And also …

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Georges Simenon, Helen MacInnes

I knew, from the moment I decided to write up every book I read in this blog, that there would be some books where I didn’t have much to say. That’s okay, I thought, I can do a short entry, or I can cover two or three books in a post. These are two books I enjoyed, though I wouldn’t way either of them is particularly special.

First up is I and My True Love by Helen MacInnes. I like Helen MacInnes. I enjoyed her books when I was first into a spy novel jag back in the 1970s, and I am enjoying them again now since I rediscovered them a few years ago. They are substantial paperbacks, around 400 pages in most cases, yet I find them a very quick read. There are quite a few I’ve got through in just a day. They are colourful, usually stuffed with local colour, romantic in mood, cleverly constructed, marred if anything by an unthinking prejudice against anything on the political left. If you encounter anyone in her novels who sympathises with the left they are either a fool or evil. In the main they are a pleasant enough way to pass a few hours.

Most of her books were spy stories in one for or another. Brave men and resourceful women coming together in a desperate battle with Nazis in the early novels, communists in the later ones. The hero and heroine are always attractive, and having overcome the odds they get together at the end. But one or two of her novels dispensed with the spy plot and just told a straightforward romance. This one sits oddly in between. It tells of an unhappily married Washington wife who meets up again with the foreign diplomat that she had an affair with ten years before, and the book is basically about if and how they can get together. Except that the husband is something in American intelligence, the foreign lover is from Czechoslovakia, and someone has been leaking secrets to the Czechs. In fact the spy story aspect is downplayed so that you hardly notice it for most of the novel, as if MacInnes hadn’t quite decided what sort of novel she was writing. And unusually, indeed uniquely among those of her books I’ve read, it all ends unhappily.

The book has its interest, but it is undemanding and far from being one of her best.

The other recently read novel is Maigret by Georges Simenon. We’ve been reading the Maigret novels in sequence, and this represents a strange hiatus in the canon.

The first Maigret novel, Pietr the Latvian appeared in 1931. The 18th novel, Lock No.1, appeared two years later in 1933. In that novel, Maigret announced that he was retiring. The following year, 1934, there was a solitary Maigret novel, this one, just called Maigret. This was the first time that the name of the character had appeared in the title, though many of the later novels would take the form, Maigret and … What is interesting is that this is the last Maigret novel for nearly a decade, the next one, Cecile is Dead, appeared in 1942 during the German occupation (a time when Simenon’s behaviour was questionable at best).

Maigret is living in retirement in the country when his nephew, a rather incompetent police inspector, is arrested for murder. Maigret returns to Paris to investigate. To be honest, this is far from being one of the better Maigret novels. Without the resources of the Quai des Orfevres, the story mostly proceeds by luck rather than detection. And we know who the baddy is from quite early on, so the only real tension is how the pieces are going to fall out to allow Maigret to get his man.

There is a real sense that Simenon, like Conan Doyle before him, had had enough of his creation. I suspect he wanted it to end with Lock No.1, though even that novel feels like he was running out of steam. There is something almost inert about this novel, maybe it was a contractual obligation because it certainly has none of the sharpness or the invention of the earlier novels. It is going to be interesting to see whether, after a lay-off of eight years and with the intervention of a war, Simenon is able to rekindle his interest. There are, after all, another 55 novels to come.

Cloak and Dagger

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Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes

There is a line that has appeared on the cover of just about every Helen MacInnes novel I have ever seen. It comes from a Newsweek review:

Helen MacInnes can hang her cloak and dagger right up there with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.

I’m not so sure about Greene, I’ve not really read enough of his “entertainments” to know how valid the comparison might be. But Ambler!

There is a pattern that recurs in most, though not all, of the spy stories by both Ambler and MacInnes. The central character is an amateur, often a journalist or a writer of some sort, caught up unexpectedly in events way outside their normal experience. These events are usually triggered by a chance encounter, escalate at a rate that does not allow the protagonist time to get away, and despite being an amateur the protagonist proves to have reserves of ingenuity that makes him (always him) an effective player in a dangerous game. The drama plays out far from the protagonist’s familiar home territory, and there is usually a journey of some sort central to the action that keeps everyone off balance.

Let us take, for example, one novel by each that I happen to have read recently. Neither is among the best known examples of their work, but they are both typical of their author’s storytelling.

Eric Ambler’s Uncommon Danger (1937) was his second published novel (Ambler’s own preferred title, Background to Danger, is, I think, better). It is the story of Kenton, a freelance journalist, travelling around Europe in 1936. In Nuremberg he loses all his money playing poker dice and has to get a train to Vienna where he hopes to find an old acquaintance who might be persuaded to lend him more cash. But on the train he runs into Herr Sachs who claims to be a Jew escaping the Nazis, and persuades Kenton to smuggle an envelope of what he claims are bonds across the Austrian border in exchange for cash. But before Kenton can return the envelope Sachs is killed, and Kenton is framed for the murder. Kenton then finds himself caught in a spy game between a wily Russian agent and a ruthless representative of a British oil company.

Snare of the Hunter (1974) is, on the other hand, a relatively late work by Helen MacInnes (her first novel had appeared in 1941, so she was a pretty close contemporary of Ambler). This is the story of David Mennery, an American music journalist, who, years before, had briefly befriended a Czech girl, Irina. Now Irina has escaped to the West, and because he once knew her David is recruited to help her on her journey across Austria and into Switzerland where she can be reunited with her father, a famous author in exile. But Irina’s escape has been facilitated by her ex-husband, a powerful figure in the Czech secret service who wants to use Irina as a way of getting to her father.

Though separated by nearly 40 years, there are familiar patterns in both works: David and Kenton play much the same role, with similar competence, and the drama is largely played out in the course of a journey. (There is no journey in another Ambler from the same time, Epitaph for a Spy, but the setting is a small hotel in the south of France and all of the characters are there at the mid-point of a journey.)

Of course there are differences between Ambler and MacInnes. For MacInnes the protagonist is always a hero figure, noble, bold, in the right; though she practically always includes a traitor among those close to the protagonist upon whom he must depend. For Ambler, on the other hand, the protagonist is not morally pure, he is an ambiguous figure who learns resolution only in the face of the danger he encounters. On the other hand, once he has worked out who he can trust, those characters remain trustworthy throughout the novel.

Both writers set their work in relatively exotic European locations; Ambler tending towards Eastern Europe and Turkey, MacInnes preferring glamorous places such as Paris, Saltzburg, Malaga and the Greek Islands. But the location was intimately tied to the romance of MacInnes’s work and she included lots of confident local knowledge in her often extensive scenic descriptions. Ambler didn’t really care that much for landscape, and his  scene setting could often be quite perfunctory. There is, for instance, no sense of France in Epitaph for a Spy.

The biggest difference between the two, though, is philosophical, or at least political. For MacInnes her early novels, written during and just after World War II, invariably featured Nazis as villains; but once the Cold War got started her villains were always of the left: any communist was bad, any fellow traveller was bad, anyone whose politics were left of centre was a fool who unwittingly aided bad people. Ambler was considerably less clear-cut in his choice of villains. In novels like The Mask of Dimitrios or Uncommon Danger the villain acts as an agent for big business, because it is business that shapes European politics more than anything else. Because international business is more corrupt and villainous even than the Nazis, the good guys tend to be on the left. I suspect that Uncommon Danger is one of very few British spy novels in which the Soviet spy is a hero. By the mid-Fifties, Ambler had become less comfortable with communism, and the Russians started to become the villains, but he was never as vehemently anti-left as MacInnes always was.

Ambler’s novels are shorter and tighter: he tends to get down to plot as quickly as possible, and spends little time on extraneous details that might decorate that plot. MacInnes is more expansive, her novels tend to be considerably longer than Ambler’s. She likes to take time setting the scene and situating her characters very precisely in their landscape, she also tells a romance as much as a drama. Nevertheless, MacInnes owes a clear debt to Ambler, both are exploring a common model of the cloak and dagger tale.

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.

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, books of the year, 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.