service during WWII for background to his next two novels, The Guns of Navarone (1957) and South by Java Head (1958), but whereas Ulysses was a war story, and indeed a thrilling one, Navarone and Java Head were thrillers with a wartime setting. They both had casts of soldiers or sailors (plus a few suspicious civilians) and there was a war going on, the setting being a clearly identified theatre of WWII – the Aegean Sea and the immediate aftermath of the fall of Singapore in 1942. But the plots contained something more than straightforward military actions – they were there, but there was something else going on beneath the surface. Is there a traitor among the central, usually small, group of characters? Is the ‘mission’ or ‘objective’ the real agenda of the plot? Will our heroes survive against the elements (the sea, mountains, storms, etc.) as well as the official enemy (the Germans and the Japanese) and the enemy within?
And with all these ‘MacGuffins’ (as Hitchcock would have called them) played out against a ticking-clock scenario, MacLean invented a template for the adventure thriller which he soon moved out of the wartime milieu with great success. MacLean was to return to WWII again later in his writing career and he was far from alone in using personal wartime experience and war stories as an entré into the thriller business.
South by Java Head, Fontana, 1961
Ice Cold in Alex, Pan, 1959
Christopher Landon’s best-known book remains Ice Cold in Alex (1957), for which he wrote the screenplay for the very successful film starring, inevitably, John Mills, which was certainly based on his own wartime experiences in the Medical Corps in the Western Desert. Landon’s debut, however, had been a gripping and much underrated spy thriller set in Tehran and wartime Persia where he also served, A Flag in the City, which was published in 1953, the year of Casino Royale.
Interestingly, one of the other stars of Ice Cold in Alex had already extended his acting career into thriller-writing based closely on his wartime experiences. Anthony Quayle (1913–1989) had served with the Special Operations Executive during the war, rising to the rank of major. An unsuccessful SOE operation ‘behind the lines’ in Albania gave him the basis for a novel, Eight Hours from England, which was published in 1945, and which reviewers said had ‘masculine appeal’. A second thriller, On Such a Night (which had a British wartime Cabinet minister suspected of treason), followed in 1947 and became a successful paperback in 1955, the year of HMS Ulysses. Quayle, later made Sir Anthony, wrote no more thrillers but went on to act in some memorable film thrillers with wartime settings, including The Guns of Navarone, Operation Crossbow and The Eagle Has Landed.
The year 1953 had also seen (from the same publisher as Casino Royale), the debut novel of Francis Clifford, a genuine and very modest war hero. Honour The Shrine was a brutally honest WWII story set in Burma – possibly autobiographical – about a commando raid to destroy a Japanese railway bridge over a river. (The rather more famous The Bridge Over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle had been published in French in 1952 but the English translation did not appear until 1954.) Clifford was to become one of the most respected – and yet strangely instantly-forgotten after his death – British thriller writers. He returned to the jungles of Burma in fiction with a gruesome and utterly gripping war novel in A Battle Is Fought to Be Won in 1960.4
The Second World War continued to kick-start thriller writers into taking up their typewriters for at least a quarter of a century after it formally ended. Brian Callison started his lengthy thriller-writing career with A Flock of Ships in 1970 (of which Alistair MacLean said: ‘The best war story I have ever read’)5 and in 1974 George Markstein moved from television to novel writing with The Cooler, set in England on the eve of D-Day.
For other writers, it may not have provided the initial impetus, but it certainly led to a breakthrough in terms of sales and a quantum leap in reputation for authors such as Colin Forbes (Tramp in Armour in 1969), Jack Higgins (The Eagle Has Landed, 1975, which was in fact his thirty-sixth thriller and certainly not his first wartime setting), and Ken Follett (Eye of the Needle, 1978).
In a way the template had been created during WWII itself and very early on as well. Hammond Innes, who was to enjoy huge success in the Fifties, had published four novels before the war, but it was his three war stories – Wreckers Must Breathe, The Trojan Horse (both 1940), and Attack Alarm (1941) – which were to lay the foundations of his post-war bestselling career. Three excellent thrillers in less than two years is an impressive enough feat for anyone, let alone someone serving as an anti-aircraft gunner during an actual war. The imaginative and, no doubt at the time, sensational, if not terrifying Wreckers Must Breathe, about a secret U-boat base in the coastal caves and tin mine workings of Cornwall, was supposedly written as a result of a holiday in Cornwall by Innes and his wife in the late summer of 1939. Both The Trojan Horse and Attack Alarm would have been thrillingly ‘topical’ to the British reading public now at war and although Innes – serving in the Royal Artillery – did not resume fiction writing until 1946, his reputation as a storyteller survived and his readership was waiting for him.
The damage and displacement left by the Second World War remained a central theme in British thrillers, its main legacy of course being the Nazis, the best fictional villains no writer ever had to invent. The swastika became a vital part of the tool-kit of every book jacket designer and no bookshop or library shelf was immune. Thirty years after the actual fall of the Third Reich, in 1975, British humourist Alan Coren published a collection of his funniest essays from Punch magazine under the title Golfing for Cats, having noted that as books about cats and golf sold well, this seemed as good a title as any. But Coren had also noticed how many bestsellers featured swastikas on their covers and so insisted that his publisher include one! The paperback cover showed a cat on a golf course where the pins marking the greens flew swastika flags.6
The European war against the Nazis and its aftermath formed, if not the setting, then the back story or main plot point to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of thrillers. Nazi war criminals, neo-Nazis, resurgent Nazis, Nazi secrets and secret weapons, works of art stolen by Nazis, missing Nazi submarines, and (very popular) hoards of Nazi gold, sometimes on board the missing submarines, were all grist to the thriller mill.
The first three ‘Johnny Fedora’ novels by Desmond Cory – Secret Ministry (1951), This Traitor, Death (1952), and Dead Man Falling (1953) – all had Nazis or Nazis-on-the-run as villains. In a later adventure, Undertow (1962), Fedora is involved in salvaging secret Nazi documents (before his Russian KGB opponents can get them) from a sunken submarine off the southern coast of Spain. James Bond himself had to tackle a megalomaniac Nazi bent on attacking London with an upgraded V-2 rocket in the form of Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker in 1955, only a decade after the real thing.7 In 1958, John Blackburn’s A Sour Apple Tree suggested an evil legacy put in place by a William Joyce-like character, an English traitor who had made radio broadcasts for the Nazis (and escaped in a U-boat). Geoffrey Jenkins’ 1959 debut A Twist of Sand revolved around the wartime destruction of a top-secret U-boat off Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. In Watcher in the Shadows (1960), Geoffrey Household had his hero, who is mistaken for a Nazi war criminal, being hunted across the idyllic English countryside by a vengeful former leader of the French Resistance.8 Geoffrey Household being Geoffrey Household, and the author of the classic pre-war thriller Rogue Male, the result is something akin to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral being staged in St Mary Mead. In 1961, under the pen-name Martin Fallon, an early Jack Higgins thriller called The Testament of Caspar Schultz revolved around the hunt for authentic missing Nazis and in 1962, Philip Purser’s debut thriller Peregrination 22
