The Quiller Interrogation

Adam Hall is my favourite writer. In my view, he is one of the true great spy novelists, and his work deserves as much attention as John le Carré, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming. His protagonist was a British secret agent known only as Quiller, who works for an officially non-existent agency called The Bureau. Hall’s 19 Quiller novels and one short story, published between 1965 and 1996, were a major influence on my conception of Paul Dark. If you like my books, I’m pretty sure you would enjoy the Quiller series. They are gripping, intense and complex spy thrillers, written in a virtuoso style that at times takes the breath away. THE TANGO BRIEFING and THE NINTH DIRECTIVE are probably my two favourite spy novels.

‘Nobody writes better espionage than Adam Hall’ – The New York Times

‘Tension in a novel is difficult to maintain at a pitch that actually creates a physical impact on the readers. A few of the best writers can do it and among them is Adam Hall’ – The Times Literary Supplement

‘Awe-inspiring – an exhilarating hell of a pace’ – The Times

‘A worthy successor to James Bond, and there can be no greater compliment’ – The Daily Telegraph

Despite praise like this, Adam Hall has never achieved the fame of some other spy novelists – but he has come close. The first novel in the series, THE BERLIN MEMORANDUM, was retitled THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM in the US and won the Edgar for Best Novel of 1966, beating Len Deighton’s FUNERAL IN BERLIN among others on the shortlist. It was filmed as THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM the same year: shot on location in Berlin, it featured a score by John Barry, a screenplay by Harold Pinter, and starred George Segal, Senta Berger, Alec Guinness and Max Von Sydow.

It’s a good film, but it wasn’t quite as great as the adaptations of Len Deighton’s THE IPCRESS FILE, with Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, or John le Carré’s THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, which starred Richard Burton as Alec Leamas. But the novel is certainly on a par with both those books. In 1975 the BBC made a TV series, with Michael Jayston starring as Quiller. I’ve never seen it (and it seems the original tapes may have been scrubbed), but it was not the success Hall had hoped for. According to an interview he gave with The Guardian in 1985, sales of the novels declined after they were reissued with ‘As Seen On TV’ on the jackets. But perhaps it’s time, in 2010, for a Quiller revival.

I’m delighted and honoured today to present a Q&A session with Adam Hall’s son. JP Trevor is an acclaimed designer/artist, having created Special FX art for STAR WARS, set designs for BATMAN (a 100-foot painting of Gotham City at night), as well as award-winning TV spots, a major rock concert for Russia’s leading star, next to the Kremlin, and much more besides. You can check out some of his work at his website: http://www.thinkshapes.com/ JP also wrote Final Chapter, the moving essay at the end of QUILLER BALALAIKA describing how his father completed that novel shortly before his death. You can read that on the excellent resource Quiller.net: http://www.quiller.net/trevor/jptribute.html And he designed some of the Quiller artwork, notably the figure of the trench-coated silhouette, and took several photographs of his father that were used as jacket portraits. He took the one at the top of this page, for instance, at an airport in Oregon, after persuading a commercial flight to wait so he could use its stripes to provide the background.

And now, without further ado, The Quiller Interrogation…

Jeremy Duns: Hi, JP, and thanks very much for agreeing to do this. Let me start by asking you about the film world, and the current situation with the Quiller series. Who holds the rights, and is there anything in the works? I seem to remember reading years ago that MGM had optioned all the novels with the exception of THE BERLIN MEMORANDUM, and had the idea of filming them in every year alternate to a Bond film as a sort of tougher, more realistic alternative to that series. Is that right?

JP Trevor: United Artists/MGM bought the movie rights to QUILLER SOLITAIRE some years ago. Prior to that I was invited to meet the heads of United Artists after they’d read my Final Chapter piece to discuss Q, and they asked me my thoughts on casting, et cetera. Jeff Kleeman was one of the executives at that meeting. After the horrific 9/11, I spoke with my contacts in LA and they told me the public would probably not want to see films with lots of explosions. And that Q was a good bet as it’s lower key and different from Bond, although I can’t figure out why my father put in explosions here and there.

Time went by and they ‘revamped’ 007 and nothing happened with Q. Now, MGM is close to being bankrupt and I’m not sure what’s happening with Bond.

I’ve no idea why THE BERLIN MEMORANDUM was not included in the MGM contract. I do know that it was one of UA’s heads’ brothers that made THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM.

My contact in LA, myself (and you) favour filming THE TANGO BRIEFING. My own thoughts on this: Bond is a franchise (like Wrigley’s chewing gum) so it has ‘history’ and film momentum (Q does not) and it would probably take a few flops to send 007 into space never to return. (Ironically one of my art collector friends is Lewis Gilbert, who did send 007 into space in MOONRAKER).

Daniel Craig (a good actor generally) has been portrayed (for me anyway) as a common thug in the latest 007 movies; I am sure Sean Connery is rolling his eyes – hence my comment a few days ago: ‘You can’t just stick a bow-tie on someone and call him Bond.’

So for me, 007 is on shaky ground – though nobody else might agree with me. I also hear that the Bond people are a bit nervous about Bourne... I had a private meeting with Pierce Brosnan in London two years ago and I told him he was better than Craig. I had proposed to Mr Brosnan to play Q. I could go to MGM with a star...bla bla. Anyway he called me a week later; he passed on Q as he had his own project that might conflict, he told me. But if Bond goes down la toilette, Quiller would be a good replacement because it’s also a franchise (18 books, excluding MEMORANDUM). And it would cost less. But I’m not sure Hollywood could make the first Q a hit. And if the first film bombed, that’s the end of the franchise – in their hands – and they have signed in perpetuity; a Hollywood habit, so nobody else can touch it, but I have ideas, hinted at in my piece Life Like Quiller.

Hollywood is not much better with sequels anyway. (The recent remake of my father’s novel THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX, for example). The thing is: Bourne (wow, what a coincidence...) is a bit too ‘Quillerised’ and so is the latest 007 movie – and I know why, but I can’t say anything for now: you’re right about reading that they wanted a tougher, more realistic agent. Then guess what happened; 007 (with Craig) became just that – or a poor example. So, the niche that Quiller fitted into is now smaller, as Bourne and Bond (the only real rivals) are looking too much like Q. The solution, in my humble opinion, is to revamp the Quiller format – I have the original Q Format – then make a book like THE TANGO BRIEFING in Europe. It could be done for a fraction of a 007 budget.

Conclusion: for now MGM and Quiller is up in the air. Whoever buys MGM might, or might not, appreciate Quiller.

I’m doing all I can to promote Quiller and prod MGM indirectly. The key thing is that Quiller is a franchise; that’s kerching in Hollywood eyes. The downside at the moment is Q, 007 and Bourne are getting blurred. Whoever makes the next Quiller movie has to be better than THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM for sure. It was not good. For starters the guy who played Q couldn’t even walk like an agent...(My words, but my father was embarrassed about this movie. As for the UK TV series, he wanted to sue – but didn’t.)

JD: Thanks. All of that is fascinating, and answers a lot of things I’ve been wondering about over the years. I see your point that the new direction of the Bond films and the reimagining of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne in the Matt Damon films might have spoiled the turf for Quiller a little in the eyes of some film industry people. But perhaps there’s another way of looking at that. As you know, the best-selling American thriller-writer Eric Van Lustbader, author of THE NINJA, is a huge fan of Quiller and says so on the jackets of many of the paperbacks: ‘When it comes to espionage fiction, Adam Hall has no peer’. I take it you know that he also now writes the Jason Bourne novels, to great success, and that in 2007 he dedicated THE BOURNE BETRAYAL to the memory of your father and featured a hat-tip to Quiller’s famous request to send roses to Moira within the book. A couple of months ago I was at the Harrogate Crime Festival in the UK and bumped into a writer called Jason Elliot, who had just published an acclaimed spy novel called THE NETWORK, which is set in Afghanistan. We were delighted to meet each other, and found we had a lot in common – including a love of the Quiller novels. He was there with his publicist, and over drinks we rhapsodized about the strengths of the books and why they should be better known until, I’m sure, she thought we were both quite mad.

My point is that surely today we need Quiller more than ever – and with Bond, Bourne, Bauer and others, there is clearly an appetite for intelligent, intense, complex and taut spy thrillers featuring an agent who knows how to reach the objective. I’m intrigued that you mention cheap European location shooting. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

Moving on a little, I mentioned that Quiller is intense and complex, and having read some of your own thoughts about your father I take it he was, as well (and you, too, if you don’t mind my saying). Do you think that’s a fair assessment? What do you think are the strengths of the novels, and what are your favourite aspects of them, and of your father’s work in general?

JPT: I didn’t know about Van Lustbader and Q. Small world. Thanks also for saying that we need Q more than ever. I would like this series to survive and even get a new lease of life. As for making a movie over here, that’s quite a challenge, but who knows.

Who is Bauer?

Yes, my father was a very complex guy. Me too. Being a designer/artist doesn’t make it easier.

The main strengths of his Q novels for me are that he’s not afraid to cut/edit (unlike le Carré) and he doesn’t get frivolous. He sometimes doesn’t even bother with commas or full stops, a style I like. Stream-of-consciousness type thing. Most of his Quiller stories are hard to put down, a good sign. He does not over-describe, which I also like. He had a strong visual way of writing, which is maybe why his books are easy to film.

The only irritating thing is when he mentions his ‘bloody organism’, or ‘snivelling little organism’. This is where my father shows his own annoyance at having feelings such as fear. This is where Quiller lacks a layer. Making friends with his ‘organism’ would make him a tad warmer, I guess. True that fear and panic don’t help in a survival situation but my father went too far, I feel, in being angry at his organism, the very one that is keeping him alive. Not very Buddhist...

I’ll never know if my father was a spy. When a British paper interviewed him in Arizona and asked if he had been a spy, my father said ‘Let’s talk about the weather’. I sort of doubt it, and that he answered that way as a tease only. But he did seem to encounter real spies and CIA types here and there.

JD: Bauer is Jack Bauer, an American agent played by Kiefer Sutherland in the TV series 24. I think the current incarnation of Bond, as well as Bourne and Bauer, have something of the darkness and grit of the Quiller series, although I think Quiller is darker and grittier than all of them.

That’s a very interesting point about anger and warmth. And I also wonder if he wasn’t involved in some peripheral way in the espionage business, perhaps during the war.

I also agree that Quiller should be much better known and given a new lease of life. Ostara Press recently republished THE NINTH DIRECTIVE as a Print on Demand book as part of its new Top Notch Thrillers series: http://www.ostarapublishing.co.uk/book.html?id=50 How did that come about, and are there plans for any more re-releases? How about ebook editions? I have multiple editions of the books, but would love to be able to carry them all around with me in my jacket pocket. And Kindles can be very valuable weapons if you’re approached suddenly in a dark alley.

JPT: Thanks for the info on Jack Bauer. Funny that both names start with a B like Bond. Yes I agree, Q is grittier than most. I think my father had a lot of emotional scars from the war (the Germans killed his brother) and he hated headmasters so the grittiness, I think, came from his anger. I’m not sure about his being in the spy biz, but if not, I’m sure it must have been tempting at times. I will never know. My mother was in Naval Intelligence in Britain. My father was an RAF Spitfire mechanic.

Ostara is releasing THE STRIKER PORTFOLIO soon, I believe. Mike Ripley (who is heading the Top Notch Thriller line) has proposed working out a Kindle deal with me, but my stepmother’s agent in NYC (Spectrum) has made that difficult to proceed with. But I will watch for other e-book opportunities.

JD: Excellent. Okay, one more question and then we’ll signal London. Your father’s papers are housed at Arizona State University. He was enormously prolific, and left us with not only the 19 Quiller novels but a host of others to enjoy. But I have a soft spot for Quiller. He was also a prolific researcher and note-taker – a compulsive worker, I would imagine. So I suppose I’m wondering if there is any unpublished Quiller material in his papers that could be published in the future, or is that it for the literary Quiller?

JPT: I think he wrote with a compulsion to survive his inner world, which was pretty dark. Like you, Q is my favorite. As a kid, like many, I wanted to be 007. ‘Living like’ Q was a good second best. The unpublished material I have with me is some original PR material for the Q books, the original QUILLER BALALAIKA plot book of his, and the Q Format – why Q is Q. I’m happy to share the Q Format with you sometime. The Bureau is open for signals whenever you wish. Except I hear it does not officially exist.

JD: I might just get back to you on that Q Format! Thank you so much for taking the time to do this – and all the best for the future with Quiller.

The Debrief recommends

I've been doing this blog for a few weeks now, so I thought I would step back for a moment. One thing I want to do here is to develop a body of articles, essays, pieces, posts, snippets – words – that look at several aspects of spying and spy fiction. I think the espionage genre is looked down on in some literary quarters, but deserves serious research and critical consideration.

This has been done in theses, journals and books, of course, but I feel that increasingly the arena for it will be online, or in digital form. One of my inspirations for this blog is an excellent site by a British academic, John Fraser, which contains Thrillers. This is effectively a hyperlinked book on the genre, and it's somewhere you can get lost for hours, and learn a lot. Some of the pieces perhaps suffer a little from academic-speak, but on the whole I think what shines through is Professor Fraser's deep knowledge and passion for the genre, his gentle wit, and his great insight. If you're a fan of Donald Hamilton and haven't been there yet, you really are in for a treat. But whoever your favourite thriller authors are, I think you'll find a lot to enjoy here, a lot to think about, and perhaps some new authors to discover.

Along slightly similar lines is Bradley On Film, 'the cinematic musings of Matthew Bradley'. While not strictly espionage- or thriller-related, this blog offers some fascinating insights into cinema history from a widely published author on popular culture, and an expert on the work of Richard Matheson (I Am Legend). Mr Bradley also had a long career in publishing, and was a friend and 'shadow publicist' for Elleston Trevor, alias Adam Hall. If you're a Quiller fan, you really must read his pieces on Mr Trevor. Start here.

Finally, I highly recommend a brand new blog, Markham's. Subtitled 'A Few Notes On The Thriller Genre', this is the brainchild of 'Q.R. Markham', the alias of Quentin Rowan, an American journalist, poet, critic and book-lover who has been published in The Paris Review and elsewhere. Mr Rowan is already offering some very astute insights into spy fiction, with the promise of more to come. There's a lot of food for thought in this deceptively simple and elegant looking blog.

Mr Rowan is also a novelist, having just completed a spy thriller set in the late Sixties (which shows excellent taste), which is currently seeking publication. Here is its compelling synopsis: 'Spy Safari follows Jonathan Chase, a man ensnared by an insidious line of work – espionage – that threatens to take over all aspects of his life. Chase has survived the undercover killing grounds of the Cold War and imprisonment in Manchuria. But now, in 1968, throughout Europe, U.S. agents are being kidnapped and brain-drained by a mysterious organization known only as Zero Directorate – and what begins for Chase as a global manhunt swiftly turns into something far closer to home.' I am already salivating at the prospect of reading it.

There are many other excellent spy fiction-related blogs out there, some of which you will find linked to in the right-hand column, but these are my top three tips for today. Tell them The Debrief sent you!

On suspense

Here's an article you might have missed: it was a guest post at the group blog Jungle Red Writers in July last year. I've added some pictures, tweaked a couple of sentences, and here it is again for your reading pleasure.


What I've learned from the masters of suspense

For a lot of people, the phrase ‘master of suspense’ immediately brings to mind the film director Alfred Hitchcock. Perhaps more than anyone else, Hitchcock has brought suspense into the cultural and critical fold. Many people instantly grasp the idea that he was not simply in the business of creating entertaining films, but was exploring the human condition: that he used suspense to tap into our greatest fears, and to comment on societal taboos, questions of identity and so on.

However, as soon as this argument is applied to books, other rules – or perceptions – often seem to come into play. Many people who understand and appreciate Hitchcock’s use of suspense view suspense novels as incapable of saying anything interesting or significant about life, at best providing a quick thrill.

Is it simply that Hitchcock handled suspense better than any novelist? I don’t believe so. Don’t get me wrong – I love Hitch. But today I’d like to look at three writers who have inspired me, and who I think are just as worthy of the description ‘masters of suspense’.

The Austrian writer Johannes Mario Simmel (left) was hugely popular in his day – it is thought that 70 million copies of his books were sold worldwide. In the 1970s, several novels he had written in the ’50s and ’60s were published in English translation, with covers that usually featured a spool of barbed wire and a swastika, and titles that recalled the work of Robert Ludlum: The Caesar Code, The Berlin Connection, The Cain Conspiracy...

But ignore the packaging: these are gripping thrillers coupled with profound psychological insight. There are a few commonalities: there is often a public figure trying to protect a horrifying secret, and a character who commits a crime for love. Many are set in Fifties Vienna or Berlin, and the Cold War atmosphere is palpable: Double Agent-Triple Cross opens with an attempt to smuggle people out of East Berlin via a tunnel.

But above all, these are great suspense novels. My favourites are The Cain Conspiracy, which opens with a man overhearing his brother hiring someone to assassinate him, and The Berlin Connection, which starts with the line: ‘I can remember the moment even now when I died for the first time.’ The narrator of the latter novel is a former Hollywood child star in his mid-thirties making his comeback in a film called Comeback, which is of course about a former Hollywood child star in his mid-thirties making his comeback in a film called Comeback. He has to finish the film because he desperately needs the financial security to divorce his rich wife. And he has to divorce her soon, because she’s on the verge of discovering that he’s having an affair with her daughter, which is illegal in some states (and would ruin his film career). He’s also an alcoholic with a heart condition who can’t act, so the picture’s under threat. Oh, and he’s hiding a secret from the war. You won’t be able to sit still.

My second master of suspense is someone whose name I’m not even sure about. The two novels of his I own are credited to ‘Julyan Semyonov’ and ‘Julian Semenov’, but it appears his real name was ‘Yulian Landres’ (or the equivalent in Cyrillic). Most Western readers have never heard of Landres (right), but he was a giant in the Soviet Union: his 1968 novel Seventeen Moments of Spring (also translated under the more prosaic title The Himmler Ploy) was a massive best-seller. The TV adaptation (pictured below) was even more successful, making the protagonist an icon in the Soviet Union. Jokes are still told about him to this day, and repeat runs of the series reportedly see a significant drop in crime rates in Moscow, as everyone is indoors watching it.

Set in the final weeks of World War Two, our hero is Nazi officer Max Otto von Stirlitz – who is soon revealed to be a deep-cover Soviet agent, Colonel Maksim Maksimovich Isaev. Both the novel and TV series build the suspense very slowly, with Stirlitz/Isaev looking to uncover which leading Nazi is involved in trying to broker a separate peace deal with the United States while avoiding exposure from the same men. It’s one of the tautest spy thrillers I’ve read. He had one other spy novel translated into English that I'm aware of, Tass Is Authorized To Announce... It's not nearly as good, although it offers an intriguing look at the Cold War from the other side's perspective.

My final master of suspense is a British writer, Elleston Trevor (left). Perhaps best known for his novel Flight Of The Phoenix - filmed in 1965 with James Stewart - he also wrote 19 superb suspense thrillers under the name Adam Hall. Featuring a neurotic and battle-scarred British secret agent called Quiller (the first was filmed as The Quiller Memorandum in the Sixties, pictured below with George Segal), the series combined an esoteric knowledge of everything from sleep deprivation to martial arts with sweat-soaked action.

Like Simmel, and to a lesser degree Landres, Trevor was very fond of cliff-hangers, which he built up with successive chapters until it's almost unbearable. Told in the first person, we follow Quiller as he is chased by dogs, grips the underside of trains and enters darkened hotel rooms. But unlike in a film, here we are inside Quiller’s head, and so we experience every last moment of anxiety. My favourites in the series are The Ninth Directive, which revolves around an assassination plot in Bangkok, and The Tango Briefing, in which Quiller must reach a crashed cargo plane in the Sahara before anyone else.

All three of these writers understood the power of suspense, and used it to explore themes close to their hearts: Simmel the post-war environment of Austria and Germany; Landres duty and patriotism; and Trevor the survival instinct. Each of them had his work filmed, and often to great effect. I suspect if Hitchcock had tackled them the results might have been even more impressive – and that their work would be seen in a somewhat different light.

Paperback writers

This is an article from 2002 that I never managed to get published anywhere, despite it featuring original interviews with Martin Cruz Smith, John Gardner, Donald Hamilton and William Boyd. The first three I essentially just called up after tracking down their numbers, while I interviewed Boyd in person as part of my day job while he was promoting Any Human Heart. Several years later, he remembered me when I asked if he'd like to read my debut novel, and gave me an extremely generous endorsement for it.

I pitched this article to newspapers and magazines in the UK and US, but for a journalist with little track record it wasn't quite juicy enough. I still think it would have made a good feature for GQ or Esquire, though, if they'd taken the chance. On the plus side, I managed to talk to some of my favourite writers about their work, and learned a lot about thrillers in the process. There's a version of this at my official site, but I've added some images to present it afresh. Few of the film projects mentioned in the article panned out, and sadly John Gardner and Donald Hamilton are no longer with us, but this is a chance to read rare interviews with both of them, and journey back to the world of vintage spy paperbacks. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

Beyond Bond

With Modesty Blaise and Matt Helm both due to return to the silver screen, Jeremy Duns talks to some forgotten thriller writers coming in from the cold

Bond is back. Although the 50th anniversary of 007's first appearance, in Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, is actually next year, Penguin has nipped in early and has already reissued all the Bond novels in classy new covers to celebrate. A wise move, perhaps, considering the hype about to engulf us all: 2002 is also the 40th anniversary of the first Bond film, Dr No, and to help hammer that home, the 20th film in the series, Die Another Day (due out on November 22), promises to include several nods to classic Bond moments - including Halle Berry ascending from the ocean in a bikini, à la Honey Ryder. We're in for a Fleming fest.

But while 007 and his creator seem destined to hog the limelight in coming months, some old foes are lurking in the shadows, gathering strength to do battle with the tuxedoed super-spy once again.

Bond, James Bond is now such a dominant cultural figure that it’s easy to forget that Fleming fashioned him after adventure heroes such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, Bulldog Drummond and The Saint. But following the success of the first few films in the early Sixties, Bond began attracting imitators of his own: TV series such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E and Mission: Impossible, Hollywood films such as Our Man Flint, and a slew of gaudy paperbacks promising slick, sexy and sadistic secret agents.

Most of the 'Bond clones' have rightly been forgotten. But for every Man from O.R.G.Y. there was a Harry Palmer. Behind some of the scantily clad sirens on these now dusty covers lurk believable characters, gripping plots and dazzling prose. And there's an uncommon thrill to reading a twist on a familiar theme. John Braine's character Xavier Flynn, for example, featured in two novels in the Seventies: he works for a counter-espionage organisation that takes its codenames from CS Lewis' Narnia novels, drinks bison vodka and is a devout Catholic. William Garner wrote three books featuring an agent called Michael Jagger, who picks up society girls in the street and owns a Francis Bacon painting; strangely, nobody comments on his name. For those bored with the 'shaken, not stirred' formula, there are dozens of new iconographies to explore.

One writer who managed to mine similar territory to Fleming but created a substantial following of his own is Peter O’Donnell. A script-writer for newspaper comic strips – among them the Daily Express’ adaptation of Goldfinger – O'Donnell was asked in 1962 to come up with a new spy series. He remembered an incident when he had been stationed with the British Army in the Caucasus Mountains during the war: a 12-year-old girl had boldly walked into the camp looking for food. The girl inspired the character of Modesty Blaise, an orphan from Hungary who had grown up to head a global criminal organisation called The Network, before packing it all in to carry out hair-raising missions for the British government.

The strip appeared in the Evening Standard the following year – and has been there ever since. In 1966, it was made into a dreadful film starring Monica Vitti, Terence Stamp and Dirk Bogarde. Now, Hollywood is trying again: Miramax has already finished shooting My Name Is Modesty. It's directed by Scott Spiegel, but 'presented' by Quentin Tarantino, who has long harboured the wish to see the character return to the silver screen. It follows the Modesty's early years as a refugee and criminal, seemingly with the aim of introducing a series. Unknown British actress Alexandra Staden plays the lead.

O’Donnell isn’t in favour of the prequel idea, and says he won’t comment publicly on the film. But, in the meantime, his 13 novels featuring the character – arguably the best drawn female in the genre – are available at your nearest second-hand book emporium, and are well worth seeking out.

Modesty Blaise isn’t the only former Bond rival to be resurrected. Even MGM – the makers of the Bond films – are getting in on the act. In the mid-Nineties, they bought the rights to Elleston Trevor’s series about Quiller, a bitten-eared Cold War alley-cat of a British agent. It was reported that they planned to release a Quiller between each of Bond’s excursions, but so far nothing has materialised.

But perhaps the most surprising cold warrior to be slated for a comeback is Matt Helm. In February, Dreamworks announced that they have optioned Donald Hamilton’s 27 Helm thrillers, and that Gary Luketic (Legally Blonde) has already signed on to direct the first film.

Helm previously hit the silver screen in the Sixties, in four Bond spoofs starring Dean Martin. That carousing lush bore no relation to the Helm of the books, who was a ruthless government assassin. Hamilton himself is a little kinder on Dino: 'Well, he was not the guy I would have picked,' he says from his home in Gotland, off the coast of Sweden. 'He was never going to be as tough as I would have liked the character, but I think he did a pretty good job considering the baggage he came with.' Had he been given the choice, however, he says he would have picked Richard Boone for the role.

After writing several pulps and Westerns, Hamilton wrote his first Helm novel, Death of a Citizen, in 1960. 'I didn't know any killers or secret agents or anything. I was just looking to write about a good, violent character,' he says. At the start of the novel, Helm is a married photographer living in Santa Fe, but he is soon drawn back into a world he thought he had left behind in the war. The transformation from family man to killer is chilling, and it contains some of the greatest hardboiled prose outside Hammett and Chandler.

Although the character has often been called 'the American Bond', there are few similarities - Helm is a lanky, laconic Swedish-American who wouldn't know what to do with a tux - and Fleming was not yet very popular in the US in 1960. Still, Hamilton admits to being a Fleming admirer. And, like Bond's creator, he has never been popular with feminists. 'A lady came up to me at a party once and screamed that she detested my monstrous, misogynistic character Matt Helm,' he chuckles. What did you reply? "'That's too damn bad.'"

Now 86, Hamilton is increasingly frail, and losing his memory; our conversation is peppered with long pauses. Last year, he completed his 28th Helm adventure, The Dominators, which is set on the East Coast of the US and has Helm trying to stop a plot to assassinate the President. He says it will probably be his last novel, although he plans to write some short stories when he feels up to it.

Although over 20 million Helm books are estimated to have been published around the world, Hamilton's publisher, Ballantine, has declined to take up The Dominators, saying that there's no longer a market for this genre. Hamilton probably made more money from Martin's films than he ever did from his books, but he may have irreparably damaged his legacy in doing so. One can only hope that Dreamworks manage to produce a film worthy of his talent, and that the stain of being a Bond knockoff is finally removed from his character.

Another novelist stigmatised as being a 'mere thriller writer' is John Gardner, who holds a peculiar position in the genre: having penned a series of Bond parodies in the Sixties, he was approached by Glidrose, Ian Fleming's literary estate, in 1979 and asked if he would turn gamekeeper and continue the series proper.

After Fleming's death in 1964, Kingsley Amis had written one Bond novel, Colonel Sun, under the pen name Robert Markham. Now Glidrose were looking for someone to bring 007 to a new readership. 'We didn't want another Amis,' says Peter Janson-Smith, Fleming's former literary agent and Glidrose board member at the time. 'We reasoned that someone that famous wouldn't want to take on another writer's character for any length of time.'

Gardner, who had written numerous spy thrillers and a continuation of the Sherlock Holmes stories, fitted the bill. Still, he was reluctant. 'I didn’t fancy the idea at all,' he admits. 'But when I told my agent – Glidrose had approached me separately – he said "You know you could do it. And if you don’t, someone else will." Then I started thinking about accepting.'

When he did, he decided not to watch any more of the films, so as not to be distracted. He published Licence Renewed in 1981, and went on to write another 13 original Bond novels. But despite maintaining solid sales over the years, Gardner was much maligned by many Fleming aficionados, 'mainly for not being Ian Fleming', he says. Older fans blanched at a Bond who cried at funerals and visited EuroDisney, and Amis lambasted Gardner in the press for letting the agent smoke, drink and gamble less.

Does he regret having taken the job? 'In a way I do, yes. Bond is a formula, and I was intrigued by the idea of taking that on but, ultimately, it was a no-win situation from the start.'

Ironically, some of Gardner's earlier novels are more like Fleming than his Bond efforts (perhaps because they were written in the Sixties). His eight novels featuring Boysie Oakes, an assassin for the British government who is so squeamish that he sub-contracts his 'liquidations' out, are enormous fun. The first was made into a film in 1965, complete with Shirley Bassey title number. 'Boysie was a piss-take of Bond,' he says. 'But he was mine. Bond was never mine, and he always felt unreal to me. Nobody, however brave, is never afraid. So I tried to put a little of Boysie into him.'

In 1995, Gardner was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. 'I didn't think I had much time,' he says. Without telling Glidrose how ill he was, he resigned from the job. Or, as Janson-Smith puts it: 'We mutually decided he was running out of steam.'

By the time Gardner had recovered, his wife had died of liver cancer, and a new Bond writer had been appointed: Raymond Benson, a computer-game designer and Fleming fanatic (his sixth novel, The Man With The Red Tattoo, was published earlier this year, and he is soon to 'novelize' Die Another Day). Gardner, elated to be alive, nevertheless felt bitterly disappointed with Glidrose. 'I was appalled that they chose an American,' he says, in an odd echo of Amis' scorn towards him.

Now in his mid-70s, Gardner lives in Basingstoke and continues to write every day. He is working on The Streets of Town, the second in a series about a female detective-sergeant in World War Two London (the first, Bottled Spider, has just been released in paperback). I ask him what has inspired him to write all these decades. 'Hunger, mainly,' he replies. 'And the desire to live extremely well.'

The survival instinct is strong in writers. Martin Cruz Smith, bestselling author of Gorky Park among many others, began his career dashing off thrillers under pseudonyms. Between 1972 and 1973, he wrote three Nick Carter adventures to feed his family: The Devil's Dozen, Code Name: Werewolf and The Inca Death Squad.

Carter was one of the most published characters in fiction – a detective in dime novels since the 19th century, he had been given a swift makeover in the Bond-fuelled spy fever of the early Sixties. By the Seventies, the gung-ho American agent for AXE was battling Russians, Arabs and Orientals around the world and bedding beautiful women along the way in what seemed like a new adventure every week. 'There isn’t a writer in America today who hasn't written a Nick Carter novel,' Cruz Smith notes wryly when I ask him how he got involved. 'Anyone who has been desperate enough has succumbed.'

Cruz Smith wrote each in six days flat, using locations he already knew well. 'I tried reading one recently, and couldn't make any sense of it at all,' he says. Despite his dismissiveness, all three show glimpses of the writer he would become. There are some particularly delicious descriptions: 'The odds of survival were slimmer than a scorpion's waist', for example. 'They're the closest to noir I ever came,' Cruz Smith says. He also admits to having a soft spot for The Devil's Dozen, in which Carter figures out a way of smuggling opium undetected. I won't give the method away - but it is pleasingly ingenious.

After Carter, an editor told Cruz Smith that he was looking for someone to write a new paperback series. 'I wasn't interested in another Nick Carter kind of thing, so I proposed my own series,' says Cruz Smith. 'I thought it was a fairly entertaining idea, and so did the editor - but we were about the only ones.' The Inquisitor, an assassin working for the Vatican, featured in six books, and they're all great fun. Particularly good is The Midas Coffin, in which our hero joins forces with a former British agent called James Carlin to steal 14 million dollars of gold. 'What those books taught me was pace,' says Cruz Smith. 'Then you need to learn how to step away from the pace.'

Cruz Smith's new novel, December 6, set on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbour, is released in the UK this week, but he's already set his mind to the next, which will be the fifth in his Arkady Renko series. All he will reveal for now is that Renko returns to Russia, 'because that's pretty much all I know myself right now. I've got a few ideas, but those can change dramatically as I start to research the book.'

Cruz Smith has left his Cold War capers behind him, but a few so-called 'literary' writers are turning to just such stories for inspiration. In his 1997 novel Death Will Have Your Eyes, acclaimed American poet, crime writer and biographer James Sallis turned in a riff on the spy genre. 'I'd long been a fan of Donald Hamilton and Philip Atlee,' he says, 'And the novel began as a homage to them.' Sallis decided to take various clichés of the genre – the spy drawn unwillingly back into service, rendezvous with glamorous women and counteragents – and 'like a jazz musician working off a pop tune, see what might be in there.' The resulting novel is a winding road trip that becomes an elegy for the Cold War.

William Boyd – whose latest novel, Any Human Heart, has Ian Fleming as a minor character – is also considering writing an espionage novel. 'I think it’ll be in the Fifties – that’s period now. Spy thrillers probably need to be set before the Wall came down to deliver the full weight of the genre,' he says. 'I do feel like the Cold War has impinged on my life: I vividly remember being a terrified ten-year-old during the Cuban missile crisis.' He doesn’t have much time for the internet conspiracies of Clancy et al: 'I think technology has killed the spy story, in a way. When everyone's got a cell phone, you lose some of the tension. A Western doesn’t work if they’re driving jalopies around. They've got to be on horses with guns around their waists.'

As many established novelists hit middle age, could a new wave of Cold War spy thrillers emerge? If so, don’t be diverted by the continuing flurry over Fleming – you might miss out.

The Otto Penzler Collection of British Espionage and Thriller Fiction

On April 8, the famed bookseller, publisher and friend to many thriller-writers Otto Penzler is selling off part of his massive collection at the Swann Auction Galleries in New York - specifically, his British espionage and thrillers. This must be the finest collection of its kind in the world, and offers both a deep insight into the history of the genre, and is part of that history.  It includes rare correspondence between Ian Fleming and Richard Chopping about the jacket art for the James Bond novels, signed first editions by Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Adam Hall and Dennis Wheatley, scarce editions by William le Queux and E Phillips Oppenheim... and much more besides. The asking prices are a little too high for me, but what a gorgeous, gorgeous catalogue. You could read it for hours.