When Julian met Graham

Julian Semyonov was the Soviet Union’s most famous spy novelist. A bearded, burly Hemingway-esque figure of a man, he was best known for his Second World War-set thriller Seventeen Moments of Spring. A bestseller in the Soviet Union on publication in 1969, Semyonov adapted it into a 12-part television series four years later, and it became an indelible part of Soviet culture. It’s regarded in Russia to this day with roughly the same degree of reverence as Brits have for the BBC adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

I was looking at Semyonov when researching my next book, Dead Drop, because I realized there were incidents in one of his later novels that closely echoed the real events I was writing about. Semyonov died in 1993, but his official website is crammed with information, including interviews he both gave and conducted (Semyonov was a journalist as well as a novelist). And buried in this website is this remarkable interview he did with Graham Greene.

In early 1989, Semyonov travelled to Antibes to meet Greene in his home there. He had tried to contact him before, in Moscow in 1985, although Greene doesn’t seem to have been aware of this when he mentions it. Greene, who was 84 at the time and would die just two years later, initially seems a little stiff, but soon seems to forget that he’s being filmed, and the interview feels very much like eavesdropping on a private conversation. It’s also fun to catch a glimpse of how Greene lived – if you look very carefully, you can spot a Scrabble box in the background!

This conversation between two of the great spy novelists of the 20th century runs at around an hour and a quarter, and there are several gems in it if you’re interested in the Cold War or espionage. The two men happened to meet at a crossroads in history when, finally, they could speak relatively openly with each other, although there are some guarded moments. Semyonov is by turns solicitous and pushy, while Greene occasionally seems a little lost: despite the almost tangible end of the Cold War – the Wall would fall within a few months – the gulf between their worlds is still palpable. Semyonov repeatedly mentions Greene’s books, and even offers to buy one to translate into Russian (Greene suggests his 1934 novel It’s A Battlefield), but only refers to one of them by title, and doesn’t ask a single question about their content. 

Similarly, Greene seems either unaware or disinterested in the fact he is talking to one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent writers. When he relates how a book of his had sold some 14,000 copies in Czechoslovakia despite a decree forbidding it to be reviewed or advertised, Semyonov lets him in on a secret about the Soviet literary scene: a book often sells more if it hasn’t been reviewed or publicised, because word-of-mouth is much more valued by readers than state approval. Later in the conversation, Semyonov asks if Brits can immediately distinguish shades of sense of humour, such as ‘Eton humour’, ‘Cambridge humour’ and ‘Oxford humour’. Greene visibly squirms. Both writers were masters at delineating the idiosyncracies and nuances of their own countrymen but, perhaps unsurprisingly, seem to have had much less of a grasp of each other’s cultures.

Greene talks at length about his close friendship with the Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos, the subject of his book Getting To Know The General, and both men say they disbelieve that his death in a plane crash had been accidental – Greene even points to who he feels is the most likely person to have masterminded a plot to assassinate him! The culprit, he is sure, was Colonel Dario Paredes del Rio. 

He also discusses how he ‘detested’ Ronald Reagan, his hopes that the newly elected US president, George Bush Snr, will be more progressive, his time in Czechoslovakia, and reveals his thoughts on Russia and Afghanistan – the latter being a topic both men knew well (Semyonov was fluent in Pashto).

They also discuss censorship, which was something Semyonov was very familiar with: his father had been the editor of Izvestia, but had been arrested by the NKVD and spent time in the gulags. Semyonov talks about how he too had been summoned to the Lubyanka, by Yuri Andropov shortly after he had been appointed head of the KGB in 1967. But rather than being put in a cell, Andropov had wanted to help him with his novels – in a 1987 interview, Semyonov revealed that this included being granted access to KGB operational files. Semyonov tells Greene how Andropov had advised him on avoiding the censor’s pen, by simply adding three lines to any potentially controversial scene setting out the other side of the argument. This technique is a hallmark of Semyonov’s work, and it’s fascinating that it was suggested by the head of the KGB.

Semyonov played both sides of the fence like this throughout his career, praising the KGB in his books but doing so in such a way as to almost shame them, by making them conspicuously nobler and more empathetic than their real-life equivalents. His characters often eloquently condemn precisely the sort of narrow-minded behaviour that plagued Soviet bureaucracy as ‘anti-Soviet’, and there are ambiguities galore in Seventeen Moments of Spring.

Greene doesn’t seem to have been aware of any of this, and rather peculiarly seems to have seen Andropov as a reformer who paved the way for Gorbachev’s reforms, something Semyonov agrees to. But Greene had also mentioned, almost in passing, how he had blocked all Soviet translations of his work as a result of the Daniel-Sinyavsky trial in 1966, a restriction he had only lifted a couple of years earlier. Andropov had hardly been a saint in that affair, as Greene must have known. Both men seem to dance around the other’s politics, anxious to please and not offend. Safely ensconced in the era of glasnost, Semyonov reveals he felt the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan were mistakes, but he also shows a lot of inside knowledge, and one wonders if it crossed Greene’s mind that Semyonov knew a great many people in the KGB, and that their meeting might well be discussed back in Moscow. At one point Semyonov asks Greene to sign some books for Raisa Gorbachev, which he duly does. The entire Gorbachev family, he rather unconvincingly claims, are fans of Greene’s work. It seems more likely this would have been a totemic gift for Semyonov, who was a wily networker.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of the discussion comes about halfway through, and revolves around Kim Philby. Greene had known the KGB agent well during the war, when they had both been in MI6, and had (controversially to many in the West), written an introduction to his memoir My Silent War (British first edition image courtesy of Existential Ennui). Semyonov is keen to get his sense of the man, and Greene talks about how fond he was of Philby, and how they had gone to the pub together during the Blitz. He says that he had sometimes asked himself what he would have done if Philby had indicated to him, ‘in an unwise moment’ over such a drink, that he was a Soviet agent. Greene felt he would have ‘given him twenty-four hours to leave the country and then I’d have reported him. In other words, I’d have given him twenty-four hours to get away!’

Perhaps enlivened by the discussion of his old friend Kim, towards the end of the interview Greene suddenly perks up, and he starts to  prepare a gin and tonic for the camerawoman, commenting as he does on his most recent (and, it would turn out) last novel, The Captain and the Enemy, which he reveals he wasn’t fond of, as he felt it had ‘too many echoes of other books’, and that at one stage he had even abandoned writing it. 

And there the footage suddenly ends, with two of the great espionage novelists from either side of the Cold War looking as if they are about to get a little drunk together, in a flat in Antibes in 1989.

You can watch the whole interview here.

The forgotten master of British spy fiction

Spy fiction can be divided, very roughly, into two camps: Field and Desk. James Bond is a field agent - we follow his adventures, not M's. John le Carré's novels, on the other hand, tend to focus on the people back at headquarters – George Smiley is a senior man at the Circus (he later becomes head of it, for a time). Broadly speaking, I think Field tends to win out on the sales front, whereas Desk gets more critical acclaim.

I enjoy both genres, but sometimes find myself wishing that the Field book I'm reading were as deft at characterization and prose style as it is at the suspense and atmosphere. Similarly, I often find myself reading a Desk book and desperately hoping that something will happen. It's all beautifully drawn, but is everyone going to be searching their filing cabinets for that manila folder forever?

In my own work, I’ve tried to have my cake and eat it: Paul Dark is a Desk man sent unwillingly back into the Field. In this I was partly influenced by the British spy novelist Joseph Hone, who combines the best of both camps in a way that leaves me breathless – and sick with envy. I interviewed Hone for my unpublished article on spy writers back in 2002, but decided not to include him in the finished piece, partly because it was already rather long, and partly because his work didn’t quite fit with the other writers I’d interviewed for it. But as I think he was one of the great spy novelists of the last century, I’m going to return to him now.

After speaking to Hone (his number was in the book and he picked up – sometimes you get lucky), he sent me a very charming and touching letter, and enclosed copies of many of his reviews. That probably sounds a little vain of him, but it’s not if you've read his novels. While it was reassuring to see that others had also highly valued his work, I found the reviews rather depressing reading. When I see a quote from a newspaper on the back of a novel, I'm conscious that it may have been taken wildly out of context. ‘Better than Deighton’ may, for example, have originally been part of the sentence ‘Better than Deighton at describing the intricacies of Nicaraguan bee-keeping customs Mr Fortescue undoubtedly is; as to the nature of espionage, he hasn't the foggiest.’ A jacket that trumpets ‘One for le Carré lovers… real suspense’ may have been culled from a review in the local paper that read: ‘One for le Carré lovers in search of a stop-gap only – despite occasional glimmers of real suspense, No Checkpoints for Charlie is dull as ditchwater, with a protagonist so irritating I kept wishing he would use his blasted cyanide capsule and put us all out of our misery.’ (My publishers would never do this, by the way.) But here were perceptive and laudatory reviews of Hone's work from Time, Newsweek, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, Kirkus and many more, comparing him favourably with Ambler, le Carré, Deighton and Greene. And yet, sadly, he is pretty much completely forgotten today, a footnote in British spy fiction. He deserves to be much better known.

Hone’s main protagonist – ‘a man with almost no heroic qualities’, as he describes himself – is Peter Marlow, an MI6 desk man turned field agent. He is repeatedly being taken out of his grubby office in the Mid-East Section in Holborn and dragged into the line of fire. The plots come thick and fast, and feature ingenious twists, action, mayhem, chases, Esperanto smiles and high-octane affairs – all the great spy stuff you'd want. But it's all wrapped up in prose so elegant, and characterization so subtle and pervasive, that you put the books down feeling you've just read a great work of literature.

Marlow himself is a wonderful character, and I think deserves to be as well known as Smiley. He’s the constant outsider, peering in at others' lives, meddling where he shouldn't, and usually being set up by everyone around him. He's a kind and intelligent man, and terribly misused, but he’s also a cynic – he sees betrayal as inevitable, and tries to prepare for it.

We first meet him in The Private Sector (1971), as an English teacher in Cairo who is gradually drawn into a spy ring. It’s one of those ‘innocents in too deep’ stories, but the evocation of both Egypt and the shifting loyalties of the protagonists is dazzling. Hone alternates between third and first persons, which he makes look like the easiest thing in the world. Set in the run-up to the Six Day War, it is superficially about Soviet moles, but the subtext is about how we can never know anyone else. That’s a poor description of it, though, so here’s LJ Davis writing about it in The Washington Post in July 1972 instead:

‘There are moments in this book – indeed, whole chapters – where one is haunted by the eerie feeling that Joseph Hone is really Graham Greene, with faint quarterings of Lawrence Durrell and Thomas Pynchon. His tone is nearly perfect – quiet, morbidly ironic, beautifully controlled and sustained, moodily introspective, occasionally humorous and more often bitter, with a persistent undertone of unspeakable sadness and irrecoverable loss.’

The May 8 1972 issue of Newsweek featured a full-page review of the book, calling it the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral In Berlin:

‘Joseph Hone knows what counts in this kind of fiction: ambiguity, romantic weariness, morality suspended, a precise sense of place, and a hall-of-mirrors effect in which double and triple agents are each caught in a plot more twisted than he can comprehend yet each imagines a plot more twisted yet. The fun is in watching everyone second-guess everyone else.’

The review concluded:

‘Hone answers to all the criteria of good spy fiction; his story is not only good but reinforced by his dalliance. He remembers, as some ambitious but less skilful writers forget, that a good spy story subordinates everything – characters, atmosphere and all – to the necessities of plot. A good spy novel is quite different from a good novel about spies – Conrad's Secret Agent, for instance, or le Carré's Looking Glass War – in which plot is sacrificed for the sake of character and atmosphere.’

In the second novel in the series, The Sixth Directorate (1975), Marlow has become just a little wiser. MI5 has caught a chap called George Graham red-handed as a Soviet sleeper, and locked him away. But they need to know more. Marlow looks enough like Graham that he is sent on a mission to impersonate him. The book is partly set in New York. Here’s Marlow describing his arrival there:

‘The city had climbed up in front of us long before, when we'd passed under the Verrazzano bridge eight miles out; the towers, points, all the steps and cliffs of Manhattan growing up on the horizon, poking gradually into the sun, like an ultimate geography lesson – some final, arrogant proof in steel and concrete that the world was round.

From a distance the city was a very expensive educational game, a toy not like other toys. And one had seen those towers so often in so many images – in polychrome and black and white, moving or with music – that all of us standing on the forward deck that morning had the expression of picture dealers scrutinising a proffered masterpiece, leaving a polite interval before crying 'Fake!'

These preconceptions were a pity since, from a distance, in the sharp light over a gently slapping metal-blue sea, the place looked better than any of its pictures, like the one advertisement layout that had escaped all the exaggerated attentions of the years, come free of Madison Avenue, the press, all the published myths and horrors of the city.

Sharp winds had rubbed the skyline clean, light glittered on the edges of the buildings and all I saw was a place where I was unknown, where unknown people bore ceaselessly up and down those cavernous alleys, between bars and restaurants and offices, all busy with an intent that had nothing to do with me.

The city stood up like a rich menu I could afford at last after a long denial.’

Marlow has come to Manhattan because Graham had a mistress there years ago, and he has studied her letters to learn all about her. But when the MI6 liaison in the city introduces Marlow to his wife, we realize that she was Graham’s lover. Ouch. Before long, Marlow finds himself entangled with her, as well as fending off the advances of a beautiful African princess who works for the United Nations. Yes, only in spy novels, but Hone somehow manages to make the whole thing seem real:

‘'Having coffee with a spy.' She said it in a deep, funny voice. 'Do you carry a revolver?'

'No, as a matter of fact. No guns, no golden Dunhills, no dark glasses.'

'No vodka martinis either – very dry, stirred and not shaken. Or is it the other way round?'

I felt the skin on my face move awkwardly, creases rising inexplicably over my cheeks. Then I realised I was smiling.

'Yes, I drink. Sometimes. Bottles of light ale, though. I'm a spy from one of those seedier thrillers, I'm afraid.'

'Let's have a drink then.'

'Here?'

'God, no. Upstairs.'

I looked at her blankly.

'Women are out too, are they? Not even "sometimes"? What a very dull book you are.’

'I disappoint you.'

'Not yet.'

She stood up and tightened her belt a notch. She was already pretty thin.’

It’s not that seedy a thriller, of course. Here’s Anatole Broyard’s verdict on it from The New York Times of March 2, 1984:

‘Joseph Hone's Sixth Directorate, which was published in 1975, is one of the best suspense novels of the last ten years. It has elegance, wit, sympathy, irony, surprise, action, a rueful love affair and a melancholy Decline of the West mood. Only the crimes in its pages separate the book from what is known as serious novels.’

The book also came with a cover quote from the American spy novelist Charles McCarry, who Hone is similar to in some ways. McCarry was forgotten for years, before being rediscovered in the last decade by a new generation of readers. Hone told me that Tony Richardson, the director of Look Back In Anger and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, had intended to film The Sixth Directorate, taking an option on it and commissioning a script, but it didn’t go ahead as result of Joseph Andrews performing poorly at the box office. That’s a real shame, as it could have made a terrific film, and introduced Hone to a wider audience.

After The Sixth Directorate, Hone wrote a standalone spy thriller, The Paris Trap (1977), although its narrator, Harry Tyson, is in much the same vein as Marlow. The plot sounds preposterous when précised, and doesn’t do it justice, but I’ll give it a go. A film, Hero, is being shot in Paris, starring Julie Christie, Jean-Paul Belmondo and (the fictional) Jim Hackett. The plot of the film: a group of Palestinian terrorists have taken Christie’s husband, a minister in the French government, hostage. Belmondo plays a cop reluctantly working alongside British agent Summers, who is played by Hackett.

The screenplay for Hero is based on the long-running TV series of the same name, which in turn was based on a novel by John Major (really). Major was a pseudonym of Harry Tyson, who now works for British Intelligence (in the same section as Marlow, with the same boss). Former spy writer Tyson and film star Hackett are old friends, but now Tyson is having an affair with Hackett’s estranged wife – and Hackett secretly seeing Tyson’s.

In the meantime, a Palestinian terrorist cell, known only as The Group, takes Tyson, his daughter, and Hackett’s wife hostage. Their demands? Unusual, to say the least. They want a rewrite of the Hero script by Tyson, restoring the original grittiness of Summers’ character (he was a kind of Harry Palmer, but has become more like Bond), and a more sympathetic depiction of the Palestinian cause. The leader of The Group’s operation turns out to be a middle-class British radical: think a younger Vanessa Redgrave to the power of ten.

If you can’t imagine how on earth any of this could make a believable (or coherent) thriller, here’s the opening paragraph, which is typical of the tone throughout:

‘Nothing should ever surprise us. The warnings were all there in the past, ignored or disbelieved, and so all the more devastating when they at last take effect – as a marriage will suddenly explode for the lack of something years before, some mild ghost not laid in bed then, which rises up one fine day and takes a brutal shape from the years of waiting.’

Hone’s next novel, The Flowers of the Forest (1980), brought Marlow back. The book was published in the US as The Oxford Gambit, a move that did not impress the critic of The New York Times Book Review:

‘The title was changed here, I suppose, to identify it more clearly as a complicated thriller and tap the wide market for such books. Pity. It is all of that but a bit more. It is a deft story laced with a mordant wit and deserves a wide readership.’

Like the previous two Marlow novels, the plot again revolves around Soviet penetration agents. The man in question this time is Lindsay Phillips, a senior MI6 officer who suddenly disappears while tending his bees. Has he been kidnapped, murdered – or was he perhaps, as some are now starting to fear, a mole all along? Our man Marlow is sent in to investigate, and begins prying around the family: how much did Phillips’ wife and daughter know of his secret life? The basic set-up is familiar from several spy novels of the era, and would be put to great and best-selling effect by le Carré in A Perfect Spy six years later, but Hone handles it very differently. The narrative is once more a mix of first and third person, and features murders at funerals, chases across Europe, faked deaths and hidden affairs galore. Isabel Quigly wrote of it in the Financial Times:

‘This is the best thriller I’ve found in years, perhaps the best I remember – too serious and rich for the world thriller and what it implies, though sticking closely to the thriller genre – a novel about the mysteriousness of human beings rather than the mysteries of intelligence and diplomacy. The weaving of the story is so close, so tight, that no image, no hint, is ever wasted: everything links up with something else pages or chapters ahead… It all works without pretentiousness, going far beyond the limitations of its genre.’

That ellipsis isn’t to cut parts that weren’t as flattering, by the way, but rather a couple of hundred more words raving about the novel’s merits. Ms Quigly, I salute your good taste.

The Valley Of The Fox (1982) was the final novel in the series. Marlow has retired to the Cotswolds, where he is slowly writing his memoirs. Then a man breaks in and shoots his wife, and he goes on the run. This is a classic chase thriller, in the tradition of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. Some passages pay explicit homage to that book, with Marlow surviving on his wits in the countryside. Here's how it opens:

'He'd trapped me. But had he intended to? Had he meant to drive me up against the old pumping shed by the far end of the lake? Or had I carelessly allowed him to do this, moving after him into this impasse where there was no soundless exit, either across the stream ahead or up the steep open slopes behind the ruined building. Either way, I couldn't move now. And since the laurel bush only partly hid me I knew that if he moved past the corner of the shed he must see me and I would have to kill him...'

So there you have it. Five novels, all superb, all pretty much forgotten. All are also long out of print, but are easily found online, and well worth seeking out. Faber Finds also has the four Marlow novels as print-on-demand titles. They are not only very readable and exciting, but also psychologically astute and beautifully written. The passages I’ve quoted from them give only an inkling of their impact: it’s the melding of the prose style with the twists and turns of the plots that make Hone so special, and it has to be experienced over the course of a novel to appreciate.

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.