I've got a bunch of new eBay auctions up and running, including something quite special:
Volume 4 No. 24 of Science Fiction Adventures, published in January 1962. What's so darn special about it? Well it features the first appearance of J.G. Ballard's dystopian classic The Drowned World, which debuted in this issue of Science Fiction Adventures months before it was published in hardback by Gollancz – making this effectively the true first edition. (See this post for more.) It's a pretty scarce publication, with lovely Brian Lewis cover art illustrating Ballard's tale, and it's got a low starting price, so someone could potentially nab a bargain.
All of my latest eBay offerings can be found here:
Existential Ennui on eBay
Or by clicking on each picture for the individual auctions...
Among them a 1964 first edition (later printing) of The Man Who Sold Death by James Munro (alias Callan creator James Mitchell)...
....a 1989 first edition of Quiller KGB by Adam Hall...
and a 2016 omnibus of Avengers: Time Runs Out, which collects the climax to Jonathan Hickman's brilliant Avengers run. Quite a mix of books, then, plus there are some others I've offered before – some of them signed – but which now have lower starting prices. Have at it.
As we reach the end of the first week of posts about my – and Rachel and little Edie's – recent holiday to Suffolk, and with a second and possibly even (heaven forfend) a third week of such posts in prospect, it occurs to me in passing that I may be trying the patience of even the most ardent and steadfast of Existential Ennui readers with this absurdly self-indulgent endeavour, which, if the missives thus far are anything to go by, and the odd book-focused interlude aside, will continue to consist largely of a succession of pictures of me and a supposedly cute baby in front of a variety of secondhand bookshops in whichever godforsaken Suffolk town or village I've dragged Rachel and Edie to on the pretence of it being picturesque.
Still: in for a penny, eh?
So then. Where were we? Halesworth, that's where, the base location for the week's holiday, from which locale we ranged far and wide over the eastern bit of Suffolk, in the first instance to the seaside town of Southwold, where, sadly, there are no secondhand bookshops (although my good friend and colleague Roly Allen, who's very familiar with the area, assures me there used to be about four), and then to the similarly coastal but not quite as quaint Aldeburgh, where there is a single secondhand bookshop:
Reed Books 2. Apparently there was at one point a Reed Books 1, but it didn't seem to exist by the time we got there – a shame, because while Edie nabbed herself a Noddy in Reed Books 2 (the first book in the series, Noddy Goes to Toyland), there wasn't anything for me, and I suspect most serious secondhand book collectors would struggle to find much of interest either. Unlike the next bookshop we ventured to:
Chapel Books, in the little village of Westleton, about six miles north of Aldeburgh. As the shop's name suggests, it's based in an old chapel, with shelves arranged in a pleasingly haphazard fashion around the hall, and the occasional charming offer of tea from the proprietor (although it was a bit too hot the day we were there to take him up on it). Even though there was only a small crime fiction section, tucked away in the far corner, there was still plenty for both me and Edie to look at:
Lots of children's books, evidently, but also a good range of non-fiction, vintage paperbacks, science fiction, and a decent holding of modern firsts. I eventually emerged with three books:
Er, and a baby (Edie, in case there's any confusion). One of those books will form the basis of the next post, but the other two were:
A first Corgi paperback printing of Manning O'Brine's The Hungry Killer, published in 1956 (the same year as the Hammond hardback edition), cover art by John Richards (who also did the cover art for my 1955 Corgi paperback of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man), and:
A 1955 Heinemann first edition of Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up, dust jacket design by the great Val Biro.
O'Brine has been on my radar for a while now – indeed I have a first edition of his 1970 novel Crambo, the second in his three-book Mills espionage series, waiting to be blogged about. The Hungry Killer is part of an earlier, longer spy series starring Michael The O'Kelly – the fifth book in the series in fact, and notably scarce: there are only three copies in any edition on AbeBooks at present, none of them the Corgi paperback.
Trevor, on the other hand, is probably better known round these here parts under another of his aliases: Adam Hall, author of the nineteen Quiller spy novels (and one standalone thriller). However, The Big Pick-Up isn't an espionage work: like another Trevor novel I blogged about back in 2011 (The Killing Ground, 1956), it's a World War II tale, in this instance set during the Dunkirk evacuation; there's a review of it over at the Broken Trails blog.
Jacket designer Val Biro I've written about numerous times, and his wrapper for The Big Pick-Up is another cracker, that big, bold but elegant hand-lettering standing in marked contrast to the freely daubed gouache paint behind. Needless to say, it's now taken its place in my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1960s and 1960s gallery, alongside eleven other fine examples of Val's work (and taking the number of covers on the page up to a remarkable 111).
As for the third book I bought, and why it's special enough to warrant its own post: all will be revealed soon.
On to the second of two posts on Adam Hall – the Quiller spy thriller-writing alias of Elleston Trevor – memorabilia. And having showcased some of the items that Trevor's son, JP, has for sale, I thought I'd showcase my own Adam Hall item – which, before you ask, is most definitely not for sale, and which is related to this:
The British first edition of The Volcanoes of San Domingo, published by Collins in 1963. This is the first book Trevor wrote under the Hall nom de plume, before deploying the moniker, from 1965 to 1996, to pen the nineteen books which comprise the series starring secret agent Quiller. The Volcanoes of San Domingo has nothing to do with Quiller, however, at least in terms of plot: it's a standalone thriller set in the fictional South American country of Aguador, where Transocean Airlines head of London station Paul Rayner is sent to investigate the circumstances of a TOA airliner crash off the coast of the capital of Aguador, San Domingo, and how the captain of the plane has been spotted in the country when all on board were reportedly killed. Stylistically, though, despite being written in the third person rather than the Quiller novels' first, it's clearly cut from the same cloth. Though the locale is fictional, Hall's evocative description brings the place to sweltering, sticky life, and certain phrases and action sequences presage Quiller: a couple of appearances of Quiller catchphrase "no go", for example, or a tense knife fight narratively deconstructed – slowed down and broken down into its bruising, bloody constituent parts.
The jacket design of the Collins edition is credited to Bryan Lubrani, who also painted covers – usually credited as Brian rather than Bryan – for books by Charles Kearey, Mary Scott and Chester Alan. He's virtually forgotten these days, but even so, he was the main reason (the other one being I've enjoyed the Quillers I've read and was intrigued to find out what the first Adam Hall novel was like) I decided to hunt down a copy of The Volcanoes of San Domingo. Or rather, trying to learn his name was the main reason – because I'd come into possession of this:
The original artwork for the jacket, which I acquired from David Schutte. Painted in acrylic – or possibly poster paint – on board at a surprising four or five times the size of the printed version, it lacks the front cover and spine text, which was obviously added by a designer at Collins. But it also lacks a signature or any other kind of credit; the pencil writing at the bottom lists the book's title, author, publisher and year, but not the artist; while the label on the back:
lists almost everything under the sun other than the identity of the illustrator. David Schutte didn't know who the artist was, and I couldn't find the information online either. The only thing for it, then, was to try and locate a copy of the Collins edition and hope that it carried a cover credit on the jacket flap. Unfortunately, finding a cheapish, decent-ish copy – not ex-library, in other words – with a dust jacket in the UK wasn't as straightforward as I'd hoped, and I actually ended up asking JP Trevor if he had a copy he could check for me (he didn't). But in the end I found one, and Bryan Lubrani was credited on the front flap. Phew. Mystery solved.
Even though Mr. Lubrani isn't exactly the most well-remembered of cover artists, I still like this piece a lot; it's now framed and hanging on a wall at home. Is it the greatest cover ever created? Not by a long chalk;
the likes of Val Biro and Denis McLoughlin were creating more striking dust jacket art around this same period (see the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s permanent page for examples by those and other artists). But it is nicely painted, and it's significant, in that
it illustrates the first book Elleston Trevor wrote as Hall. Moreover, it's representative of the way covers were created back then – partly the materials used and the time taken, but also, and more vitally, the way that, much as Biro and McLoughlin did with the novels they designed wrappers for, Bryan Lubrani evidently read The Volcanoes of San Domingo. That's plainly Paul Rayner on the front of the jacket, nursing the injury he receives whilst shark fishing early in the story – a scene depicted in blue in the bottom right corner – while the blade-wielding boy on the spine is Paul's "Levantine" opponent in the knife fight two-thirds of the way into the novel.
These days, cover designers rarely get to read the novels they create the covers for; indeed they're lucky if they even get a brief synopsis, which is part of the reason why we see so many formulaic Photoshopped image library covers – other reasons being it's cheaper to design covers that way, and marketing departments seem unable to disabuse themselves of the restricting notion that certain covers should look a certain way – i.e. a man running into the distance on an urban street for thrillers, or foggy, "found", arty photographs on literary works. That such an, in its day, essentially un-extraordinary cover as Lubrani's should seem so extraordinary by comparison is, for me, very telling. It reminds us – reminds me, anyway – of what we've lost, I think. Not necessarily hand-painted and -lettered covers and jackets – although more of those would be welcome (and the odd individual, such as Lewes-based designer Neil Gower, is doing their best to keep that tradition alive) – or covers that explicitly illustrate particular scenes from a novel; but covers conceived and created by talented artists and designers, not sales and marketing departments; covers where those artists and designers have been granted the opportunity to read the book before making its cover.
I suppose some designers may baulk at that arduous task. To them I say: if an author has given over a year (or more) towards writing a book, the least you can do is spend a few days reading the damn thing. Ultimately, lovingly designed covers will be to the benefit of those of us who'd like to see the physical book not only survive, but flourish. (And how much more desirable is that in the wake of the woman whose Kindle was wiped – and yes, eventually restored, but that's beside the point – by Amazon?) If that is to happen, there has to be a reason for it to happen, and it strikes me that beautiful design – along with great production and printing and binding – is as good a reason as any.
So then. Campaign for Proper Cover Design, anyone?
I've a couple of posts on Adam Hall – alias Elleston Trevor, thriller writer and, under the Hall alias, creator of the Quiller spy series – planned for this week, both of them to do with memorabilia. I'll be unveiling my personal piece of Hall ephemera later in the week, but first: earlier this year, quite out of the blue, I was surprised and delighted to receive an email from Elleston Trevor's son, JP Trevor. JP had spotted one of my posts on Hall/Quiller – my review of the second Quiller outing, The Ninth Directive, I believe, which I own in signed first – and wondered if I might know of a good place online to sell a number of Hall/Quiller items: books, posters, cuttings, photos; notes for the final Quiller book, Quiller Balalaika, which JP helped his dying father finish; even memorabilia related to the 1966 big screen Quiller adaptation, The Quiller Memorandum, and the 1965 film version of Trevor's novel The Flight of the Phoenix.
I told JP I'd ask around on his behalf, but also offered to post something myself on the items. JP agreed, and so I'm pleased to be able to present below the full list of pieces for sale. It's an extraordinary
collection of Adam Hall memorabilia – Quillerbilia, if you will (or even memoraquillera... no, perhaps not) – and
this is the first time any of it has been seen online; the photographs scattered about this post were kindly taken by JP especially for me, which makes them something of an Existential Ennui exclusive. Anyone interested in any of the pieces or seeking more information can contact me on the Existential Ennui email address, and I'll be sure to forward all inquiries and questions to JP.
QUILLER'S ORIGINAL BLACK BELT (ADAM HALL'S)
BALALAIKA A4 PLOT BOOK – 62 PAGES OF NOTES BY ADAM HALL
23 PAGE ORIGINAL QUILLER FORMAT
QUILLER'S RUN JOVE PUBLISHING POSTER WITH CUTOUT DRAGON
QUILLER JOVE PUBLISHING POSTER
QUILLER KGB WH ALLEN/STAR PUBLISHING LARGE POSTER
QUILLER BALALAIKA ORIGINAL OUTLINE
SIGNED A4 B/W ADAM HALL
QUILLER LONDON ODEON MARQUIS A4
ADAM HALL & SENTA BERGER AT LONDON PREMIERE
ORIGINAL QUILLER MEMBERSHIP ACETATE TEMPLATE A4
FIGHTING STARS MAGAZINE, MINT CONDITION, 4 PAGE ARTICLE ON ADAM HALL
21 PAGE ELLESTON TREVOR'S ORIGINAL LAST RITES OUTLINE
VARIOUS ORIGINAL NEWSPAPER CUTTINGS & PHOTOS
And:
ELLESTON TREVOR'S PERSONAL COPY OF THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX SHOOTING SCRIPT: a one-off edition made by Twentieth Century Fox for Elleston Trevor, plus sixty-four black-and-white photographs taken by Trevor on location in Arizona, and A4 cast photos, nine of them – including James Stewart and Richard Attenborough – signed.
For the grand finale of this series of posts on spy novelist Jeremy Duns – whose third spy thriller starring British double-agent Paul Dark, The Moscow Option, was published in the UK on Thursday (it'll be out in the States on 29 May in an omnibus edition alongside the first two Paul Dark novels) – something rather special: an exclusive Q&A with Mr. Duns. The interview was conducted over email earlier this week, and those familiar with Existential Ennui will doubtless be unsurprised to learn that the questions are very much books-orientated – partly because books – reading, collecting, publishing – are indeed the focus of this blog – and Jeremy is, after all, an author – but also because I believe that what we read as a child and what we read as adults can offer insights into who we are as people. In that respect, then, I feel Jeremy's answers are quite revealing, as he discusses the books he read as a kid, his schooldays, and where and how he discovered spy fiction.
But we also examine the Paul Dark novels, along with where Jeremy writes, how he writes, the music he listens to whilst writing, and his research for his books – and not only that, but Jeremy kindly provided some specially photographed shots of his book collection, which you'll see dotted about the interview. So, without further ado – except to say thank you to Jeremy for being so forthcoming and generous with his time – on with the interview...
NICK JONES: What is your earliest reading memory? Either being read to, or reading for yourself?
JEREMY DUNS: My earliest reading memory is of my mother reading me I See Sam
and Dr, Seuss books. She was an English teacher so she was keen to teach
me to read early. My earliest memory of reading for myself is
discovering a cupboard at home that had boxes of spare books from my
mother's class. One box was filled with pristine copies of a book called
Emil and the Detectives, and I took it out and sat on the carpet and
read through the whole thing,
entranced. I don't remember much about the book except for that feeling
of being swept away in a story, and wanting to read more as a result.
Can you recall the first book you bought yourself? Or at least the earliest one you can remember – what it was, where you bought it, why you bought it?
I feel I should remember this, but I don't. It might have been Curtain
by Agatha Christie. When I was eleven or twelve I started reading Christie's
novels because my parents had a few, and I quickly became addicted to
them and began seeking them out. I've never been a book collector, but
at that age I was determined to read all of Christie's work, and she had
written dozens of books. I didn't read all of them, but I read all of
the Marples and Poirots, and Curtain was the last Poirot to read. I loved Christie's twists, and Curtain didn't disappoint.
I did a lot of my reading as a kid at the local public library. I know you grew up in Nigeria and Malaysia and so forth, but I believe you went to boarding school in England. Did you have access to a library? Were you an avid reader?
I was a total bookworm as a boy – I had enormous round glasses and
looked like Harry Potter. I went to prep school at eight, a place called
Horris Hill in Berkshire, and one of its alumni is Richard Adams. I
remember being told that the seeds of Watership Down had been
sown at the school when he told other boys stories about the rabbits on
the nearby down after lights out in his dormitory. I didn't tell stories
after lights out, but I did read long into the night with my torch
under my blanket, usually things like Jennings and Darbishire and Just William,
then Agatha Christie when I got a little older. At thirteen I went to
Winchester – after I'd talked at great length in my interview about
Hercule Poirot – and there was a library in the boarding house that
seemed to have stepped out of Tom Brown's Schooldays. It had a
copy of that book, which I read, as well as P. G. Wodehouse, John Buchan
and dozens of comic legal thrillers by Henry Cecil, which I chomped
through. It also had several paperbacks with distinctive yellow spines
and the name of the writer in thick black lettering: Dennis Wheatley. I
was too young for his occult stuff, and have never really been
interested in horror anyway, but I loved his Gregory Sallust spy
thrillers, despite their rather dubious politics. I reread them a few
years ago and it was like travelling back in time to my fifteeen-year-old
self.
Incidentally, I thought it was interesting that Song of Treason, your second Paul Dark thriller, hinges in part on a past, painful humiliation at boarding school. Was that informed by personal experience?
I don't have much in common with Paul Dark – I can't kill someone with
my bare hands, even if they're guilty of plagiarism. But I realized when
writing Free Agent that his background would most likely mean
he went to a public school. As I went to one, I thought it made sense to
capitalize on that and use what I knew about its peculiar ways and
customs to bring him more to life. I enjoyed my schooldays, but I was
fascinated by aspects of it, such as the power prefects held – I
remember there was a rumour that under the previous housemaster the
prefects had occasionally run amok and destroyed people's possessions
overnight. I watched Another Country at school, and felt that the
basic dynamics of life in such a place hadn't changed for decades. I
didn't realize until years later that Julian Mitchell had gone to
Winchester, so there were probably reasons it seemed so familiar.
When
it came to Song of Treason, I thought it wouldn't be too
difficult to insert some of my knowledge into an earlier era without it
seeming anachronistic – it had already seemed anachronistic when I
experienced it. My own Notions test was unremarkable, but it had quite a
build-up, which I suppose is vital with any initiation ceremony. You
heard, and imagined, all sorts of things. The parts about waiting in the
library in his dressing-gown and being disoriented as he is led around
the house are from my own memories. Much of the rest is imagined, and
some is from hearing others' experiences. There was an incident with
someone getting Deep Heat in his eyes, and although it wasn't damaging
in the long term, at the time it seemed monumental. I tried to take
these experiences and make them real for Paul Dark and the other
characters in an earlier time, in a
more dramatic way. The idea of someone carrying over humiliation at
school into adult life is not uncommon in thrillers (or perhaps life),
but I thought the 'local knowledge' I had would make it more vivid and
interesting. Although it might not get me invited back for Sports' Day.
While we're on the subject of Song of Treason: you also put Paul Dark through a torture sequence, in the grand tradition of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, Len Deighton's The Ipcress File, Adam Hall's (alias Elleston Trevor) The Berlin Memorandum and others. Bit of a weird question, but were you keen to have your own torture sequence in one of your novels? And how do you think your one stacks up?
There's a great conversation between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming
that was broadcast by the BBC in 1958, in which a rather sozzled
Chandler asked Fleming why his novels always included a torture scene.
Fleming replied that he grew up reading Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu and
Sapper's Bulldog Drummond, and that in those stories it was traditional
for the villain to capture the hero and drug him or make him suffer in
one way or another. My first exposure to this sort of scene was in
Dennis Wheatley's Sallust novels, where there's a recurring villain, a
senior Gestapo officer called Grauber, and the torture scenes were often
horrific. I had written an interrogation of sorts towards the end of Free Agent,
but I thought it was time I had a proper spy thriller torture scene. It
fitted into some of my research about the political situation in Italy
at the time, but I
also felt that a torture sequence that played with public school
initiation ceremonies would make sense for the novel. I'm proud of the
scene, but I don't think it compares to the ones in those three books,
of course – they're classics of the genre.
Back to books and reading. What were you reading as you entered your teens? For me, books took a bit of a back seat for a while as I got more into music. Was it a similar thing for you? I know we like some of the same bands...
I did get into music a lot more, but I carried on reading. As well as
Agatha Christie and Henry Cecil, I remember reading John Christopher's Sword of the Spirits
trilogy, which I loved. This was in the library, I suppose because it
was set around Winchester, which made it more interesting, of course.
But it also had a fantastic twist, which I'll spoil now so be warned: it
seems like it's set in the past, in some Arthurian England, but partway
through you discover that it is in fact set in a post-apocalyptic
future, where the priests are secretly controlling technology. I guess I
like twists. As well as Dennis Wheatley, I read a lot of Alistair
MacLean, Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins. Jeffrey
Archer, of course: copies of Kane and Abel were handed round like samizdat
(and always seemed to open on the same page). There were a lot of
thrillers from the Sixties and Seventies floating around: Hammond
Innes, Geoffrey Jenkins, Duncan Kyle, that sort of thing. In my late
teens, I read a lot of Julian Barnes and Iain Banks, and became more
interested in literary fiction.
I read in an interview that you didn't really discover spy fiction until you were in your twenties, when you chanced upon some spy novels in an Antwerp bookshop on a journalistic assignment. Were they paperbacks? Can you remember what they were?
I did read spy novels when I was younger – my parents had a rather obscure novel, The Left-Handed Sleeper
by Ted Willis, which I enjoyed, and after that I discovered Len Deighton and John le Carré. But I did a degree in English literature and
read very few thrillers at university. So when I walked into that
bookshop in Antwerp I hadn't read any spy novels for a few years, and
wasn't especially interested in them. But there was a whole bookcase
of second-hand thrillers in English, and a lot of them were spy novels. I
picked up The Quiller Memorandum by Adam Hall. The title
was vaguely familiar and I saw it had been made into a film. It cost
next to nothing. I picked out three or four other books – I don't
remember what they were – bought them, and went to do an interview with a
fashion designer. I was impressed by The Quiller
Memorandum, but it didn't blow me away. But I found another
secondhand bookshop in Brussels that had several more books in the
series, and The Tango Briefing had me hooked. I'd never read
anything like it. I'd never imagined a spy novel could be so exciting
but so beautifully written. So then I started reading a lot of spy
fiction.
I can usually recall where I bought the books that are most important to me. Is it the same for you? Where are some of the places you've bought books?
I lived in Brussels for several years, and there's a wonderful
second-hand bookshop there called Pêle-Mêle – anyone who knows me has
heard me rhapsodize about it. It used to have an extraordinary
collection of secondhand thrillers in English, but I suspect it doesn't
anymore as several hundred of them are now in my bookshelves: sorry! I
just cleaned the place out over the course of a few years. I mainly buy
from
second-hand bookshops. I always visit the Charing Cross Road area when
I'm in London, although the pickings are a lot slimmer now. I'll stop at
any flea market, in any country, and check their selection. There are a
few good places in Stockholm, where I live now, but these days I do
most of my book shopping online, which is less interesting but means I
get what I'm looking for. Physical bookshops are for the discoveries.
I've got a silly amount of guidebooks I've bought 'just in case': if I
ever want to write a thriller set in Mauritius in 1976, I'm prepared.
There are a couple of fantastic second-hand bookshops in Rome, which I
mention in the author's note for Song of Treason: I remember being in the back room of one over a decade ago and finding a copy of Encounter
from 1965. It had an article in it by John le Carré in which he wrote
about James Bond being a capitalist hyena and ended by suggesting that
the Russian Bond was on his
way. That was an important find for me, and I still read the article
every now and again to remember the effect it had on me.
I'm reading Adam Hall's The Ninth Directive at the moment, which I believe is your favourite Quiller. Why is that, do you think? And when did you first read it?
The Ninth Directive probably ties with The Tango Briefing for my favourite spy novel full stop. I read both in 2000, I think, one after the other. I love The Ninth Directive
because it's both very pulpy in terms of plot – assassinate the
assassin – but simultaneously seems extremely authentic. While reading
the novel, you really believe that this is how a secret agent would
think and act. It predates The Day of the Jackal by five years,
but has much of that feeling of peeking inside a hidden world. I loved
the way the target is never named, making it almost an elemental
struggle to survive. Beyond that, I don't know... Sometimes you just
connect with a book, or the voice of an author. I've connected with
many, but with Adam Hall it was like a jolt of lightning through me.
One thing that occurs to me as a possible reason for why you like The Ninth Directive is the setting: Thailand. You grew up partly in Asia – do you think that might be why the novel had such an impact on you? I've never been to Thailand but Hall's vivid description of the place strikes me as authentic.
I guess part of my love of The Ninth Directive is due to the
location, although I've never visited Thailand. Then again, I don't
think Hall/Trevor had, either! I was surprised to read an interview with him in which he revealed that he very rarely wrote about locations he
had visited, because he found he lost the magic when he did that. Quite
an astonishing thing to do, really. For the most part I think it's
impossible to tell, and he makes locations come alive. Hall was an
expatriate for much of his life, so even in the Seventies some of his
characters are from an England he had long left behind – as I've
spent most of my life as an expatriate, perhaps I identified with that
feeling in his writing as well.
Which of the books you own are you most fond of? I'm guessing there might be a battered paperback or two you prize, so do please tell me about those. But are there any first editions you;re pleased to own? Am I right in thinking you own perhaps the scarcest Adam Hall book, the final Quiller, Quiller Balalaika?
I own two copies of Quiller Balalaika, but they're less rare
than when I bought them. I have a couple of first edition Quillers which
are dear to me because they were gifts, but although I love books, and
often love the designs of them and the feel of them, I'm not usually
that sentimental about them as physical objects. I cherish books that
have been given to me, and am lucky enough to have a few from other
writers: The Bright Adventure by Geoffrey Rose, Lights in The Sky by Philip Purser, Silver by my friend Steven Savile... I sometimes pinch myself that I own these.
All the books I got in that Antwerp shop were paperbacks, incidentally, as are both my editions of Balalaika
(the same one, with the jacket art featuring Quiller holding, clanger
of clangers, a gun). Most of my books are paperbacks, in fact. Something
I just remembered is that I managed to persuade the editor of the
magazine I worked for in Belgium to let me do a feature article on
Pêle-Mêle, so I toddled off to interview the owner. And after we had
chatted away for a bit he led me through locked doors down to the
basement, where there was a whole room stacked floor to ceiling
with second-hand English paperback thrillers – their overflow room. It
was like Ali Baba's cave. So I didn't just clear out the shop of every
last Household, Hall, Hone and so on, I also raided their secret stash. It was
geektastic.
Where do you usually write? Do you have a study at home in Stockholm?
Yes, I have a small study that is basically a computer, a leather chair,
a sofa-bed and several bookshelves. I have a few small objects about.
Adam Hall's son sent me a Soviet militia badge a couple of years ago,
and I quite often pick that up and
fiddle with it. It's my executive toy!
I'm assuming you write on a computer. Have you always done so? I
actually wrote on a typewriter when I started out as a music journalist
twenty years ago, and when I switched to a computer I found it changed
the way I wrote – instead of writing from beginning to end, I'd write
bits of an article and then sort of stitch it together. I guess what I'm
asking here is, how do you write your novels? Plot them out? Write from
start to finish and make it up as you go along? Or write bits from
across the novel and put them together?
I mainly write on a computer, and always have done, although I also
carry a notebook with me to jot ideas down. I don't have a set method,
but I do tend to write a short synopsis and that gives me a basic
structure. I try to figure out what sort of mood I want the book to
have, what kind of book I want it to be. With The Moscow Option,
I knew going in that I wanted it to be set in the Soviet Union and the
Åland archipelago, that it would take place in winter, and that it would
involve the threat of nuclear war. I wanted the mood to be bleak, but
frantic. I also had some ideas of set scenes, so I started writing them
in basic form first and then worked from there – I wrote part of the
ending first. My structure tends to change as I go along, as I discover
that ideas I liked don't work or think of something better. I find if
I've worked everything out too much in advance it starts to feel stale. I
like to surprise myself, and that involves some tricks to keep myself
on my toes. So it's a mix between planning in advance and improvising.
Do you listen to music whilst writing? What, if so?
Yes, I almost always write to music, as I find silence too imposing. I
put a lot of thought and time into what music I write to, in fact. Some
writers obsess about Moleskine notebooks or where they place their pencil
sharpener, and I guess this is my little obsession. I find it difficult
to write to music with lyrics, so I mainly listen to instrumental
music, or music in which the lyrics are fairly minimal and so are less
likely to distract me from my work. I love Leonard Cohen, for instance,
but I wouldn't try to write while listening to him. I've got several
playlists that are 200-400 songs long so I don't feel like I'm listening
to a loop and I also refresh them quite frequently for that
reason. The basis for most of them is electronica, often taken from
compilation albums with 'Ibiza' or 'Chill' in the title. Particular
favourites are Waiwan, The Flashbulb, Bliss, Snooze, and two collections
called The Jazz House Sessions and Chill House Sensation,
both of which sound absurd but which work very well for me. I find I'm
enjoying the music, but can also stay sharply focussed. I also throw in
some oddities, especially stuff from the Sixties that will help me feel
like I've stumbled into the score of the book I'm writing: a few
Emotions songs, some Persuaders, that sort of thing. Then I have some
jazz – Grant Green and John Scofield – and this all helps make what, in
my fevered mind, is an endless soundtrack. I'm imagining I'm the spy
novel equivalent of David Holmes.
I started this approach with my first novel, but have varied it since, trying out new music
and adding quirks depending on the book. With Free Agent,
I listened to a lot of afrobeat, some of which goes on for a long time
and is quite meditative. In particular, Fela Kuti's early band Koola
Lobitos helped me get into the mood of Nigeria in the late Sixties.
I wore out a haunting Marvin Gaye song, Dark Side of the World, which was recorded at around the time the book is set but not released until fairly recently. Alice Russell's song Hurry On Now
was an important song for me: it sounded like it was from the Sixties
but gave a fresh twist to it, and I was trying to do something similar. I
also listened to a lot of early Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter and Play With Fire
in particular: I wanted the book to feel like those songs. I found it
interesting when I read an early draft of a screenplay for the BBC that
the script began with Sympathy for the Devil
playing over a Lagos traffic scene. It's such a simple idea, but of
course that song is perfect for Paul Dark, and for the series as a whole
in fact.
For Song of Treason, I downloaded several albums of soundtrack
music from Sixties Italian spy films, and mixed them in with my other
music – a lot of Ennio Morricone and his contemporaries. I also listened
to Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire several hundred times –
that was the key song for the book, an alternative title for it, and
briefly features in it.
For The Moscow Option, I listened to a lot of Sibelius – Finlandia
comes up in the first two books and this one's the pay-off for that,
as Dark is in Finland – as well as a lot of more recent spy scores. I
love John Barry's work but can't write to him as I start imagining Sean
Connery or Michael Caine or George Segal
instead of Paul Dark. Ditto John Powell's work on the Bourne films. I
realized that that sort of sound helped my writing, but I associated it
too much with Jason Bourne. So I spent a few hours on iTunes, using the
preview feature, buying individual songs from spy thriller scores. I
picked a lot of films I haven't seen, so I know I have stuff on my
playlists from The International, Shooter, Spy Game (which
I've seen, but years ago) and several other films from the last couple
of decades. But I don't look at the stereo when they play, and I have
enough of them, on a long enough random-order playlist, that none of
them ever push themselves to the forefront enough to stand out. So
instead of being Track 4 from The International, Track 6 from Shooter and so on, they became part of the soundtrack to The Moscow Option. Just the other day I found a great album to fit in to my playlists for
my current book: Themes for an Imaginary Film by Symmetry. It fits my purposes perfectly, and I've written a lot to it already.
I realize that all makes me sound slightly mad, but when you want to
write a book I think it's worth making yourself comfortable to do it. I
spend some time setting up music so I don't have to think about what to
listen to on a daily basis.
Do you write on the move at all? Do you have a laptop?
I don't have a laptop, though I sometimes use my wife's if we're
travelling, and I also use a notebook. But most of my writing is done in
my study at home.
Do you have to stay away from the likes of Twitter and Facebook when you write, or are you able to dip into them as you write?
It varies. I've gone off Facebook in the last year or so and don't use
it all that much anymore, but I am an avid Tweeter. Sometimes I find
that when I'm writing a lot I also tweet a lot, because I become almost
hyperactive with ideas, and very flighty. But sometimes the opposite
happens, and I just hunker down without any need to go online at all. On
the other hand, I also find I can get overly distracted by the net, and
to get work done I have to switch it off with Freedom – sometimes
willpower isn't enough. It's something I wrestle with quite a bit, as I
imagine many writers do now. Radio silence can recharge your creative
energy, and can be vital. But interacting with people, reading articles
and so on can also reinvigorate and inspire you. It's a balancing
act. The most important thing is getting the work done. You do whatever
it takes.
All three of your Paul Dark novels draw on real historical events, but
in The Moscow Option, not only do Brezhnev and other well-known Soviet officials make cameos, but
Donald Maclean plays a fairly crucial role, too. Why did you choose to bring
Maclean in? Paul's reasoning for seeking out Maclean rather than, say,
Kim Philby, is logical, but from your point of view, it must have been
very tempting to have Philby play a part as well...
You're right – it was tempting, and Philby was my first idea. I wrote
several scenes featuring him, but abandoned them. The scene with
Brezhnev near the start of the novel originally had Dark and Philby
around the table. I also wrote a long scene with Dark in Philby's flat,
and did a lot of research for it. There were several reasons I decided
not to go with that idea. Some of them are to do with that logic – if I
were in Dark's shoes, knowing what I knew of Philby and his career in
Moscow, I wouldn't have risked appealing to him. I also found it very
hard to do because although I feel like I can imagine
Philby quite well, there are a lot of traps there. Philby has appeared
in a lot of spy thrillers, either under his own name or loosely
disguised. So now it's almost too obvious, and it kept ringing false to
me. If I had the stutter it was cliched and almost parodic, but without
it he didn't quite feel like Philby, and so on.
I thought about it for
several weeks, trying different things and doing some research, and
eventually decided that Maclean was not just more likely, but more
intriguing. I thought it was interesting that he had associated with
dissidents in the way he did, and the small incident that forms the
basis of Dark's appeal to him really happened. Most literature about the
Cambridge spies centres on Philby and Burgess, but I found
Maclean equally fascinating, partly because he's harder to read. He was a
handsome man – you can imagine Rupert Everett playing him, I think –
but towards the end of
his life he became rather ghoulish looking. He also had a very screwed
up relationship with his father, as of course Dark does. Philby did,
too, but I thought it would be interesting to encounter someone who had
done what Dark had done, a real historical figure who had lived with the
consequences but who would also condemn Dark for his actions. I
thought this would confuse our feelings about Dark more, in that you'd
both see Maclean's point but also be on Dark's side – after all, we've
come to know him while Maclean is a stranger, and one seen through
Dark's eyes. But if we forgive Dark, why don't we forgive Maclean? Dark
has done more damage. My motives weren't quite as clear-cut as that,
perhaps, but this is the general area I was circling.
As with the two prior Paul Dark novels, the Author's Note at the back of
The Moscow Option is most illuminating as regards the research you do
for your novels and how
you weave real events into them. But I have to say, The Moscow Option
note is rather alarming, in particular what it reveals about President Nixon's "Madman Theory". And the
novel as a whole often sees Paul ruminating on the nuclear nightmare
he's trying to prevent. I vividly recall being terrified of nuclear war
in the 1980s; did you have similar fears growing up?
I'm glad you found that note alarming, because that's why I decided to
use it. I remember the idea of nuclear war scaring me as a teenager, and
of course that fear has faded with the end of the Cold War and the
emergence of new threats, although the risk is perhaps greater today
than it has ever been. Despite that, to most people nuclear war now
seems an abstract idea: in thriller terms, we know the secret agent will
defuse the warhead, but it means very little to us. But it meant
something to me when I was fifteen or sixteen. So I wanted to bring back a
thriller with those stakes, but I also wanted
to remind or perhaps introduce people to what they really meant, and
how fragile the situation was. I was lucky to come across a guy called
Mike Kenner, who is a campaigner for freedom of information, and he very
kindly shared with me thousands of documents he has managed to have
declassified from the National Archives. A lot of these are from the
British government's contingency plans for nuclear war during the
Sixties, and they're chilling. So I used some of that information and
the events of October 1969 to try to craft a thriller that recaptured
some of the feel of the books I read growing up, by Frederick Forsyth
and Desmond Bagley and others, but which I hoped would also hit home now
because of the reality behind it.
Last question: something you find with many writers of fiction is that they don't seem to read
much fiction – when asked what they're reading, it's usually
non-fiction. (This isn't always the
case, of course; Kingsley Amis read a lot of fiction, especially genre fiction.) I guess that's partly down to not wishing to be influenced by
other people's novels when writing your own, but I also suspect it's
that 'busman's holiday' thing: when your 'job' is to write novels,
reading them as well can seem a bit much. What do you think? I know you
read a fair bit of non-fiction, but do you still read much fiction
besides? What are you reading at the moment?
Unfortunately, I fall into this camp – I hardly read any fiction these days. I'm reading Ordinary Thunderstorms
by William Boyd at the moment, but it's one of the very few novels I've
read recently. I'm always looking for new information to use in my
books, and I find that much as I enjoy fiction it mainly contains lots
of ideas I can't use. At the moment I'm writing my first
non-fiction book, about Oleg Penkovsky and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
as a result I've read around a hundred non-fiction books for research
in the last year – if you think my music selection sounds obsessive it
doesn't even compare. I guess the busman's holiday comparison is right –
for some reason, I often find it very difficult to read fiction now,
and get antsy after a few pages. I happily listen to music and watch
films, but when I'm reading a novel I become very conscious that I'm
taking time away from creating my own
books.
For previous Existential Ennui interviews, click here for a Q&A with Christopher Nicole, alias Andrew York, author of the Jonas Wilde spy novels; here for short Q&A with Jeff Lindsay, author of the Dexter crime novels; and here and here for a two-part interview with Anthony Price, author of the David Audley spy novels.
Continuing this run of posts centring on spy novelist Jeremy Duns – whose latest Paul Dark thriller, The Moscow Option,
was published in the UK yesterday – next I'm reviewing a book that
isn't, in fact, by Jeremy at all, but instead is by one of his favourite
authors – and, indeed, is one of his favourite spy novels – as Jeremy himself will shortly elucidate...
The Ninth Directive
by Adam Hall was first published in 1966 by Heinemann in the UK and
Simon & Schuster in the US (and is now available as an ebook and
paperback from Top Notch Thrillers, which is the cover you can see above). Now, I have blogged about this book before, when I showcased a signed edition in September of last year. I've also blogged about Adam Hall – alias Elleston Trevor – previously, notably in this run of posts on his nineteen-book espionage series starring secret agent Quiller, of which The Ninth Directive is the second instalment (following 1965's The Berlin Memorandum).
Quiller, for the uninitiated, is an operative of The Bureau, an
ultra-secret British intelligence outfit which doesn't, officially,
exist. The Quiller novels are all written in the first-person, Quiller's
unique narrative style – with his curiously clipped sentences, his
automaton-like reciting and
numbering of facts, and his deployment of shorthand phrases like "red
sector", "no go" and "so
forth" – being one of the chief draws.
Another draw, of course, is that the Quiller novels are terrific spy thrillers, The Ninth Directive
being a case in point. This time out, Quiller finds himself in Bangkok
at the behest of his Bureau controller, Loman, who tasks Quiller with an
unusual assignment: a "representative of the Queen" – only ever
referred to in the narrative as "The Person", but clearly Prince Philip,
the Duke of Edinburgh – will be embarking on a goodwill tour of the
city, and Loman has the following instructions for Quiller: "During the
visit we want you to arrange for his assassination."
That gobsmacking order closes out the first chapter (evidently Jeremy Duns learned a thing or two from Adam Hall in terms of injecting a jolting volte-face into the opening chapter of a novel),
but as becomes clear thereafter, the mission is more nuanced than that
would suggest: a credible threat on The Person's life has been received,
so Quiller's task is to determine how that assassination might occur,
and to stop it happening. Unfortunately, the assassin is Kuo the
Mongolian, whose speciality is long-range hits using a rifle, which
leaves Quiller with two factors to work out: where on The Person's route
the attempted assassination will take place, and more importantly, from where.
There
follows a deadly game of cat and mouse – with much "tagging" and
"flushing" (i.e., tailing and losing tails) – as Quiller tries to track
down Kuo and his cell, an endeavour which is complicated by the
involvement of "Mil6", who seem inordinately interested in Quiller. Why
they are, and what Kuo's ultimate aim is provide a number of twists to
the tale, leading to some searing and brutal set pieces, with Quiller
facing seemingly certain death on a number of occasions. But he also
finds time for love – or at least what passes for love in Quiller's
world, which is to say a one-night stand with an equally damaged fellow
operative – and the Bangkok backdrop against which the action is set is
vivid and convincing.
Mind you, as Jeremy Duns recently
pointed out to me, it's debatable how well Adam Hall knew Thailand, as
Hall rarely visited the places he wrote about. Jeremy notes: "I was
surprised to read an interview with him in which he revealed that he very rarely wrote about locations he
had visited, because he found he lost the magic when he did that. Quite
an astonishing thing to do, really. For the most part I think it's
impossible to tell, and he makes locations come alive."
For Jeremy, "The Ninth Directive probably ties with The Tango Briefing [Quiller #5, 1973] for my favourite spy novel full stop. I read both in 2000, I think, one after the other. I love The Ninth Directive
because it's both very pulpy in terms of plot – assassinate the
assassin – but simultaneously seems extremely authentic. While reading
the novel, you really believe that this is how a secret agent would
think and act. It predates The Day of the Jackal by five years,
but has much of that feeling of peeking inside a hidden world. I loved
the way the target is never named, making it almost an elemental
struggle to survive."
And there'll be plenty
more from Mr. Duns, not only on Adam Hall but also on a variety of other
topics, in the final post in this run of Duns: an exclusive Q&A with Jeremy, in which we discuss the books he read as a boy, his
schooldays, how and where he writes, and of course his novels –
including The Moscow Option – all illustrated with never-before-seen photos of his books. Look out for that over the weekend...
