The war of ideas

‘The propagandist writes solely with the intention of appealing to his readers’ interest. He aims to hit, because he cannot afford to miss.

Accordingly his work is based on the formulae of modern advertising, to whose task his own runs broadly parallel.

It differs only in that the propagandist is at greater pains than the copywriter to disguise his medium. The reader of an advertisement should never be provoked into feeling: “This is only an advertisement.” The reader of propaganda should, if possible, never be allowed even to suspect that he is reading propaganda.’

These words, written in April 1943, are contained in the syllabus used by the Special Training Schools of the Special Operations Executive. Variations of this syllabus were used in different training schools, but this passage comes from the one used by STS 103 in Canada, also known as Camp X, where members of SOE and OSS trained together.

As this document was used to train secret agents, its authors’ names do not appear anywhere in it, but we now know that it was written by two SOE instructors: Paul Dehn (left) and Kim Philby (right). Dehn, a poet and novelist, became a well-known scriptwriter after the war, working on the screenplays of both The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Goldfinger. Philby went on to rise through the ranks of MI6 and was tipped by many to head it, but was eventually exposed as a double agent working for the Soviets, having been recruited while a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s.

There is a chilling irony in the fact that Kim Philby was one of the writers of the syllabus used to train British secret agents during the Second World War – and one has to wonder as a result how much of it might be propaganda. This is what James Jesus Angleton famously referred to as the ‘wilderness of mirrors’ that populates the world of espionage. Even when being taught about propaganda, you might be subject to it.

In October 1953, a new monthly magazine was launched in Britain: Encounter. An Anglo-American publication, it was a literary magazine that also discussed politics: it was liberal but anti-Communist. Its first editors were Irving Kristol and the poet Stephen Spender, and it was funded by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom. It became very influential, publishing the work of many of the most famous writers and thinkers of the day, including WH Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Iris Murdoch and Bertrand Russell. But in 1967, it was revealed that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA front, and that most of the finance for the magazine had come straight from the CIA’s coffers, with the remainder being provided by the British Foreign Office’s innocuously named Information Research Department – in fact, a secret group dedicated to spreading anti-Communist propaganda. This isn’t a conspiracy theory but widely-documented fact, which the CIA itself acknowledges. Stephen Dorril discusses it at length in his book, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service.

The idea for the magazine grew from meetings between MI6 and the CIA, who were looking for a way to influence the thinking of Britain’s liberal and left-wing intelligentsia. Steering the Congress for Cultural Freedom was CIA officer Michael Josselson, a former member of the Psychological Warfare Division. On the British side, the two leaders of the project were initially Tosco Fyvel, a member of the IRD who had been a close friend of George Orwell, and Malcolm Muggeridge, a senior journalist at The Daily Telegraph who also worked for MI6 ‘part time’. Muggeridge eventually grew disillusioned with the behind-the-scenes machinations and withdrew from the project. He was replaced by Goronwy Rees, another MI6 agent. But, to make matters a little trickier, we now know that before the war Rees had passed information to the Soviets, who had given him the codenames FLEET and GROSS.

Encounter’s readers could not, of course, be allowed to suspect that anything they read in the magazine might be propaganda. The merest hint of such a thought would mean the propaganda was ineffective. As a result, the CIA and MI6 left the majority of the magazine’s content alone. That way, it established itself and was soon taken by the intelligentsia in Britain as a genuine and unadulterated liberal voice. Articles that criticized censorship of the arts and other forms of repression behind the Iron Curtain were quietly encouraged, and articles that criticized American foreign or domestic policy were quietly discouraged. Stephen Dorril also reveals in his book the practice of MI6 agents writing articles in the press under pseudonyms, and discusses several such articles published by The Spectator in 1994.

As a result of this hornet's nest, figuring out today which of Encounter’s articles were written with no agenda and which were placed to plant ideas in readers’ minds is a difficult task. Similarly, some articles might have been written by authors who had no idea of the magazine’s real backers, but were published either because they coincidentally transmitted a desirable message, or because they served as good cover for other propaganda to be slipped between.

A good example of this can be found in the issue of May 1966, which I mentioned in my last blog post. The issue contains articles by, among others, Anthony Burgess, Eugène Ionesco, Robert Graves, Frank Kermode (by then an editor of the magazine), Tom Driberg, Malcolm Muggeridge and John le Carré. An extremely impressive line-up of contributors. Any of these articles might have been used by the CIA and MI6 for their own purposes, with the authors’ knowledge. Any may have been used by the CIA and MI6 without the authors’ knowledge. And any may have been used against the CIA and MI6, without their knowledge.

An example of the latter could be Tom Driberg’s article. Driberg was a prominent journalist, Labour MP and, later, Baron Bradwell. He was also gay, and on visiting Moscow in 1956 to interview the British double agent Guy Burgess, he regularly frequented a lavatory behind the Metropole Hotel to pick up men. The KGB showed him ‘compromising material’ of his visits there, and he was recruited as an agent as a result, and given the codename LEPAGE. One of his first acts was the publication of a book claiming that Burgess had never spied for the Soviet Union.

But Driberg broke off contact with the KGB in 1968, and his very dull 1966 article about Edith Sitwell is not a piece of propaganda for either side in the Cold War. Still, it is intriguing that a Soviet agent was writing articles in an MI6/CIA-fronted magazine. Especially considering Rees' involvement – one has to wonder whether the KGB tried to insert its own propaganda into the enemy's propaganda machine.

The article by John le Carré is also worth a closer look, but for very different reasons. Le Carré had worked for both MI5 and MI6, and knew Muggeridge, who had interviewed him just three months earlier for the BBC, as discussed in my last post. But in 1966 le Carré was firmly against American foreign policy, and it is hard to imagine a writer less likely to choose to work for the CIA. Even unknowingly, his article goes against what both MI6 and the CIA would have liked the magazine’s readers to think, because although he attacks many of the problems in the Soviet Union, he concludes that ‘there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and a political misery’.

But I think John le Carré was unknowingly used in a different way: his article was one of the many hundreds of genuine ones published in Encounter that provided a suitable context in which MI6 and the CIA could insert a few articles that would make the points they wanted to make, and be taken seriously as a result of the background provided by others. I think one of these articles appears in this issue.

Titled ‘Africa Without Tears’, it was written by Rita Hinden, a socialist South African academic at the University of London, in reaction to news of a series of political murders that had taken place in Nigeria – murders that turned out to be the firing shots in what would become a lengthy civil war. I don’t know whether Hinden wrote the article on the behest of the CIA or MI6, but I think it may have suited their aims, as in it she essentially argued why everyone should turn a blind eye to the worsening political situation in Nigeria and, in effect, let the Africans get on with killing each other.

Hinden made this argument in a way that appears extremely heartless with the knowledge of the deaths that resulted in the civil war, but even without hindsight it is an example of the sort of bizarre double-think some intellectuals engaged in at the time. She develops her thesis over several thousand words, but I think a sense of what she was doing can be seen in the callousness of the title, and in the article’s final paragraph:

‘As long as we continue to regard Africans as a “special case” to be courted, flattered, excused, expected-greater-things-from, grieved-over, explained-away, we will still not have recognized that they have, once and for all, severed the navel cord which used to bind us. And Africans will continue to regard us with the irritation – merging eventually into pity – which marks the attitude of grown-up children to their anxious, ridiculous parents.’

I have read this article many times, because my first novel was set in the Nigerian civil war. The article shocks me every time I read it. As well as being a contributor to Encounter, Hinden was the editor of a magazine called Socialist Commentary, which reflected the views of the pro-American right-wing of the Labour party at the time, and was also involved in the Fabian Society’s journal, Venture, which was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Michael Josselson described her as a ‘good friend of ours’ and said that the CIA relied heavily on her advice for their African operations.

This article of hers may not have been CIA propaganda, but it was nevertheless CIA-funded, and I think it was propaganda. Its aim was to plant the idea that post-colonial guilt is the real crime for which the article’s readers should feel guilty. It constitutes a ‘guilt complex’, and that ‘emotionalism’ is preventing people from seeing Africa in its proper perspective. Hinden suggested that anyone who felt that Britain had a responsibility to its former colonies was being condescending toward Africans – perhaps even racist. But her claim to respecting Africans was insincere, simply a pretence that offered readers a convenient excuse for ignoring a growing crisis in a country that, in 1966, had been independent just six years, following 160 years of British rule. It’s not callous to be indifferent to the situation in Nigeria, she argued: it’s treating them as the adults they want to be. The article plants some very unpleasant ideas, which were doubtless digested and repeated in conversations across England in various forms in May 1966 and after.

The British government did become involved in the war in Nigeria, but mainly as a supplier of arms to the side they thought had the greater chance of winning and continuing to supply them with oil. Many people in Britain didn’t feel the way Rita Hinden did, and were deeply shocked and moved by the events that took place in Nigeria and Biafra, and many did something about it. Many in Nigeria and Biafra were irritated by Western involvement, but many others were not, as their lives were saved by organizations such as the International Red Cross, Caritas and others.

In his BBC interview with John le Carré, Malcolm Muggeridge revealed with a mischievous glint in his eye that he had once been involved in intelligence. In fact, he still was. John le Carré didn’t reveal that he had also been an intelligence operative, and he did not know that he was about to be used by MI6 in a very elaborate propaganda operation. The part he played in the operation was a very small one: an article about James Bond, which expanded on some of the thoughts he had already expressed in his interview with Muggeridge. The article acted as a lure: it was featured on the cover of the magazine, and le Carré’s name would have attracted readers. But it also acted as cover, because readers of his article may also have read Rita Hinden’s, and been influenced by it. In his article, le Carré wrote of his own novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold:

‘I tried to touch new ground when I discussed the phenomenon of committed men who are committed to nothing but one another and the dreams they collectively evoke. At heart, I said, professional combatants of the Cold War have no ideological involvement. Half the time they are fighting the enemy, a good deal of the time they are fighting rival departments. The source of their energy lies not in the war of ideas but in their own desolate mentalities; they are the tragic ghosts, the unfallen dead of the last war.’

There were, doubtless, many professional combatants during the Cold War who acted in just this way. But the irony is that, unknown to John le Carré, his own words were being used by men who did have an ideological involvement, and who were channeling their energies into the war of ideas.

Close encounters

This week, the BBC has put a treasure trove of archive interviews with 40 British novelists online, and for fans of espionage fiction there are two real treats: John le Carré being interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge in 1966 (here), and Len Deighton being interviewed by Melvyn Bragg in 1977 (here).

These are rare interviews with the two giants of British post-war spy fiction, and are well worth taking the time to watch. Deighton's last published novel, Charity, came out in 1996, and even before then he was becoming rather publicity-shy, so it's a delight to watch a full-length interview with him in his home in Portugal, in which he discusses several of his books in detail. He seems very relaxed and the dry humour of many of his novels shines through, but he also comes across as a very thorough, passionate and thoughtful writer with a strong set of guiding principles: he discusses what he feels is a writer's responsibility regarding the depiction of violence, for instance.

There has been more press interest in the interview with John le Carré, notably an article in The Daily Telegraph, James Bond was a neo-fascist gangster, says John Le Carré. Well, le Carré didn't quite say that, in fact. In the interview with the BBC, he said:

‘I’m not sure that Bond is a spy... I think it’s a great mistake if one’s talking about espionage literature to include Bond in this category at all. It seems to me he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a licence to kill.’

Reflecting on that interview now, in a new interview with The Radio Times, le Carré said:

‘These days I would be much kinder. I suppose we've lost sight of the books in favour of the film versions, haven't we? I was a young man and I knew that I had written about the reality in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and that the Fleming stuff was a deliberate fantasisation of Fleming's own experiences when he was safely in New York. But at the root of Bond there was something neo-fascistic and totally materialist. You felt he would have gone through the same antics for any country really, if the girls had been so pretty and the Martinis so dry.’

But I suppose 'James Bond was "some kind of international gangster", says John le Carré' or 'John le Carré feels the character of James Bond has neo-fascistic and materialist roots' would not have been as snappy newspaper headlines. Take the best bits of both quotes - 'neo-fascist' and 'gangster', said 44 years apart - and you have something distinctly grabbier. (It's nevertheless rather an intriguing idea of being kinder on le Carré's part!)

The interview with Muggeridge is interesting for reasons other than the comments from both men about James Bond: I'm not sure how well known it is that le Carré wrote a screenplay for The Looking Glass War, for example, and he also says that he is thinking of abandoning espionage fiction, despite the fact that several of his best spy novels were still to come, including the Karla trilogy. But I'd like to discuss his comments about Ian Fleming and James Bond a little more. They aren't the first he had made on the subject. Bond is a le Carré bugbear. In 1965, he was quoted as saying that he felt that Bond would be 'the ideal defector' because 'if the money was better, the booze freer and women easier over there in Moscow, he'd be off like a shot'.

He expanded on this idea in an article he wrote for the British magazine Encounter in May 1966 (published just three months after the BBC interview with Muggeridge, and in an issue that also featured Muggeridge).

Titled To Russia, with Greetings, the article takes the form of an open letter to the editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet Union's leading literary magazine of the day, concerning an article it had published several months earlier by a V. Voinov reviewing two of le Carré's novels, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and The Looking Glass War. Voinov had argued that, by assuming the role of impartial observer in the Cold War, le Carré was playing a subtler, but more insinuating, game of propaganda than that played by Ian Fleming, and that his fame in the West was a result of readers growing tired of Fleming's 'cheap romanticism'. Voinov also alleged that le Carré had been an intelligence agent.

Le Carré ignored the latter charge (which was true), but rebuffed the rest, pointing out that he was not an apologist for the Cold War at all, but opposed to the methods of both sides:

'In espionage as I have depicted it, Western man sacrifices the individual to defend the individual's right against the collective. That is Western hypocrisy, and I condemned it because it took us too far into the Communist camp, and too near to the Communist's evaluation of the individual's place in society.'

The letter/essay ends with an analysis of James Bond:

'The problem of the Cold War is that, as Auden once wrote, we haunt a ruined century. Behind the little flags we wave, there are old  faces weeping, and children mutilated by the fatuous conflicts of preachers. Mr Voinov, I suspect, smelt in my writing the greatest heresy of all: that there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and political misery. And so he called me an apologist (he might as well have called Freud a lecher).

James Bond, on the other hand, breaks no such Communist principles. He is the hyena who stalks the capitalist deserts, he is an identifiable antagonist, sustained by capital and kept in good heart by a materialist society; he is a chauvinist, an unblinking patriot who makes espionage exciting, the kind of person in fact who emerges from Lonsdale's diaries.

Bond on his magic carpet takes us away from moral doubt, banishes perplexity with action, morality with duty. Above all, he has one piece of equipment without which not even his formula would work: an entirely evil enemy. He is on your side, not mine. Now that you have honoured the qualities which created him, it is only a matter of time before you recruit him. Believe me, you have set the stage: the Russian Bond is on his way.'

I discovered this article while browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Rome about a decade ago (and some of the ideas in it influenced me when I came to create my own character, Paul Dark). But while I find le Carré's comments on Bond fascinating, I think they address a popular perception of the character, especially as seen in the film adaptations, but are not borne out in Ian Fleming's work. Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, is by no means a magic carpet taking us away from moral doubt. Yes, James Bond smokes, drinks and dresses well. But he is also betrayed and tortured, and wracked with doubts about his profession, motivations and more besides:

'Take our friend Le Chiffre. It's simple enough to say he was an evil man, at least it's simple enough for me because he did evil things to me. If he was here now, I wouldn't hesitate to kill him, but out of personal revenge and not, I'm afraid, for some high moral reason or for the sake of my country.'

Fleming's character is a patriot, but as can be seen here he is by no means an unblinking one. (And if he were, how would that square with le Carré's idea that he would defect to Moscow if he thought he could have a better time there?)

In this passage and others, Fleming was influenced by earlier British thriller-writers, notably Geoffrey Household. But he also knew and was a great admirer of Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Somerset Maugham - the influence of the latter is very clear in his short story Quantum of Solace; one could not get further away from the idea of 'banishing perplexity with action' than that story (which I analyzed here). In short, James Bond is a secret agent, and stories about him do therefore belong in the category of espionage fiction. Ian Fleming's work has, in fact, shaped the genre to a significant degree - and is still doing so today.

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.