Karla’s Choice - a John le Carré novel, by Nick Harkaway

“In the early spring of nineteen sixty-three, there was a rumour — unconfirmed and a little scandalous — that George Smiley might almost be happy.” (p. 26)

I was going to ask for this for Christmas and then couldn’t wait: a new le Carré novel despite the author no longer being in the field, and a new adventure for spymaster George Smiley, for all he long ago retired.

Whereas Silverview (2022) was written by le Carré and finished after his death by his son, the novelist Nick Harkaway, this is an entirely new novel by Harkaway. Or rather, it isn’t, because it’s been devised to fit neatly between two of the old classics, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). As well as owlish George Smiley, it features lots of familiar characters from both those books — such as Control, Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam, Bill Haydon, Alec Leamas, Connie Sachs and Ann Smiley — and makes subtle play with the fact we know what is to be befall some of them in events to come.

Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon. People other than Arthur Conan-Doyle were writing Sherlock Holme stories while Doyle was still alive. Kingsley Amis wrote Colonel Sun (1968) four years after the death of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. New stories continue to be written about Bond and Holmes and whoever else, some continuing their adventures into the present day, other working as period pieces, looking back to the time when the original adventures were set. (See, to choose an example entirely at random, Sherlock Holmes and the Great War.)

That’s the big point of difference here: le Carré was grappling with the contemporary world, all gritty, cynical realism. Karla’s Choice is a historical novel, conjured as much from depictions of the previous books on TV and in film. It is a pastiche.

I think it’s a good one: it feels authentic and I suspect would work well if you (re)read the Smiley novels in order, inserting this one into place. The familiar characters are well captured, Harkaway acknowledging in his both author’s note and acknowledgements the debt he owes to the various actors who’ve realised the characters on screen. At the same time, new characters, whose fates we can’t be sure of, are also nicely delineated and feel in-keeping.

In the opening pages, Harkaway accepts that the very idea of a new Smiley novel not written by his dad will be unthinkable to some. He then invites us to see, with him, how well he’s achieved his aim. That’s clever: co-opting us, perhaps even seducing us despite ourselves. We become part of the game.

And that matches the plot. Susanna Gero, a Hungarian refugee with a new life in London working for a literary agent, answers the door of her office to a strange man — who has orders to kill her boss. Susanna’s quick-thinking and brave response leads to attention from the Circus, and soon she’s embroiled in the secret world. George Smiley should not be involved as he recently retired, following the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But he and Susanna find that once ensnared with the ‘grey mistress’ of the service, it is all-but impossible to escape…

As well as authentic, it’s an enjoyable, engaging story — and, in its last section, extremely tense. The period setting with Smiley in his prime works better, I think, than seeing the character living on agelessly into the modern age, almost but not quite giving his view on Brexit, as per le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017). 

But at the same time something is lost in making Smiley a figure from history. There’s no longer that tantalising sense of this all being real and now and incredibly relevant, of le Carré using a fictional spy story to raise the curtain a bit on what's really going on. 

There’s one moment where we come close, an echo of today in this echo of the past. As the stakes get ever higher, Smiley considers what difference it will make to the wider world if he is successful in besting his opposite number, the Russia spymaster known as Karla. 

“Would Moscow abruptly suffer a shortage of brutal and brutalised men, thinking to make good whatever sinkholes were in them by destroying the West? By finally achieving Peter the Great’s ambitions and standing Russia at the pinnacle of the world? Would the Cold War, with all its terrible arsenals and its power to compress and unshaped ordinary lives, come to an end? Would the nuclear demon go back to hell, and the fear of a Russian land invasion sweeping everything before it, not stopping until it reached Normandy and Lagos and Palermo, fade into history because Karla fell to Smiley’s unknightly lance?” (p. 220)

And then, in the end, there is the choice Karla makes that gives the book its title. It is not what Karla does but the thought of how Smiley will need to respond that is what resonates.

See also me on:

• Titanium Noir (2023) by Nick Harkaway
• Silverview (2021) by John le Carré and Nick Harkaway 
• A Legacy of Spies (2017) by John le Carré
• The Mission Song (2006) by John le Carré
• The Constant Gardener (2005 film version of 2001 novel by John le Carré) 
• The Secret Pilgrim (1990) by John le Carré
• Smiley’s People (1979) by John le Carré
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (1974) by John le Carré
• The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) by John le Carré
• The Looking-Glass War (1965) by John le Carré

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, by Margot Bennett

“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149)

Thursday, 30 July 1964 saw publication of two paperback “Penguin Specials” from Penguin Books both looking at the same subject. At four shillings, Nuclear Disaster by Tom Stonier,

“was based on his 1961 report to the New York Academy of Sciences which dealt with the biological and environmental effects of dropping a 20-megaton bomb on Manhattan”. Geoffrey Goodman, “Obituary — Tom Stonier”, Guardian, 28 June 1999.

Alongside this, at a slightly cheaper three shillings and sixpence, Margot Bennett’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation is, according to the back-cover blurb, a “first reader in the most uncomfortable subject in the world”. 

The title is surely a riff on The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw, first published by Constable & Co in 1928 and republished in 1937 as an inexpensive two-volume paperback — the first Pelican Book — under the revised title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism. 

Of course, that was timely given the ongoing civil war between Republicans and Fascists in Spain, and the growing power of the Nazis in Germany. I’d be surprised if Margot Bennett wasn’t aware of the book, given that in 1937 she was in Spain. It was the year that Margot Mitchell (sometimes known as Margot Miller) married English journalist Richard Bennett while both were working for the Government — that is, Republican — radio station. Bennett, who also worked as a nurse, had been machine-gunned in the legs the previous year and at the time of her engagement had recently broken her arm when the ambulance she was in crashed under shellfire.

There’s nothing very militant in her book on atomic radiation, written 27 years later. “Politics is not the concern of this book,” she tells us in her introduction (p. 10). The focus is instead on the cause and effects fallout,

“addressed more to women than to men [because] the mother is far more intimately concerned with the health of the family than the father. It is the mother who sees that the children have green vegetables and milk, and who nurses then when they have measles.” (p. 11)

This still holds, she says, even if the mother has a career; a woman with no family, “still has a tenderness to children that is different in quality from the feelings of a man.”

It’s not exactly the most feminist stance but this is a politically active woman writing in the mid-1960s for a small-C conservative readership, the emphasis on presenting just the facts rather than on what we should think. The book concludes on a broad political note:

“Science affects us all; so far, overwhelmingly to our advantage. If there are times when we feel this is not so, as members of a democracy we have some kind of duty to find out what is happening.” (p. 154)

But there’s no sense of a particular party or ideology being favoured. We’re left to make up our own minds.

The domestic perspective — the way radiation affects milk and green vegetables, and our children — might imply this is rather lightweight or condescending to the ordinary housewife. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed one contemporary review thought it was, 

“little more than another text book, and heavy going at that.” (Robin Turner, “Nuclear penguins and others”, Birmingham Post, 8 August 1964, p. 5.)

A more generous review found it,

“Thought provoking … easily read but thorough” (John Berrie, “Woman’s angle”, Nottingham Evening Post and News, 7 August 1964, p. 10.)

It’s certainly thorough, covering the ground in detail in just 154 pages (not including appendices, glossary and index). After the introduction, the first three chapters give us a grounding in the physics involved in atomic radiation — “Inside the Atom”, “Neutrons and Nuclear Energy" and “Fission, Fusion, and Fallout”. We then switch to biology for “The Message in Our Cells”.

Chapter 5, “The Subtle Enemy”, then applies the physics to the biology to explain the damage atomic radiation can do to us and to future generations. The next chapter, “The Influential Friend”, puts a counter case, outlining all the beneficial ways atomic radiation can be applied. “Pollution and Protection” addresses what can be done to mitigate potential fallout. Bennett then provides a conclusion, making the case that even statistically “negligible” numbers of people wounded or killed would still be tragic for those concerned.

A lot of this is very technical. Promotion for the book at the time said that Bennett wrote in “plain English” (for example, “For Your Bookshelf”, Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 31 July 1964, p. 4). Even so, I found it quite hard going and made slow progress. 

Two things really bring it alive. First, Bennett peppers her book with vivid real-world examples of the way radiation can affect people’s lives. Hauntingly, she details the stages of radiation sickness suffered by early pioneers, from skin rashes and hair loss through anaemia, sterility and useless, deformed fingers to the fatal cancers (pp. 96-97). Or there’s the awful story of the Radium Girls (pp. 100-101). 

I’d be interested to know more about the Russian scientist who claimed to be able to cure the effects of radiation on DNA via a simple pill (p. 114), or about the Scottish boy discovered playing in a “pile of radioactive dust” and the factory making luminous dials that proved so radioactive that the Radiological Protection Service had the whole site buried (both stories p. 146). Frustratingly, there are no notes or bibliography to guide us to more information.

Secondly, throughout the book Bennett uses relatable, often domestic analogies to explain the complex ideas. She likens electrical charges — the way positive and negative attract one another but two positives or two negatives repel — to attraction between people, where a talker will fall for a listener (p. 17). She describes atoms of different elements as being like different breeds of dog (p. 22). Compounds and molecules are likened to marriages (p. 24).

Sometimes those analogies show how far we have come. On page 83, she refers to the cumulative effect of exposure to radiation over “the long days of our lives — 20,000 days if we live to be about sixty”, which doesn’t seem very long at all. (Bennett lived to 68).

But on the whole the effect is to make a complex, technical subject more tangible. The central, political idea here is the responsibility to be better informed: nuclear weapons are devastatingly powerful, but knowledge is also power — one to hold the arms race at bay.

*

Obligatory Doctor Who bit

Since the book was published at the end of July 1964, Bennett must have delivered the manuscript no later than, I’d guess, the end of May. Given the technical detail, it can’t have been a quick book to write. As well as the time taken to research it, a note just ahead of the introduction tells us that, 

“Everything factual has been checked by scientists whose knowledge is far more than equal to the task” (p. 7).

We’re not told who these scientists were or what the editorial process involved, but writing and editing surely took some months, which means work on the book overlapped with Bennett’s conversation(s) with BBC story editor David Whitaker about potentially writing for Doctor Who. As detailed in my post on Bennett’s novel The Furious Masters, that seems to have happened in late February 1964. She was being considered to write a story comprising four 25-minute episodes as a potential replacement for what became Planet of Giants — but nothing further is known about what her story might have entailed, or whether she even submitted an idea.

I partly read this book in the faint hope of finding some clue as to what she might have discussed with or submitted to Whitaker. The short biography of Bennett on the opening page is suggestive:

“She likes variety in writing and is now doing something in Science Fiction,” (p. 1) 

That “something” may have been The Furious Masters, published four years later. Or Bennett may have completed work on her study of atomic radiation and then turned to Doctor Who, only to discover that she was now too late and Planet of Giants was going ahead after all…

Then there’s one of the allusions she uses. At the end of her introduction, Bennett says that there’s no point wishing that the atom had never been cracked open.

“Man can’t afford to retreat; it is by discovery and invention, from fire and flint axe onwards, that he has survived. The axe is dangerously sharp, and the fire has grown as hot as the sun.” (p. 13)

Unlike most of the analogies she uses, this isn’t contemporary or domestic — it’s making a link between modern technology and the ancient past. 

The first ever Doctor Who story, broadcast 23 November to 14 December 1963, involves a tribe of cave people where authority is dependent on the ability to make fire (I think this owes a debt to The Inheritors by William Golding). “Fire will kill us all in the end,” opines the Old Mother of the tribe.

In the next story, we see something of this prophecy come to pass when the TARDIS materialises in a petrified forest that Barbara initially thinks is the result of a “forest fire”. It turns out that the devastation is the result of a neutron bomb, leaving the ground and atmosphere “polluted with a very high level of fallout”. Beings called Daleks are among the survivors.

I’m not the first to suggest that the Doctor Who production team deliberately juxtaposed the role of fire in the prehistoric tribe and the role of nuclear weapons on this futuristic world as part of a wider ambition to have the time travellers witness key moments of societal change. And it’s exactly the same connection made by Margot Bennett.

Did she and David Whitaker discuss it? And who exactly informed whom?

Spook Street, by Mick Herron

I've been listening to this, the fourth of Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, a little behind the run of the TV version and it's been fascinating to see the differences.

The attention of the security service is taken up with a terrorist bombing in a London shopping centre. River Cartwright, the nominal lead of these adventures, is worried about his elderly grandfather, a retired former spook and legend in the service who is suffering from the early signs of dementia. The "Old Bastard", as he is affectionately known, thinks someone is out to get him and is determined to strike first - which is bad news when River goes to visit...

It's difficult to say more without getting into spoilers. But what I can talk about here is what the TV version changes. A sequence in the book in which a character ends up in the Thames is completely excised - I am assume for being impractical. In the book, someone gets off a train to find the authorities waiting to arrest them; on TV there follows an elaborate chase.

Generally, the changes on TV are to give characters more agency: in the book, one character thinks about doing something with a gun and is then taken by surprise; on TV, they do the thing thought about and then take action in response to the surprise something. Another character doesn't simply retire but finds out how they've been wronged and puts it right. River, meanwhile, puzzles out what's going on rather than being presented with the answer.

I'm not sure the TV version makes such a point of the relationship between River and the character Bertrand, which in the book has a huge impact. But on the whole, I can see how the changes make the TV version more action-packed and visual, people doing things to drive the plot(s) forward.

There are some pretty major revelations here for at least one of the principal characters. Effectively, for the first time in this series, we end on a cliffhanger. It will be interesting to see where things go next, and how much these revelations skew what follows...

See also my posts on the previous books in the series: Slow Horses, Dead Lions and Real Tigers.

The Furious Masters, by Margot Bennett

This is a review of a comic science-fiction novel from 1968, sort of John Wyndham done as sitcom. Yet in poking fun at the mores and anxieties of its time, there are things here worth a content warning for sexual violence. 

Characters - male and female - repeatedly joke about rape and when one woman is stripped naked and murdered, it's played for comic effect. I'm not sure how much that's the author satirising misogyny of the period or being steeped in it herself and, given the overall light comic tone, I'm not sure how much that's on purpose. There's a lot going on under the surface.

At 3 am on 16 May, a sonic boom is heard across Yorkshire, trembling windows in Huddersfield and so terrifying the animals at a farm in Highfield-on-Moor that egg production drops by 40%. Two days later, farmer John Holman writes an angry letter to a government department to complain, believing the boom to have been caused by the RAF running exercises. The ministry denies any such exercise has taken place. 

Meanwhile, four precocious students from Oxford - Cressida, Robbie, Sue and David - go hiking across the moor and discover a strange object:

"The main body was a big, squat, metal cuboid, four feet high and over five across. On each side there were three-inch square slots, which on examination appeared to be filled with thick glass. The body was covered by a low pyramid, from which two long cup-ended tentacles projected at different angles. They looked very like aerials. A thick rod rose several feet above the pyramid to support two flat rectangular sheets of metal; one almost parallel to the ground, the other about ten degrees off the perpendicular." (p. 14)

They're soon joined by photographer Henry Brown, who takes atmospheric snaps of Cressida in front of this "spacecraft" and then hurries down to London to sell them to the papers. Soon people are queuing up to see the "Martian" lander, Holman fencing off his land and charging entry. News reporters come by helicopter, the police turn out in force, the local vicar has a moral perspective on all these proceedings, and even the Prime Minister is making pronouncements on TV about what he thinks is going on, based more on what he'd like to think than the evidence on the ground.

In all this frenzy, it takes a while for the students - and the reader - to spot the effects that this lander seems to have on those who get close it. They become more frenzied, angry, violent... The title of the novel refers to the "furious masters of lust and violence" that govern our behaviour.

We get our first clue to what's going on just after Henry photograph Cressida, thrilled by the possibility that these pictures will make him famous. They're also both hot from the walk and the sunny day, and the heat given off by the "spaceship". Henry suddenly changes tack:

"'I wa thinking to hell with fame and what's the hurry [to get to London] and I should pull you down and...' He put his arms around her and rubbed his face against hers. 'And make love to you on this fine bouncy grass.'" (p. 19)

Cressida initially seems keen but then a sheep bleats nearby and ruins the moment. Cressida admits that she likes Henry but thinks they should call the police to inform them about the lander. Henry persists: 

"I should have raped you [but] I'm over-civilised" (p. 20). 

Cressida laughs this off, but it's the first of many casual references to sexual violence. Later, this is linked to sexual liberation - or the lack of it:

"Cressida and Sue ran across the grass to the helicopter.

'Would you have minded being raped?' Sue asked in her shrill, clear voice, as they climbed on board.

'Yes.'

'With your inhibitions, naturally. I would have liked to be raped. It makes a nice change.'

'Being raped by one man is all very well. But I had two after me. And Sabine women aren't in this year.'" (p. 83)

The casual tone of all this is shocking, but surely a conscious choice by the author. In part, it's satirising sexual liberation. It's also not so different with the comments by members of the public from the time responding to the sexual assault depicted in The Forsyte Saga, which are included as extras on the DVD of that serial. But one big element of the novel is competing ideas about the cause of the increasing violence: whether it's something being done to us by the "spaceship" or something inside us all anyway that's been given an excuse to let rip. As Cressida and Sue have this conversation, is it a new or prevailing attitude?

As I said, much of the violence here is played for comic effect. When Cressida rebuffs Henry's advances, he resorts to attacking his own blown-up photographs of her. Another character makes a clumsy attempt to break into the bathroom when she's in there. In both cases, the threat is undercut by the inadequacies of these men. Later, as things get every more frenzied, another woman is stripped naked and murdered in a church as part of a kind of ritual sacrifice, but the vicar and congregation don sunglasses so as not to see anything rude.

A lot of these incidents feel like comic sketches. The novel is often funny and well observed, its targets including the press, police, church and civil service bureaucracy. There are some great one-liners:

"I must say Mars couldn't have chosen a more awkward time for the Minister." (p. 36)

But many of the gags are specifically visual in nature. Margot Bennett has a knack for conjuring vivid, strange images - such as this glimpse of the fauna of another world:

"Could the population of Mars, formerly supposed to consist of small snails, have devised a machine capable of driving human beings mad?" (p. 139)

Often, we "see" the comic events taking place, such as squabbles over who is in charge of a helicopter, or the top secret files raining down from an open window on to people rioting in the street. With its lively characters and set pieces, I could easily see this being dramatised - and perhaps Bennett, a prolific writer for TV, did so too. In fact, one reason I was so keen to read this novel is that it had been suggested to me that it originated in an idea Bennett may have offered Doctor Who. 

Her name is listed in two internal BBC documents, one from 28 February 1964 and one undated but probably from 2 March, with the idea to commission a four-part story from her to cover the potential loss of what ultimately became Planet of Giants. Nothing else is known about what Bennett's story might have involved.

If it was the seed of what became The Furious Masters, I can see why it didn't go any further as a Doctor Who adventure. On 20 February, story editor David Whitaker declined a story by another would-be writer, David Fisher, on the basis that it was set in the 20th century; the production team wanted Doctor Who to visit other times and places. We don't know much about Fisher's The Face of the Fire, other than it involved the effects of a machine discovered under the Wessex Downs. If this didn't meet with approval, the same was surely true of an idea from Bennett about the effects of a machine found on the moors in Yorkshire.

I'm continuing to look into this, and have in sight Bennett's other science fiction novel, The Long Way Back (1955) and her non-fiction The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Atomic Radiation (1964). Note that the latter is from around the time she was mooted for Doctor Who, so perhaps that will provide further clues.

See also:

• Me on The Man Who Didn't Fly, a detective novel by Margot Bennett
• Me on The Victorian Chaise-Longue, a science-fiction novella by Marghanita Laski, another author considered for the first year of Doctor Who
• Buy my biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television
• Memoirs of the Spacewomen, a 2015 radio documentary about the work of Margot Bennett, Naomi Mitchison and Rose Macaulay, presented by Matthew Sweet and produced by Allegra McIlroy

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

Two teenage friends, Freda and Florence, run away from home in York in 1926 and head to London to make their fortunes on the stage. Gwendolen Kelling, a friend of Freda's half-sister, agrees to try and find them. Miss Kelling teams up with Detective Inspector John Frobisher who is investigating the night clubs run by Nellie Coker, who has just been released from a six-month prison sentence. Coker, whose clientele includes the Prince of Wales and Aga Khan, is fighting her own battles. And someone is killing young woman and dumping them in the Thames...

These are just some of the many, many characters in this sprawling, 500-page novel. As with Atkinson's Case Histories, a number of stories are all happening at once, not always in chronological order. It's often warm and funny and yet there's an undercurrent of real threat. Many characters are haunted by their life-changing experience of war, which informs the violence. Mrs Kelling, for example, is a former nurse and knows how to deal with a bullet wound. Another shadow cast over events is the discovery, four years prior to the story being told, of the tomb of Tutankhamun. At one point, it almost seems credible that the ghost of the Egyptian pharaoh might be the one killing the young women.

Yet the novel stays in the realistic. It all feels real, too - the different clubs, each with their own vibe and clientele, all add to a rich and teeming sense of the metropolis and its many dangers. Gwendolen is figure I recognise from my reading of contemporary sources for my own Sherlock Holmes novel: an intelligent, able woman empowered by her war work and enjoying a new-found liberty to carve out her own role. (The fact she's unwittingly come into a great deal of money doesn't hurt.)

Atkinson lists a range of intriguing sounding sources in her author's note, but also admits that she has fudged some details - for example, one character has read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, though this novel is set months before that was published. As she says, she's writing fiction not history and nothing jarred me out of the story.

There are some extraordinary coincidences - a girl called Gertie happens to look just like Freda and is in the wrong place at the wrong time, while a mother who comes to see Frobisher describes her daughter wearing a locket that is one of a very small collection of items we know Frobisher has already found. I think Ramsay Coker's efforts to write his own thrilling, insider's-eye novel about the "Age of Glitter" is a little on the nose. And there is also a little cheating, such as the shock 'death' of a character at the very end of a chapter (p. 361) who is later revealed merely to have fainted.

But that reprieve makes it all the more surprising at the end when a number of principal figures are bumped off abruptly. It's been a lively, fun adventure but we feel their loss, and we want to know what happens to the survivors. We last see Gwendolen hesitating over a question put to her by a man, and are left hanging as to what she might choose to do. There, I think, is scope for a whole new story...

Doctor Who: Ruby Red, by Georgia Cook

Responding to an alien distress call, the Doctor and Ruby arrive in Estonia a few days before the Battle of the Ice on 5 April 1242. 

"'Big one,' the Doctor nodded. 'Well, small in scale, but big in everything else. The final bust-up between the invading Duchy of Estonia and the republic of Novgorod. Marks the end of the Northern Crusades in this region, and cements Prince Alexander Nevsky as a national hero.'

'I've never heard of it,' said Ruby.

'Your planet's had too many wars for anyone to know them all,' said the Doctor sadly. 'Still, here we are.'" (p. 30)

The distress signal has been sent by Ranavere, a 16 year-old girl from an alien culture of warriors, who has been sent to the battle as part of a coming-of-age ritual. Ranavere doesn't to fight - but it soon turns she may not have a choice. There are other aliens on the ice, some of them more of Ranavere's warmongering people and then there's something more monstrous as well...

I really enjoyed this fast-moving, lively adventure by first-time novelist Georgia Cook (who I know a bit). It deftly captures the pace and verve of the recent TV series. In fact, it's packed with set-piece moments that would be great to be able to see. This is a book that would really suit illustration - which should come as no surprise given that the author is also a designer and artist. 

Ruby and the Doctor are captured well, and Ranavere is a character we can relate to; she and her family are well drawn. Like Ruby, I'd never heard of this moment in history but it makes for a rich, arresting backdrop. It's all great fun, not least towards the end when, after all the ice and cold, the Doctor emerges from the TARDIS with a pile of big, fluffy towels for the surviving burly warriors. Their resistance to such comfort quickly melts, in a moment that's perfectly daft, funny and true to character.

Swan Song, by Edmund Crispin

"There could be no doubt, thought Adam, that the death of Edwin Shorthouse was not much regretted by Peacock or anyone else connected with the production. Adam said as much to Fen.

'I know,' said Fen. 'It seems positively indelicate to be trying to discover his murderer.'" (p. 113)

After the events of The Moving Toyshop - or, chronologically, after the events of Holy Disorders since we're told on page 20 of this book that "the business about a toyshop" was "before the war" - the fourth Gervase Fen is another fast-moving, breezily witty adventure. This time, the mystery centres round a new performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, the first since the war and with a disquiet about staging work so beloved of the Nazis. We meet the various operatic characters involved in the opera. Then, just as in The Case of the Gilded Fly (where it was the company in a theatre), one of the most odious of this cast ends up dead.

This time, the death looks like suicide but Fen is not so sure, and the attempted rape of one woman, the attempted murder of another and the sudden death of a man are all tangled up in the case. I think it's all a lot better structured than previous instalments, not least in that Fen takes his time to puzzle out what's gone on rather than sussing it early and then declining to share his deductions. 

There's some confounded cheating - on page 189, Fen causes quite a stir (for the characters and this reader) when he announces that one person killed both the dead men. That person doesn't immediately deny it and we're led to believe they are guilty, only for Fen to then unravel what really happened and how this person is in fact innocent.

There's also something uncomfortable in the treatment of young Judith Haynes, the victim of the attempted rape, both in the immediate aftermath of that and what happens later. I don't think it's very well handled, and it also doesn't sit well in what's otherwise a light, comic novel centred on an ingenious double-puzzle.

The adventure and comedy otherwise work very well. Wilkes the old rogue from The Moving Toyshop making a welcome return to further confound Fen's deductions just for the fun of it. And I loved the unnamed burglar who turns up at an opportune moment to help the sleuth break into a smart house.

"'Doesn't look to me,' said the little man disapprovingly, 'as if there's anything worth pinchin' 'ere. What we want is socialism, so as everyone'll 'ave somethink worth pinchin'." (p. 182)

The Moving Toyshop, by Edmund Crispin (again)

"'Let's go left,' Cadogan suggested. 'After all, Gollancz is publishing this book.'" (p. 87)

It's more than a decade since I first read The Moving Toyshop and, having really enjoyed it then, I'm surprised how little stuck in the memory. One thing was the basic wheeze: Richard Cadogan stumbling drunk into a toyshop to find a dead body, only to return with the police to find the body and the whole toyshop gone. To solve the mystery, he calls on his friend, the eccentric Oxford don Gervase Fen. 

Then there's the thrilling final sequence on a merry-go-round, borrowed by Alfred Hitchcock for Strangers on a Train. But sadly, between these two brilliant bookends, there's a lot of running around and literary gags that - though enjoyable - lack the mad and visual heft to linger.

Reading it after the two preceding novels (The Case of the Gilded Fly and Holy Disorders), it's also notable that this third instalment isn't set during the war as they are. We're not actually told when events take place - though the next novel, Swan Song, will reveal that The Moving Toyshop took place before the war and so precedes those two earlier novels. 

"'Well, I'm going to the police,' said Cadogan. 'If there's anything I hate, it's the sort of book in which characters don't got to the police when they've no earthly reason for not doing so.'

'You've got an earthly reason for not doing so immediately.'

'What's that?'

'The pubs are open,' said Fen, as one who after a long night sees dawn on the hills. 'Let's go and have a drink before we do anything rash.'" (p. 50)

At one point, while incarcerated and with Cadogan unconscious, Fen amuses himself coming up with titles for further accounts of his adventures:

"'Fen steps in,' said Fen. 'The Return of Fen. A Don Dares Death (A Gervase Fen Story) ... Murder Stalks the University ... The Blood on the Mortarboard. Fen Strikes Back ... My dear fellow, are you all right? I was making up titles for Crispin.'" (p. 81)

Not even halfway through a third book and it's poking fun at the idea of this as a series; Fen established enough to be mocked just as much as anyone else in the literary world. 

Holy Disorders, by Edmund Crispin

First published in 1945, this is the second of the detective novels starring Oxford don and amateur sleuth Gervase Fen. Following the events of The Case of the Gilded Fly, we rejoin composer and church organist Geoffrey Vintner, now in a London cab with a loaded revolver. He also has a telegram from Fen:

"I AM AT TOLNBRIDGE STAYING AT THE CLERGY HOUSE PRIESTS PRIESTS PRIESTS THE PLACE IS BLACK WITH THEM COME AND PLAY THE CATHEDRAL SERVICES ALL THE ORGANISTS HAVE BEEN SHOT UP DISMAL BUSINESS THE MUSIC WASN'T BAD AS ALL THAT EITHER YOU'D BETTER COME AT ONCE BRING ME A BUTTERFLY NET I NEED ONE WIRE BACK COMING NOT COMING FOR LONG STAY GERVASE FEN." (pp. 3-4)

We learn that a local organist has been attacked and knocked unconscious, and that Vintner has also received an anonymous letter threatening that he will "regret" any trip to Tolnbridge. So, gun in hand, he heads to Tolnbridge (in Devon), stopping first at a London department store to acquire a butterfly net. There, he is set-upon by a would-be assassin in the midst of the sports equipment. In the ensuing battle, runaway footballs cause chaos on the lower floors of the store.

All this is within the first 10 pages, a mini-adventure like something from a silent comedy setting us up for the main event. As before, this is an arch and witty detective story, but much more in the John Buchan mould than its predecessor. One element of the plot involves a teenage girl drugged with marijuana to do the bidding of the villains, while another involves witch trials from 1705 and a modern-day coven led by a villainous priest, but really this is a shocker about Nazi spies working undercover in England. Oh, and Vintner meets a young woman in Tolnbridge and immediately falls in love.

For all it's fun, and peppered with literary allusions and jokes, the last few chapters are really suspenseful - Fen is kidnapped, badly beaten by the villains and there's added resonance here in the fact that these Nazis ruthlessly use gas to dispose of their victims. Rather than ill-fitting the light comedy / cost detective story stuff, this real-world horror works extremely well. The eccentric, idiosyncratic Fen is nonetheless a hero, still cracking jokes as the villains rough him up, in a manner that reminded me of James Bond in Casino Royale. There's something, too, of the plucky spirit of Went The Day Well? (1942).

 "'Do talk English,' said Fen, with a touch of acerbity. 'And try to stop imagining you're in a book.'" (p. 218) 

Garry Halliday and the Kidnapped Five, by Justin Blake

This is the third of five novelisations of the adventures of airline pilot Garry Halliday, following Garry Halliday and the Disappearing Diamonds and Garry Halliday and the Ray of Death. It was published by Faber in 1962, based on a six-part serial broadcast on the BBC between 16 January and 20 February 1960. The time slot was 5.25pm on Saturdays - the same as later taken by Doctor Who. 

Episode 3, The Outcasts, is the only one of 50 episodes of Garry Halliday to survive. It used to be available on Youtube, from where I took screenshots of the lengthy recap at the start. While exciting music plays, a plummy voice speaks over the following still images:

"Garry Halliday, owner and chief pilot of the Halliday Charter Company is up against his old enemy…

[Image showing Terence Longdon as Garry Halliday]

"... The Voice, now engaged in a colossal scheme to kidnap five world famous atomic scientists and sell them to the highest bidder. Two scientists have already been kidnapped. Now the Voice plans to take another…

[Image showing Elwyn Brook-Jones as The Voice]

"... Professor Mundt, who has been visiting England with his secretary…

[Image showing Richard Dare as Professor Mundt]

"… Martin. At the suggestion of…

[Image showing John Hussey as Martin]

"… Inspector Potter from Scotland Yard, Halliday’s plane has been chartered to fly Mundt back to Frankfurt, much to the annoyance of…

[Image showing Nicholas Meredith as Inspector Potter]

"...  Mr Smith-Clayton of the Home Office, who has been looking after Mundt’s security in England.

[Image showing Peter Myers as Smith-Clayton]

"... Bill Dodds, Halliday’s co-pilot, is on the plane with him, as well as Bill’s fiancee...

[Image showing Terence Alexander as Bill Dodds]

"... Sonya, who is acting as stewardess for the flight because…

[Image showing Juno Stevas as Sonya Delamare]

"... Jean, Halliday’s usual stewardess, has been deployed away by a fake message sent by the Voice. The only other people on the plane are three security men, but they are headed by…

[Image showing Jennifer Wright as Jean Willis]

"O’Brien, who is in reality the Voice’s principal lieutenant." At last, we crossfade into the interior of the plane, and the action ensues.

[Image showing James Neylin as O'Brien]

It's striking how complex this all is after just two episodes: lots and lots of characters and a then-and-then, House that Jack Built plot. That, of course, made it harder for viewers to join the story midway through. Compare it to the opening of the surviving second episode of soap opera Compact - with no recap, and a single, short scene involving a receptionist to bring us up to speed on everything we need to know. (This was some of what I looked at in my talk “Television Before the TARDIS” at the GallifreyOne convention in February.)

But once the recap is over, the pace of this Garry Halliday episode really picks up. The villains hold the heroes at gunpoint and demand that Halliday changes course for Switzerland. Halliday and Bill then battle with the villains, and we cut from TV recording to film for the fisticuffs. It's all very well-staged by fight arranger Terry Baker, though the book ups the stakes by having Garry grab the handle of an emergency hatch.

"He pulled down, and pushed out, and the other hand got hold of [a villain called] Crake, and impelled him through the hatch. There was a terrible roar of wind and a scream from Crake." (p. 56)

This may have been too technically difficult to realise on TV rather than something they omitted as unsuitable for children watching. It’s striking what was considered okay for this Saturday teatime adventure. There's a fair bit of killing in the story anyway and also the odd relationship between Sonya and George Smith-Clayton. Sonya explains to Bill:

"Well, [we're] not exactly chums, except that you do feel rather close to people when you've been through a lot with them. It was about seven years ago at a Commem. Ball at Oxford, you see ... and some of the boys decided to take Georgie's trousers off. ... Of course the champagne had been flowing a bit. Old Charlie champers. ... All I did was hit him over the head with a champagne bottle. It can't really have hurt him. It was empty. ... It was only a gesture of affection really. A sort of love-tap." (p. 46)

Smith-Clayton says that as a result he was in hospital for nearly 10 days. Now, this exchange occurs in the missing second episode of the TV serial so we can't be sure it was relayed exactly as in the book, but Sonya refers to the champagne bottle in the surviving third episode so some version must have been included.

So when Doctor Who began in 1963, its elements of kidnap, murder and threat were all in keeping with previous adventures shown in the same slot. What’s very different is the tone.

Having defeated the villains, Halliday then gets a call from the Voice, who has kidnapped Jean. So, despite winning the fight, Halliday ends up changing course to Switzerland anyway. The Voice also tells Halliday not to tell the authorities and gets his men to hand Halliday a suitcase of money - making it look to Smith-Clayton as though Halliday is his willing agent. Soon, Halliday and Dodds are on the run from the police while also trying to thwart the Voice's next attempt at kidnap.

It's all good, fast-moving fun, our frightfully well-spoken heroes battling all manner of accented folk, ranging from villains to eccentric character-types. One of them, a Swiss Clerk in the surviving episode, is played by no less than Jill Hyem.

I'd love to know how the TV version realised the exciting finale, in which the Voice coolly escapes in a cable car, only for Halliday to give chase on skis. Was there location filming in Switzerland? It now feels very James Bond yet predates the ski stuff in 1963 novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

There are a few other fun details, such as a sense of changing times:

"I mean, you don't say 'sir' in the nineteen-sixties." (p. 20)

We learn that Halliday is a veteran of the Korean War and has always "had the habit of attracting adventures" (pp. 20-1). But there's still the painful lack of anything for women to do. Sonya, while getting some laughs at Smith-Clayton's expense, is left behind in a cell when Bill and Halliday make their escape, and Jean spends most of the story locked up. On the last page of the novel, she "surprised us by getting married" recounts Bill; her husband is Philip Latters, a character from the previous serial, not credited in TV listings for this one. The implication is that she leaves Halliday Charter Company. I suspect she didn't have an exit on screen and just didn't appear in the next serial; I can't really blame an actor given such an unrewarding part.

In fact, this could easily have been the end of Garry Halliday since he outwits and captures the Voice. But the book ends on a cliffhanger.

"Because the news in that telegram was that the Voice has escaped from prison. Now nobody who had ever seen the Voice's face would be safe." (p. 119)

The adventure continues in Garry Halliday and the Sands of Time, if I can ever track down a copy...

The Case of the Gilded Fly, by Edmund Crispin

"My gnomic utterances," said Fen severely, "reduce themselves to three: that I do not believe in the crime passionnel; that the motive for murder is almost always either money, vengeance or security; and that none the less it is sex which is at the heart of this business." (pp. 198-9)

It's years since I read The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin, a brilliant, daft and inventive mystery featuring Gervase Fen, Oxford don and amateur sleuth. Some stuff in the past year has prompted me to pick up Fen's other cases.

One such prompt was Life of Crime by Martin Edwards. Then there's the beautiful new edition of Crispin's short stories which I got for Christmas. And then there's the bits about Crispin in the BBC's files on early Doctor Who, which I dug through when writing my book.

(A digression: Edmund Crispin and Doctor Who... 

On 5 March 1962, Eric Maschwitz, working as assistant and adviser to Donald Baverstock, the BBC's Controller of Television Programmes, asked the head of the script department Donald Wilson whether science-fiction stories on TV had to be done as six-part serials, in the manner of Quatermass or A for Andromeda. Maschwitz asked if there was scope for standalone, 50-minute stories, either run singly or as part of a series. Asa Briggs, in his history of the BBC, suggests this was prompted by the large audience that tuned in on 20 February to watch John Glenn make the USA's first crewed orbital spaceflight; I've heard others suggest that Maschwitz may have been inspired by the US anthology series The Twilight Zone (1959-64), which was first broadcast in the UK on ITV's east of England franchise Anglia Television from 4 January 1962.

Whatever the case, Wilson saw the value of this idea and on 17 April replied to Maschwitz saying that he'd set up a unit to report on this. A four-page report, written by Donald Bull, was delivered on 25 April. Bull said he and his colleague Alice Frick had consulted studies of SF by Brian Aldiss, Kingsley Amis and Edmund Crispin, and Frick also met with Aldiss in person.

Crispin's name cropped up again a year later when, on 23 May 1963, Frick reported to Wilson (now head of serials) that she'd met with the author. Having at that point edited three volumes of Best SF anthologies for Faber, Crispin was able to provide Frick with names and addresses of writers he thought could produce good science-fiction for TV. These were: JG Ballard, Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Brian Aldiss, Eric Frank Russell and Harry Harrison. Crispin also suggested that he might compose the theme music for whatever it was Frick and Wilson had in mind.

I think we can guess what that was. Frick's memo to Wilson was written one week after he, BBC staff writer CE Webber and head of drama Sydney Newman finalised a three-page "General Notes on Background and Approach" document for a new science-fiction serial called Doctor Who. Frick's memo - and Donald Bull's report from the year before, which cites Crispin - are included in a folder of early Doctor Who production paperwork ("Doctor Who General B", T5-648-1) held at the BBC's Written Archives Centre in Caversham. So Crispin was surely being consulted about established SF writers who might write for Doctor Who, and he then put himself forward to write the theme music.

That's not so odd as it might sound. Crispin was, under his real name Bruce Montgomery, a composer, producing orchestral works as well as scores for more than 30 films including Doctor in the House (1954) and Carry On Sergeant (1958), and various sequels of each. Much of his screen work was for this kind of light comedy, so he might have seemed an odd fit for the science-fiction series Wilson had in mind. But I'm struck that the titular sergeant in the first Carry On film was played by William Hartnell, who two months after Crispin's meeting with Frick was cast as Doctor Who. 

Anyway, I digress...)

The Case of the Gilded Fly is Crispin's first novel, published in 1944 and set in October 1940. It begins with different people all arriving in Oxford, effectively a long, comic prologue about the shortcomings of trains. Among these characters are various actors, a writer, a journalist, an organist, a professor of English language and literature who is also an amateur detective, and a chief constable who is a published literary critic. 

"By Thursday, 11 October, they were all in Oxford. ... And within the week that followed three of these eleven died by violence." (p. 21)

That sets up a suspenseful plot but things then proceed rather gradually, the first death not discovered until as late as p. 74. By then, we've established that actress Yseut Haskell has few friends among the company of the play she is rehearsing, meaning everyone is a suspect - if, in fact, she's been murdered. It just so happens that her body is found in a room downstairs from where Gervase Fen lives with his wife, so they are quickly caught up in the case. In fact, Fen deduces who killed Yseut that same night and then spends most of the rest of the book keeping this fact to himself, so as not to interrupt rehearsals of the play. That surely means he has some responsibility when the murderer kills someone else...

If this is not very satisfactory, there is also a fair bit of what feels like cheating - Fen and the author keeping evidence from us, so they have more to work with than we do. The last full chapter involves 10 pages of Fen spelling out everything, which feels a little clunky - at least some of this could have been revealed earlier, to avoid such lengthy exposition.

While this first novel by Crispin could be improved structurally, it's also great fun - and constantly surprising. At one point, there's the incongruous image of a room in an Oxford college filled with monkeys and typewriters but - to the disappointment of the academic study being conducted - declining to write Shakespeare. On another occasion, we get a vision of halcyon days before the war.

"'Tell me, Nigel,' said Fen, whose mind was on other things, 'were you here for the celebrations on All Hallow E'en three or four years ago?'

'When the college danced naked on the lawn in the moonlight? Yes, I was involved - in fact suffered disciplinary penalties which must have paid for the SCR port for several weeks.'

'Those were the days. Were any fairies in evidence?'

'We counted at one stage of the evening and deduced the presence of an unknown among us. But whether it was a fairy or just one of the dons we never knew.'"(pp. 117-8)

None of this is for the sake of the plot; it just adds to the fun. There are gags and literary allusions, the title of the book taken from Act IV, scene 4 of King Lear - though the author makes us look it up ourselves.

The murder of Yseut Haskell is ingeniously devised to fool the police into thinking it was suicide. Crispin, a composer, makes clever play with music in the plot - the organist's sheet music and use of organ stops are vital to unravelling the mystery, and the sound of a gunshot is masked by a radio playing the fortissimo re-entry of the main theme during the overture from Wagner's Die Meistersinger (p. 194). I've seen it suggested that the climax of Crispin's later Fen novel The Moving Toyshop (1946) was, ahem, homaged by Alfred Hitchcock in the ending of Strangers on a Train (1951). Surely the method of disguising the murder of Yseult in this novel can be seen in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the Oxford college transposed to the Albert Hall.

This is Fen's first published case but we're told he's worked on several mysteries before this and is well known for his work as a sleuth. It's not the best detective story but it's a very promising start.

Garry Halliday and the Ray of Death, by Justin Blake

This is a novelisation of the second Garry Halliday serial, about the adventures of an airline pilot (see my post about the first one, Garry Halliday and the Disappearing Diamonds). The book was published in 1961, based on the six-episode serial broadcast on BBC Television on Saturday tea-times from 26 September to 31 October 1959. 

The first serial was considered enough of a success for two new Garry Halliday serials to be commissioned, apparently at once. This was mentioned in press previews ahead of the the second serial - in the Nottingham Evening Post, 10 September 1959, p. 15 and the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 18 September 1959, p. 9. But the third serial wasn't broadcast until January 1960.

Why the gap? One issue was the availability of the cast. The Radio Times listing for the first episode of this second run says that star Terence Longdon (who played Garry Halliday) was appearing in The Sound of Murder at London's Aldwych Theatre while Elwyn Brook-Jones (returning as the villainous Voice) was in The Crooked Mile at the Cambridge Theatre. Those commitments probably explain why - again, as per Radio Times - this was a "BBC recording" rather than broadcast live (as with the first serial).

(The stage productions must have given permission for the actors to appear in the TV serial at the same time as their stage commitments; the plugs in Radio Times were probably part of the agreement - I've seen evidence of that with other productions.)

Also returning was Terence Alexander as Halliday's co-pilot Bill Dodds, who narrates the novelisation. He's got a more distinctive, slightly Woosterish voice compared to the first novelisation.

“Hullo! Bill Dodds talking. Are you receiving me?

I expect you are. Loud and clear, as we say in radio communication - I've always had a good carrying voice.

If you've read a book called Garry Halliday and the Disappearing Diamonds, you'll know who I am, and who Garry is, and about Jean Wills, our stewardess, and about the Voice. If you haven't, then you'd better read it, because I'm not going to explain all over again. Life's too short, and anyway there are probably going to be more books after this one, and I can't keep doing it. I expect there'll be many more books as Garry has adventures, and Garry's an adventurous type.” (p. 10, opening Chapter 1)

Jean Wills was back, but with actress Ann Gudrun (better known as Gudrun Ure) replaced by Jennifer Wright - and still not having a great deal to do in the story. The cast was also expanded, with Bill's fiancee Sonia Delamare played by Juno Stevas and Garry's plucky nephew Tim Halliday played by David Langford.

The story opens with Garry, Bill and Jean having set up their own airline, the Halliday Charter Company, and flying a party of holiday-makers out to Paris. Tim sits next to a nervous man whose only luggage is a box containing a jigsaw puzzle. When Tim expresses interest in the puzzle, the man is rude - and when the jigsaw pieces fall out into the cabin, he calls stewardess Jean a "stupid, clumsy bitch" (p. 22), which is a bit of a shock in a TV serial/book aimed at children.

They gather up the jigsaw pieces but Tim, in revenge for the rudeness, keeps one piece. It then turns out that the back of the jigsaw puzzle is written on in invisible ink, and Tim now has a vital part of a message being delivered on behalf of the Voice.

Garry and his friends attempt to make sense of the message and trace how it is delivered, while at the same time the Voice instructs his minions to recover the missing piece of the jigsaw and kill those who get in the way. As in the first serial, this includes an attempt to destroy Garry's plane while in the air.

A preview in Junior Radio Times supplement (included in the Radio Times covering the first episode, via the link above) reveals that this was an ambitious production with location filming abroad:

“There have been film locations in Paris and also down at Ferry Field Airport at Lydd, Kent. Once more Silver City Airways have kindly afforded us every facility, and the Managing Director was recently mistaken for one of our actors playing the part of a high-pressure business executive!

There are more thrilling aerobatic film sequences and a number of specially staged fights, for The Voice’s men are out to get Garry this time, come what may, and their methods change from the use of poison gas to the use of plain fists.” (Junior Radio Times, p. 3)

I'm also struck by how often it veers on the edge of what's suitable for kids: one man compromised by the Voice discusses committing suicide; young Tim Halliday witnesses another man falling to his death; the police seem very relaxed about our heroes shooting a helicopter out of the sky (p. 125). There's fair bit of smoking and drinking, and Bill's views on women - he falls in love with Sonia after she "clonked me on the lug-hole with a kipper" (p. 11). At one point, Garry says of Bill's interest in the secrets hidden on the jigsaws:

“He's a bit kinky about invisible ink.” (p. 37)

At the same time, the plot races along and is full of daft jokes to lighten the mood - Bill gets confused by police sergeant George Eustace having two first names (p. 35), and there's later a police sergeant in Keswick with the surname Love. The local inspector presumably spoke to him with an accent:

“Wait, Love. Wait. Not so far. Instructions must be adhered to, Love, or where would the world be, I ask you.” (p. 121)

The plot hinges on the invention of a new kind of heating appliance.

“It was a cheap way of heating by doing without coal, or gas, or oil; his invention simply extracted heat from the atmosphere, and used that.” (p. 71)

That seems prescient - a kind of air-source heat pump offering green, renewable energy - but the application of the technology is very much of its time. The Voice sees the potential to focus the energy produced into a death ray, a weapon effectively like a cut-price nuclear bomb. 

Such a weapon is of interest to Dr Edmundo (Richard Warner), who our narrator describes as,

“one of these middle-aged South American chaps with mahogany faces and black moustaches, who are always having revolutions in countries with unlikely names.” (p. 38)

He's a stock villain, a racist cliche - and this is not the only time Bill Dodds shares disparaging remarks about foreigners. At one point, he uses a particular word - which I won't repeat here - which is even more shocking than "bitch" to see in a book written for children.

Edmundo employs "thugs" who aren't named in the book but on screen were "Sebastiano" and "Perfidio". The latter, appearing in the last two episodes of the serial, was played by Walter Randall, who later played similar, small villainous roles in Doctor Who. These were the only two episodes of Garry Halliday that Randall appeared in, which means we know someone else who had an uncredited role on the production - and went on to write for the series.

“Douglas [Camfield] was commissioned [to write] for the [Garry Halliday] serial because he had worked on it in 1959 as an AFM where he met actor Walter Randall for the first time, and who would become one of his closest friends, as well as the go-to man for playing middle eastern villains.” (Michael Seely, Directed by Douglas Camfield, p. 34.)

Camfield wrote an episode of the eighth and final Garry Halliday series, which was not a serial but comprised six standalone episodes. But we're getting ahead of ourselves...

The ending of this second story makes use of the fact that no one (except the viewer watching at home) knows what the Voice looks like. Throughout proceedings, he's communicated with his minions remotely, him seeing them on a TV screen, them only hearing his politely couched threats. But the final page of the book promises a rematch, with a closing line that reads to me like the promise of a conclusion to a trilogy:

“Whether it's my choice or the Voice's choice, at some time, in some place, we're going to finish things between us.” (p. 126)

Sadly, I've not yet tracked down a copy of the next novelisation, Garry Halliday and the Kidnapped Five (1962), but can trace something of the plot from listings - and the only surviving episode of Garry Halliday. More on that coming soon. 

Oh, and the cover art for this novelisation is by Ley Kenyon, who as a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III forged passports and other documents in the lead up to the Great Escape, and then illustrated Paul Brickhill's book.

Love and Let Die, by John Higgs

I really enjoyed this wide-ranging ramble through Bond, the Beatles and the British psyche. It charts the interweaving histories of the Fabs and 007, not just in their 1960s heydays but up to the present and beyond, exploring disparities and connections, and how our interpretations have changed. In detailing shifts in what Bond and the Beatles mean, it's a history of our changing mores and anxieties. It's a fun and provactive read - a book about connections that really connects.

"That's as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs," quips Sean Connery's Bond in Goldfinger (1964), a moment before someone hits him. Yet less than a decade later, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and ex-Beatles producer George Martin provided the soundtrack for Bond movie Live and Let Die (1973). I've long thought this was evidence of seismic shifts in contemporary culture over a very brief period, but not got much further that that. This is the territory Higgs dives into in his book, with lots of fresh insight and stuff I didn't know, for all that the subjects are so familiar.

How strange to realise that I've been part of these historical changes. I was at university in the mid-1990s when the Beatles enjoyed a resurgence in things like the Anthology TV series, and well remember debates had then about who was best: the Beatles or the Stones. How disquieting to realise, as Higgs says, that we don't make that comparison any more, without ever being aware of a moment when things changed.

Higgs is also of his (and our) time in rejecting ideas that I can remember used to hold considerable sway, such as that John Lennon was the 'best' Beatle, or the band's driving creative force. As the book says, there's growing recognition of what the four Beatles accomplished together rather than as competing individuals. There's something of this, too, in the way Higgs positions Bond to the Beatles. Initially, they're binary opposites, Bond an establishment figure Higgs equates with death, the Beatles working-class rebels all about life and love. By the end, it's as if they synchronise.

This might all sound a bit highfalutin but the insights here are smart and funny. As just one example, here's what Bond's favourite drink reveals about who he is.

"Bond's belief that he knows exactly what the best is appears early in the first novel Casino Royale, when he goes to the bar and orders a dry martini in a deep champagne goblet. Not trusting the barman to know how to make a martini, he gives him specific instructions. 'Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel.' When the drink arrives, he tells that barman that is is 'Excellent,' then adds, 'But if you can get a vodka made with grain instead of potatoes, you will find it still better.' Most people who have worked in the service industries will recognise a customer like this." (pp. 242-3)

Amazing - Bond as an umarell! 

I especially like how free-wheeling and broad this all is. There's stuff on shamanic ceremonies from the ancient past, stuff on Freud and the fine art world and Putin. At one point, Higgs talks about the damaging effects of fame in disconnecting a rock star (or anyone else famous) from everyone else.

"Drugs and alcohol appear to mask this disconnect, but in reality, they exaggerate it - cocaine in particular acts as fascism in powdered form. It erodes empathy and keeps the focus on the ever-hardening ego." (p. 294)

It probes the less palatable bits of popular history, grappling head on the complexities of our heroes' objectionable behaviour and views. Our heroes are not always good people, yet by framing this all as a study of how attitudes and culture have shifted, the book avoids making them all villains. 

I nodded along to lots of perceptive stuff, like the thoughts on why Spectre (2016) didn't work precisely because it used screenwriting structures that usually do well in other movies. But I'm not sure Higgs is always right. He argues that a derisive response to a particular CGI sequence in Die Another Day (2002) led to a serious rethink by the Bond producers, which included sacking Pierce Brosnan. I suspect a more pertinent reason was that - as I understand it - Brosnan injured his knee while filming the hovercraft chase and first unit production had to be postponed while he underwent surgery. That would have been expensive and an ongoing risk for an ongoing series of action movies. The fantasy of a Bond who is, over 60 years of movies, always in his prime, must square up against the practicalities of ageing. And that's in line with what Higgs argues elsewhere.

But I don't make this point to criticise. It's more that I found myself responding to the book as if it were a conversation, inviting the reader to engage - and argue. Most potent of all is the final chapter. Having delved so deeply into the past, the author maps out how Bond should develop from here. Yes, absolutely, a younger, millennial Bond who'll appeal to a new generation, and one big on fun and consent, and whose partners don't all die. But also -

[Thankfully, Simon is dragged off-stage.]

The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien

Atomic Theory is at work in a rural parish of Ireland. This, says Sergeant Pluck of the local police station, explains a spate of missing bicycles - and why one particular bicycle is locked up in a cell. The sergeant spells it out for us thus:

"Everything is composed of small particles of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical figures too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. These diminutive gentlemen are called atoms. Do you follow me intelligently?" (p. 86)

Since the narrator of The Third Policeman follows this, the sergeant proceeds with devastating logic:

"'Consecutively and consequentially, ' he continued, 'you can safely infer that you are made of atoms yourself and so is your fob pocket and the tail of your shirt and the instrument you use for taking the leavings out of the crook of your hollow tooth. Do you happen to know what takes place when you strike a bar of iron with a good coal hammer or with a blunt instrument?'"

The answer, he says, is that,

"When the wallop falls, the atoms are bashed away down to the bottom of the bar and compressed and crowded there like eggs under a good clucker. After a while in the course of time they swim around and get back at last to where they were. But if you keep hitting the bar long enough and hard enough they do not get a chance to do this and what happens then?" (p. 87)

Pluck explains that atoms from the iron bar duly end up in the hammer, while atoms from the hammer end up in the iron bar. What's more, the same applies in the matter of bicycles.

"The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles." (p. 88)

He proceeds to supply percentages for various named individuals. 

This is one, compelling example of the daftness contained in The Third Policeman, a novel written in 1940 but not published until 1967. I've had this recommended by various people over the years but have only just got to it. The plot, as such, is straightforward. Our narrator tells us in the opening sentence that he was embroiled with someone else in committing a murder; he then recounts what happened but much of the book concerns the rambling, surreal and often quite confused adventures that follow this wicked deed.

Things get very surreal. At one point, the narrator descends to an underground chamber where his every want can be produced from a machine - but not taken out of the chamber. He is sentenced to death by hanging but rescued by a union of one-legged men (more or less). In a sequence that calls back to Pluck's elucidation on Atomic Theory, the narrator develops some kind of relationship with a female bicycle. In all, it's generally funny-peculiar but peppered with funny-ha-ha, and I can see why some readers might find it insufferable. What saves it is that through these comic, quixotic adventures, the reader is haunted by a sense of something more sinister being involved.

Concise but illuminating notes at the end of this edition cite the influence on O'Brien of A Rebours (1884), the French decadent novel that also inspired Oscar Wilde and is seen in the closing moments of Withnail and I - a film with similar rambling, daft adventures in the countryside with something sad and bitter underneath. The notes also say that "de Selby", a philosopher whose daft theories are expounded here, largely in footnotes, returns in person in O'Brien's later novel The Dalkey Archive (1964), and also in work by Robert Anton Wilson (co-author of The Illuminatus Trilogy). The sequence on pp. 103-105 where the narrator is invited to guess the name of man he doesn't know, and we get a long list of odd monickers interspersed with "No", surely influenced the same gag in the Christmas episode of Father Ted. The notes provide evidence of the novel's influence on the TV series Lost. There's even a "De Selby" referenced in an audio play I produced nearly two decades ago, too. Reading this novel has been akin to when my children see the film or TV episode that inspires a well-known meme.

But The Third Policeman - and its final revelations - more than anything reminded me of stuff that can't have influenced it, or been influenced by it in turn. It's difficult to mention these without a risk of spoiling the novel for those who haven't read it, so I'll leave some line breaks.

Yes, I'll leave some line breaks.

Like this.

And this.

And this.

And this.

In particular, I thought of the horror film Dead of Night (1945), the defining structure of which came about by accident during the edit, and also William Golding's novel Pincher Martin (1956) and the brilliant, unsettling short story 'I Used to Live Here Once' by Jean Rhys (also used as the title of her biography). The odd thought is that all these works and their authors (including O'Brien and The Third Policemen) somehow trod the same surreal, sinister paths independently. That implies that this unsettling space is in actual fact common ground.