booklit

After a lengthy hiatus from reading, I thought it best to reaquaint myself to books with something pacy that would have the pages turning themselves with gleeful abandon. A thriller, then. The only issue I have with many of the thrillers I’ve sampled over the years is that the writer is never any good. Yes, they sell loads, but their style hovers at such a surface level what counts for characterisation appears to be the colour of a person’s hair and how many pounds they weigh.

Marking his centenery, the recent reissue of Eric Ambler’s early spy novels has come at just the right time and solved my predicament. What’s more, I don’t know how long they’ve been out of print, but they have returned with what I consider one of the highest forms of recommendation: being a Penguin Modern Classic. Graham Greene considered Ambler “our best thriller writer” and Alfred Hitchcock was also a fan. All this in mind, I turned to Uncommon Danger (1937), Ambler’s second novel - also his first serious thriller.

At the heart of the novel is the misadventures of Kenton, a British journalist working overseas, who has recently had the misfortune of losing money playing poker-dice and landed himself in debt. When he’s introduced he is boarding a train from Germany to Austria so as to visit an old Jewish friend, who he once helped leave Munich a few years before, in the hope of borrowing money to pay off said debt. However, while travelling, another passenger offers him the chance to earn some cash by taking some securities across the border :

At that moment Kenton ceased for a time to be an impartial recorder of events and became a participator. Three hundred marks! A hundred owing to the Havas man left two hundred. Two hundred! Enough to get back to Berlin with plenty to spare. Brown-Eyes might be anything but what he claimed, and he, Kenton, might be heading straight for a German prison, but it was worth the risk - for three hundred marks.

It goes without saying that the high fee and the dodgy request invites trouble, and where Uncommon Danger picks up points is in its use of a character like Kenton. With a spy novel the expectation is there that the main character will be an agent of one side going up against the forces of the enemy - and Ian Fleming’s lifeless Bond novels spring to mind here - but this it-could-happen-to-anyone approach to international espionage works well to bring us into a murky underworld where, away from the security of governments and friendly agents, the predicament becomes truly a frightening prospect, for anyone can stumble into it.

The situation that Kenton stumbles into is a plot to install a Fascist government in Romania, an intention outlined in an opening prologue that shows a board meeting of the Pan-Eurasian Petroleum Company in London as they conspire to gain access to the country’s oilfields. Of course, men in boardrooms tend not to involve themselves explicitly, as is explained later in the novel:

‘You see, your business man desires the end, but dislikes the means. He likes an easy conscience. He likes to sit in his office and deal honestly with other business men. That is why Saridza is necessary. For at some point or other in the amazingly complicated business structure of the world, there is always dirty work to be done.

It would be unfair to label Saridza as the villain of the piece, as the world Ambler writes about is never so black and white. He is, however, the agent of his conspiring paymasters and is seen throughout Uncommon Danger doing their dirty work. One such task is retrieving the aforementioned securities from Kenton, something which, given that he’s not a part of the over arching plot, should easy enough. In situations like this, however, Ambler shows he can add some dimension to his characters in that they dictate the novel’s plot rather than blindly adhere to any preconceived storyline

Kenton hesitated. His first impulse was to give the man the information he wanted and get out of the place. He glanced at the two men. […] In their eyes, watching him intently, there was a hint of amused expectation. Then, rather to his surprise, he became conscious of a new and unfamiliar sensation. For the first time in his adult life someone was trying to coerce him with threats into making a decision, and his mind was reacting with cold, angry, obstinate refusal.

Kenton’s hot-headedness leads him back and forth through a landscape of thrills, continuously moving across borders and between the arms of Saridza and a cell of Russian agents keen on preventing the Fascist plot. The only time the pace lets up is when Ambler opts to let his characters talk, at length, about the geo-political landscape -

‘Until nineteen thirty-six,’ he said, ‘Roumania could be summed up politically in one word - Titulescu. Titulesco’s foreign policy was based on friendship with Soviet Russia. The Little Entente was the first link in the chain round Germany. The last link was the Franco-Soviet pact.  But there is reaction in the air of Roumania as there is in every other European country. With Fascism in Italy, National-Socialism in Germany, the Croix de Feu in France, Rexism in Belgium, and Nationalism in Spain, it was hardly likely that Roumania would escape the contagion.’

- a technique that would typically be unforgivable just for the sheer clunky way of forcing exposition into the story, but which helps here, perhaps because it talks of an interwar period with a Europe long since altered and inconceivable today.

In writing Uncommon Danger, Ambler has certainly challenged my concerns over spy novels. His characters are full-blooded enough to be believed, without ever being larger-than-life, and his casting of big business at the heart of the novel takes the focus away from espionage between nation states with agents defecting all over the shop. The prose may not be anything to sing the praises of, it’s all about the pace here, but it feels real, and this being only Ambler’s first serious thriller, he hits the ground running. Fitting, really, for an entertaining little thriller.

After a lack-lustre introduction to James Bond in Casino Royale, a book with two memorable scenes, one for being an overlong dialogue explaining the ins and outs of baccarat, I turned to the next adventure for the British spy, Live And Let Die, hoping for something more in the way of action. And with the quote on the back of my edition from the Times Literary Supplement stating that it “contains passages which for sheer excitement have not been surpassed by any modern writer” it seemed as if the book may deliver. Alas, no.

Following on from his mission in Casino Royale, Bond is sent to America to investigate the appearance of gold coins onto the market believed to be from the pirate Henry Morgan’s lost fortune. The reconnaisance done so far suggests a powerful criminal nicknamed Mr Big may be behind this with an operation spanning New York to the Florida Keys and beyond into Jamaica. Bond, with the assistance of his CIA counterpart, Felix Leiter, set out to uncover the seemingly untouchable Mr Big’s operation, an added incentive for Bond being that Mr Big is a known SMERSH operative, the Soviet group that tried to kill him in Casino Royale.

Getting at Mr Big, however, is not an easy task. He controls the black population by fear, using voodoo superstitions to make people believe he is the zombie of Baron Samedi, also keeping a Haitian woman named Solitaire prisoner for her fortune-telling skills. The men on the street form a huge network of eyes , whispering down the nearest telephone line anything that may be of interest to Mr Big. And so it goes that Bond, with Leiter, attempt to find Mr Big and face a series of scenes and scuffles that raise the stakes each time until the final endgame between Bond and the man from SMERSH on a Jamaican reef.

While it all sounds exciting the delivery is certainly not. The prose is very matter of fact, telling the reader things rather than letting us get a sense of the scene. There’s no real connection to our hero as Fleming keeps a reasonable distance most of the time, opting to let us know exactly what Bond is thinking rather than give him any real character, making him rather wooden. It also seems, when it comes to description, that Fleming has a limited stock of phrases as shown by Bond’s repeated “comma of black hair” and two black men’s pale skin being like some variation of a week-old corpse in a river. Further adding to the misery of reading Live And Let Die is the data dumps Fleming slips in over some topic or other, examples being a lengthy page from a book explaining voodoo, the history of Henry Morgan, or the nature of random fish which Bond luckily knows about:

He chose a tank containing a six-inch Scorpion Fish. He knew something of the habits of this deadly species and in particular that they do not strike, but poison only on contact.

That said, along with the occasional spot on verb or adjective dotted through the book, there is one particular standout passage - lengthy too - amongst all the exposition and clunky prose regarding fate in the context of air travel that merits mention and a sample:

No, when the stresses are too great for the tired metal, when the ground mechanic who checks the de-icing equipment is crossed in love and skimps his job, way back in London, Idlewild, Gander, Montreal; when those or many things happen, then the little warm room with propellers in front falls straight down out of the sky into the sea or on to the land, heavier than air, fallible, vain. And the forty little heavier-than-air people, fallible within the plane’s fallibility, vain within its larger vanity, fall down with it and make little holes in the land or little splashes in the sea. Which is anyway their destiny, so why worry?

There’s not much to the characters in the novel. While Bland, James Bland may be a more suitable monicker for our hero, the others don’t fare much better, all having a rough two dimensions of personality, all lacking depth. Heaven forbid we should expect both action and depth of a book! While Mr Big walks around spouting his evil mastermind plans and his network observe and say what they see, Solitaire simply wants to escape with them and wants to shack up with Bland…I mean Bond. Miss Moneypenny, albeit a minimal player in the opening scenes, is simply passed off as “the desirable Miss Moneypenny”. And the dialogue isn’t worth dwelling on, it being proper English for our hero, info dumps from Command, and heavily accented slang for the black community.

When it comes down to it, Live And Let Die is an action novel, plain and simple. It’s not too dated (with the exception perhaps of the overused “negroes”) and still stands up to modern scrutiny but has become a bit of a cliché in the fifty-plus years since its publication. Namely characters called Mr Big, the gleeful detailing of impending elaborate murders, and the sheer patronisation of lines recapping the story so far, such as “the end of the dangerous road that had started three weeks before in the fog of London”, and it’s all just so predictable. I certainly didn’t find the same level of excitement that the TLS reviewer did and think that the action was far too much a catalogue of events without feeling to give the book the vital energy the storyline required. Live And Let Die? Live and Don’t Try!