I planned to post the second part of the 2000s’ Batman comics reading guide, but life keeps getting in the way and taking me down other paths… So I ended up in a very different place, with this post recommending a couple of British novels from almost one hundred years ago!
Although Gotham Calling tends to cover a lot of ground in common with other blogs, I like to think my tastes are eccentric and eclectic enough that they can produce original combinations. For instance, because of a side project, I’ve been reading plenty of early spy yarns, so this website has somehow developed a whole subsection of posts about very old tales of espionage and political intrigue. The thing is that, while some seminal books were still a far cry from the type of genre material that Gotham Calling specializes in (like Erskine Childers’ The Ridle of the Sands, with its endless passages devoted to the technical minutiae of sailing in the East Frisian coast), others already pretty much nailed the pulpy formulas of so many later adventures (like Jules Verne’s Facing the Flag or John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps).
And since everyone around me keeps saying it feels like we’re back in the 1930s, at least in terms of politics, then here are further recommendations from that decade, in the same vein:
THE SPY PARAMOUNT
(E. Phillips Oppenheim, 1934)
“Martin Fawley glanced irritably at the man stretched flat in the chair he coveted – the man whose cheeks were partly concealed by lather, and whose mass of dark hair was wildly disarranged. One of his hands – delicate white hands they were although the fingers were long and forceful – reposed in a silver bowl of hot water. The other one was being treated by the manicurist seated on a stool by his side, the young woman whose services Fawley also coveted. He had entered the establishment a little abruptly and he stood with his watch in his hand. Even Fawley’s friends did not claim for him that he was a good-tempered person.”
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: this lightning-fast-paced thriller about a superspy globetrotting throughout Europe, meeting gorgeous femmes fatales, and facing suavely articulate megalomaniacs while jumping from one action sequence to another is the most glaring predecessor of 007 I’ve encountered so far. Even the prose has enough of Fleming to deserve comparison.
And since there is a geeky pleasure in uncovering the genealogy of pop culture, it may actually be the case that I had even more of a blast reading this novel than its original readers: they may have gotten a witty page-turner set in a variation of interwar politics (or, as they perceived it at the time, current politics), but I got that *plus* the fun of reading what retroactively comes across like an eerie blueprint for an entire branch of adventure fiction.
It helps that E. Phillips Oppenheim often writes with the effective yet minimalist precision of a film script:
“‘You are not leaving us, sir?’ the valet de chambre enquired as he answered the bell.
‘Only for a few days,’ Fawley assured him. ‘I am keeping on my rooms.’
‘You are not leaving us, Major Fawley, I trust,’ the smiling and urbane manager asked him in the hall.
‘Only for a few days,’ Fawley repeated. ‘I am going to explore your hills and try another golf links. Back about Sunday, I should think. Keep my letters.’
‘I wish you a pleasant and successful expedition,’ the manager remarked, with a final bow.
Fawley’s smile was perhaps a little enigmatic. He waved his hand and drove off without further speech.
Fawley, some five days later, driving his high-powered Lancia car through one of the many passes of the Lesser Alps between Roquebrune and the frontier, suddenly swung round a corner to find himself confronted by a movable obstruction of white, freshly-painted rails and an ominous notice. A soldier in uniform of the Chasseurs Alpins stepped forward, his rifle at a threatening angle.”
That said, The Spy Paramount is even more interesting when it deviates from formula and it reveals itself as something quirkier. For one thing, the hero is an American freelancer rather than an MI6 agent… and he actually starts out getting hired by fascist Italy! What’s more, the story involves a disorienting bunch of German factions that aren’t easy to pin down in terms of real-world correspondents, as they combine elements from different political groups. The result is a reminder of how fuzzy things were in the early 1930s, without a clear perception of what Nazism was and that it was here to stay, before that project and its implications became fully clear. (Who knows how future geeks will look back on the fiction we are writing today…)
It’s not just that Oppenheim can’t see the future (or has a confused, impressionistic understanding of his present). It’s that his mind is also focused on the past, with the trauma of World War I still present enough to inform an obsession with the issue of war and peace. This thematic concern only really becomes central near the end, though, when escapist thrills give way to a more politically engaged type of plot. The fact that the resolution is ultimately quite odd (and unashamedly imperialist and Eurocentric) only makes the whole thing even more fascinating: for all the proto-Bond vibe, the result still definitely has to be read as a product of its time.
All these layers are added spice. If you accept that The Spy Paramount takes place on a slightly alternate history of the 1930s, I suppose you can also just enjoy it as a straight-up roller coaster ride with gripping set pieces and remarkable characters:
“In a life full of surprises Martin Fawley was inclined to doubt whether he ever received a greater one than when, for the second time during the same day, he was ushered into the presence of General Berati, the most dreaded man in Rome. Gone was the severe high-necked and tight-waisted uniform, gone the iciness of his speech and the cold precision of his words. It was a tolerable imitation of a human being with whom Fawley was confronted – a dark-haired, undersized but sufficiently good-looking man dressed in a suit of apparently English tweeds, stretched at his full length upon the sofa of a comfortable sitting-room leading out of his bureau, reading the New York Herald and with something that looked suspiciously like a Scotch whisky and soda by his side.”
A GUN FOR SALE
(Graham Greene, 1936)
“Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. It was just a new job. You had to be careful. You had to use your brains. It was not a question of hatred. He had only seen the Minister once: he had been pointed out to Raven as he walked down the new housing estate between the little Christmas trees, an old, rather grubby man without any friends, who was said to love humanity.
The cold wind cut his face in the wide Continental street. It was a good excuse for turning the collar of his coat well up above his mouth. A hare-lip was a serious handicap in his profession; it had been badly sewn in infancy, so that now the upper lip was twisted and scarred. When you carried about you so easy an identification you couldn’t help becoming ruthless in your methods. It had always, from the first, been necessary for Raven to eliminate the evidence.”
This Graham Greene fellow sure knew what he was doing…
The opening is a banger, with a killer hired to murder a government minister and kickstart a chain of events that will lead up to another world war (yep, the haunting memory of WWI is all over this one as well). This sets up a hardboiled man-on-the-run yarn that alternates between the perspectives of the assassin, Raven, of a gutsy chorus girl that gets involved in the mix, Anne Crowder, and of a bunch of other characters that Greene keeps introducing throughout (from a pre-Harvey Weinstein type to the 1930s’ version of an incel). The mosaic structure works quite nicely because Greene can quickly sketch an involving situation and a captivating new cast member in just a few well-pointed paragraphs while fleshing out a whole range of personalities. (His sharp prose really goes a long way, which is why I also loved his novel The Comedians even though the 1st-person narrator/protagonist was such an asshole.)
Above all, A Gun for Sale oozes atmosphere. There’s the palpable buildup to war on everybody’s minds, the social realist details of working-class lives, and the dark tone that makes you picture a film noir in your head… No wonder Hollywood got on it a few years later, although the novel has the advantage of letting you peek into the characters’ paranoid mindsets and closely follow their thought processes:
“The shop was in a side street opposite a theatre. It was a tiny one-roomed place in which was sold nothing above the level of Film Fun and Breezy Stories. There were postcards from Paris in sealed envelopes, American and French magazines, and books on flagellation in paper jackets for which the pimply youth or his sister, whoever was in the shop, charged twenty shillings, fifteen shillings back if you returned the book.
It wasn’t an easy shop to watch. A woman policeman kept an eye on the tarts at the corner and opposite there was just the long blank theatre wall, the gallery door. Against the wall you were as exposed as a fly against wallpaper, unless, he thought, waiting for the lights to flash green and let him pass, unless – the play was popular.”
The vibe here is very different from The Spy Paramount, although I suppose the two books do come from a similar place, looking at a Europe that appeared to be once again spiraling towards war (depressingly, they were right). While Graham Greene would go on to write some of the best spy novels in the whole damn genre, though, A Gun for Sale isn’t all that interested in the mechanics of high politics and international intrigue. Instead, Greene focuses on the ‘little’ people trying to go about their lives while the world is falling apart. I especially appreciate the epilogue, where he revisits some peripheral figures in the main narrative, who have quite a skewed vision of events because they are the center of their own stories (where it is Raven and Anne who are the peripheral ones).
With a great command of rhythm and a knack for painting a memorable picture (a climactic set piece involves a drill with people wearing gas masks), Greene is also a master of tension. He was a film critic, so perhaps he got to study the techniques developed by Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, whose style is perfectly aligned with this sort of material. In turn, directly or indirectly, this reads like the grandaddy of quasi-existentialist assassin-gone-rogue thrillers made decades later, like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï or Matz’s and Jacamon’s The Killer.
I know I keep resorting to other art forms to describe this novel, which speaks to my own insufficiencies in terms of writing about literature, but I also think there is something particularly synesthetic about A Gun for Sale. The descriptions are so vivid and visual that it often feels like you are actually watching a comic book or a cinematic montage coming to life:
“There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city like a night sky with no stars. The air in the streets was clear. You had only to imagine that it was night. The first tram crawled out of its shed and took the steel track down towards the market. An old piece of newspaper blew up against the door of the Royal Theatre and flattened out. In the streets on the outskirts of Nottwich nearest the pits an old man plodded by with a pole tapping at the windows. The stationer’s window in the High Street was full of Prayer Books and Bibles: a printed card remained among them, a relic of Armistice Day, like the old drab wreath of Haig poppies by the War Memorial: “Look up, and swear by the slain of the war that you’ll never forget.” Along the line a signal lamp winked green in the dark day and the lit carriages drew slowly in the past the cemetery, the glue factory, over the wide tidy cement-lined river. A bell began to ring from the Roman Catholic cathedral. A whistle blew.”