Tales of Derring-Don't
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing TALES OF DERRING-DON'T BY PEARL K. BELL One doesn't hear much these days about that old chestnut "the death of the novel," and this can be counted among our few blessings....
...But on top of all this Deighton tries, like Buckley, to thicken the stew with Le Carre's theme of betrayal...
...These political asides spoil much of the fun in Saving the Queen...
...Like Le Carre's Alec Leamas, of whom he is a tired copy, Charlie, the seedy and cynical British agent, must come in from the cold of history...
...Saving the Queen begins and ends with brief glimpses of Blackford Oakes in 1975, now a high-ranking CIA official, forced by Congressional plebes to answer rude questions about the agency...
...The leak has been pinned down to Great Britain, and Oakes must somehow find out which high-ranking Englishman is in fact a vile Bolshevik...
...They are, since the fictional spy is as much a figment of fantasy as the infallibly omniscient Scotland Yard investigator...
...Unfortunately, the fictional idea derived from Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby probably yielded the last of its possible subtleties and excitements in Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy...
...In the course of his mission, Charlie encounters some surviving links from the wartime chain, like the ex-Communist stamp dealer, Serge Frankel, who swallowed everything the Kremlin fed him until "those pigs who call themselves Socialists went to the aid of the Arabs...
...Alas, Yesterday's Spy is cold inside, too...
...When it becomes a propaganda vehicle or the boring formula of a lesser talent, it is doomed to such caricatures as two new offerings—one by William F. Buckley Jr...
...During a night in one of her thousand and one beds, Oakes learns the identity of the traitor—a viscount who is the Queen's cousin—and proceeds to save Queen and country from the consequences of Her Majesty's unwitting folly...
...Charlie, the dour middle-aged narrator, is a longtime agent of the British Secret Service who feels the dry rot creeping through his soul...
...At the time, his obsessive reliance on the blurred and intangible, on loaded pauses and mysteriously disjointed dialogue, did convey the shadowy meanness of the spy's world, with its elusive loyalties, camouflaged identities and weary brutality...
...The one unbreakable rule is that the spy novel must entertain...
...Of course Charlie is thrown off the track by a lot of red herrings, is nearly killed in every chapter, gets to the bottom of the nefarious plot, and ends the book with an explosion swiped from Dr...
...Perversely, Deighton kills off this promising character early in the story, and loses his one chance to breathe some life into his plot...
...It will surprise absolutely no one to learn that in Saving the Queen (Doubleday, 248 pp., $7.95), Buckley's maiden voyage as a novelist, the syndicated columnist and editor of the National Review has seized the chance to grind his renowned conservative axe...
...In 1974 he published an impenetrable lemon called Spy Story, about Russians who were or perhaps were not defecting...
...The classic detective story is a puzzle, and the solution by a superbrain like Sherlock Holmes or Lord Peter Wimsey must reveal not only who done it but why and how...
...For it is hard to share Buckley's nostalgic admiration for a cocky teen-aged American who, briefly in an England already at war in 1941, flaunted his America First button and his hero-worship for Charles Lindbergh, "the great advocate of American peace...
...a tyro in the field, the other by Len Deighton, an overrated pro...
...Whatever use he makes of moral dilemmas and psychological acumen, his plots are severely contained within the framework of a duel between the spy, who may in fact be a traitor, and the traitor, who may all along have been something else...
...In the early years of the century, the secret agent in the stories of John Buchan and E. Phillips Oppenheim was a swashbuckling hero who could take on German Intelligence single-handed...
...And the espionage thriller seems ready for dead storage...
...Buckley's tacit indignation is loud and clear—after all this selfless patriot has done for his country!—but it doesn't explain anything away...
...Though many grave charges can be brought against contemporary novels, being dead is not one of them...
...Intelligence has discovered that the Russians are being fed top-secret information about the development of the hydrogen bomb...
...This is his basic mistake, although he plots his tall tale quite creditably, and brings deus and machina to a comfortably improbable climax with panache...
...After a tough training course, the young American is sent to England on a vital and delicate mission...
...In Len Deighton's new thriller, Yesterday's Spy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 282 pp., $7.95), there is no fun to spoil...
...More recently, the Cold War has provided John Le Carre with his specialty in the espionage genre—not Ambler's whirlpool of Balkan politics, but the theme of personal trust and betrayal, focused on the character of the spy himself...
...But Buckley wants his light-hearted romp to do yeoman service as a hymn in praise of the CIA, and on this level it is as full of holes as a barrel of bagels...
...But Deighton's later efforts have bloated these cryptic and inscrutable mannerisms into a dense fog of unknowing...
...The Buckleyisms tucked slyly into the story are the sort, to borrow Fowler's old joke, up with which I will not put...
...Evasive indirection has been Deighton's trademark since his first spy novel, The Ipcress File, appeared in 1963...
...His clever, handsome and sterling hero, Blackford Oakes, fresh out of Yale in 1951, is recruited into the CIA, like Buckley before him...
...Charlie is reluctantly forced to discard all the tattered illusions he has cherished about Steve, for Champion, it develops, is up to his neck in a monstrous scheme whereby he will provide the Egyptians with a "nuclear device" in return for a sheik's ransom...
...He mourns for the "magic days" of the War, when he was part of a daredevil anti-Nazi Intelligence network active in occupied France, fighting the good fight with romantic warriors like "that dangerous bastard" Steve Champion...
...The artful fuzziness so completely overwhelmed the plot that the book was unreadable, all murk and no menace...
...the book is a derivative bore from start to finish...
...Particularly in the last decade, the popularity of the old-fashioned detective novel has been seriously diminished by the espionage thriller, dealing with political situations rather than singular private crimes, and giving guilty readers the specious assurance that they are not being hopelessly frivolous...
...In the 1930s, when Eric Ambler began publishing such superb novels as A Coffin for Dimitrios and Background to Danger, the spy became part of a sinister governmental underworld rife with the double- and triple-cross...
...So far, so good...
...Now, 30 gray and joyless years after those plucky escapades, Charlie, implausibly, is sent to investigate his old companion Champion, living high off the hog in the south of France and, the Service suspects, up to something fishy in the Middle East...
...Eventually the trail leads our red-white-and-blue pimpernel to the Crown itself, in the person of young Queen Caroline, a smashing blonde who carries noblesse oblige to extraordinary lengths...
...With no way to go but up, Deighton has at least managed to be comprehensible in Yesterday's Spy...
...Nor does it seem likely that the awful void left by the deaths of such British masters as Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham will ever be adequately filled...
...Yesterday's spy," Steve Champion, who had seemed to Charlie the courageous embodiment of anti-Nazi idealism, is revealed to be the man who betrayed some of his wartime comrades under torture, and has since been dangled on a string by the intelligence agencies of half a dozen countries...
...the intricate plots grew out of the tortuous machinations and intrigues of nations and multiple political factions...
...A rootless loner, he detests his pompous bosses, those organization men with clay faces hatching computer-printout conspiracies...
...Since there are a limited number of permutations and combinations that can be unraveled, just so many ways of exiting from the locked room, the traditional tale of detection has been languishing for years...
...Then I knew that, no matter what kind of Communist I was, I was first and foremost a Jew...
...But outside of mainstream fiction, whose possibilities are theoretically as infinite as the varieties of human imagination and experience, there are genres—especially the many forms of literary entertainment herded together under the unsatisfactory rubric "suspense"—that have reached a point of exhaustion...
...This does not mean, however, that Le Carre intends his novels to be read as existential fables...
...Out of acorns such as this mighty spooks don't grow...
Vol. 59 • January 1976 • No. 2
