place; though MacInnes would play her story out against familiar landmarks and public spaces, where Ambler’s novel takes us to seedy nightclubs and smoky offices. There is the centrality of a journey, where deadly enemies are right behind or possibly one step ahead; though for MacInnes the journey would be through the sharply described mountains of Above Suspicion or the coastal landscape of Assignment in Brittany, while for Ambler it all takes place in the equally sharply described decks and salon and cabins of the tramp steamer. Above all there is the fact that the story concerns an innocent, an amateur, caught in a violent world that they do not understand and for which they are ill prepared, but who finds within themselves resources of wit and nerve that prove equal to the task. Though MacInnes will introduce romantic interest who proves equally resourceful, whereas Ambler’s romantic interest is, in the end, unreliable. And though both MacInnes and Ambler equip their novels with enough cliffhangers and bursts of action to keep any reader gripped, the real focus is psychological, how nerves and fear and resolve shape and twist and move things along.

It has taken me a long time to discover Eric Ambler, I suspect that now I shall be making up for those long years of neglect.

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Little Britain

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Helen MacInnes

Years ago, I remember reading reviews of a new film that sounded intriguing called The Return of Martin Guerre, though as it happened I never actually saw the film. At the same time, I remember being puzzled that something in the plot seemed familiar to me, though I couldn’t work out why that might be so.

Flash forward 30-odd years and I am reading Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes, or rather, re-reading. I don’t specifically remember reading this novel before, but in the late-60s and early-70s I went through a phase of reading everything by MacInnes that I could get my hands on, and this was one of her more prominent titles so I would be surprised if I hadn’t encountered it.

And as I read the novel I begin to realise what it was I recognised in the plot of Martin Guerre.

Assignment in Brittany was her second novel, published in 1942. It is a spy story (of course) set in Brittany shortly after Dunkirk in the early days of the German occupation. A French soldier, rescued from Dunkirk, makes his way cross-country to his little family farm just outside a small Breton village. But he isn’t a French soldier; he’s an English agent who happens to look enough like the Frenchman to take his place, allowing him an ideal opportunity to observe German preparations throughout the region. To make the deception work, he has to fool the Frenchman’s invalid mother, his fiancee, and the old family servant. For a while this seems to work, but soon enough suspicions start to emerge, mostly because the Englishman is nicer than the Frenchman was.

The nastiness of the Frenchman soon takes an important turn as the English agent, Martin Hearne, gradually comes to realise that the Frenchman, Bertrand Corlay, was actually a leading voice in a Breton nationalist movement that was being subverted by the Germans for their own ends. Indeed, Corlay was a willing agent of the Nazis, giving Hearne an unexpected opportunity to play a dangerous double game. But the only way to do that is to step out from behind his disguise to those closest to Corlay.

It is an extraordinary novel for its time. It must have been written in the immediate aftermath of Dunkirk when there was considerable confusion about German plans and British capabilities. In the novel, MacInnes imagines the Germans building military airfields across the Breton plain in order to launch an aerial bombardment of South West England; a plan foiled by the intelligence Hearne provides. I’m not sure if that was ever really the German plan, their activities in Brittany seem to have been primarily naval, directed towards bases used for the Atlantic war, but in the heat of that particular moment it was probably a reasonable expectation.

More interesting is the care with which she portrays the experience of rural France under German occupation, an experience about which she is likely to have heard whispers at best. And the novel is full of an intimate knowledge of the geography of the region, something that would become a hallmark of her postwar spy fiction. There is a sense that this is an area well known to the author, a sense that these stones, these roads, these dusty tracks, these fields can be found on the ground exactly as they appear in the novel. This sense of place is something that would be a distinguishing characteristic of her work, though it is interesting to see it in place here when she couldn’t arrange a quick research trip in the middle of writing.

The other regular characteristic of her work is here also: the handsome, charming, engaging hero figure, and the love interest who proves herself at least as brave and at least as resourceful as the hero.

And so we have the basic Martin Guerre plot (40 years before the Martin Guerre film): a returning soldier who isn’t, who is taken in without question by those closest to the original, but whose identity is eventually exposed by the fact that he is nicer than the original. But MacInnes uses this as the basis for a tale that involves duplicity and betrayal, violence, revenge, capture and escape. A quiet story of high action.

There was, apparently, a film made of Assignment in Brittany, but I know I’ve never seen that.

2017 in Review

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Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of.

More Work for the Undertaker

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Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Dorothy L. Sayers, Helen MacInnes, Margery Allingham

Immediately upon finishing the Helen MacInnes, I came down with some sort of bug and ended up spending yesterday in bed. So I picked another old book off the shelf. This time it was More Work for the Undertaker by Margery Allingham. I finished it in less than two days, which either tells you how sick I was or how compelling the book is, or possibly both.

Reading for pleasure

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Helen MacInnes, John Le Carre, Len Deighton, mary renault

Rather more years ago than I care to remember, I was on a train in Greece. I was sitting next to an Orthodox priest. As soon as he found out I was English, he picked up a paperback that someone had left on the seat, and insisted on reading passages to me while I corrected his pronunciation. Meanwhile, an old lady sitting facing us would occasionally feed us fruit from the basket on her knee. It is one of the most abiding and most attractive of my memories of Greece.

The book that the priest found on the train was Neither Five Nor Three by Helen MacInnes. It was a book I knew well, I’d finished it myself not long before that trip to Greece. It seemed very appropriate, this was exactly the sort of happenstance that you are likely to encounter in one of Helen MacInnes’s novels. Except there, of course, the whole encounter would be redolent of mystery or threat.