In this ultra-aware state, Dr. Bennell notes the empty stores, the flyspecked windows, the sun-faded signs, the closed up inns, the shuttered Sequoia theater. His girlfriend notes it, too. “When did all this happen ?”

  “A little at a time . . . We’re just realizing it now; the town’s dying.” And most disturbing—it is not the aliens that caused this deterioration. It’s another sign of the times, continuing all the way to today’s battle between small town businesses and the cold calculation of major corporations, those vast conglomerates that destroy the mom-and-pop outfits across America, wearing their own masks, imitating and intimidating. Finney uses all these root fears—of outsiders trying to control us, of racial conflict, of changing times—to draw his readers into a screaming edge of terror that has a significance the movies based on The Body Snatchers (there are four) don’t attempt. Such is the work of a true master of his craft.

  But it’s worth noting one last difference between the book and the movies, one last proof of the power of Finney’s words over the cinematic flicker. And that lies at the end of the book. All the movies conclude with a cynical and pessimistic hopelessness. In the original black-and-white film, our hero is reduced to a wailing Cassandra, with no one to heed his call.

  But what about the book? In the final section, Dr. Bennell and his girlfriend have a chance to escape, but instead the two remain behind to burn a field of growing alien seed pods, sacrificing their own freedom. Contrary to our expectations, Bennell becomes a hero whose last act of defiance has an unexpected result. The pods abandon their invasion, forsaking the planet and its implacable inhabitants, searching for easier targets. Finney offers hope, suggesting that it takes only one person to stand up against the tide, whether it’s ruthless conformity, racism, or the trampling spread of corporations, and for this reader, that makes the book indeed much better than the movie.

  James Rollins is the New York Times best-selling author of adventure thrillers, sold to over thirty countries. You’ll often find him underground or underwater as a caver and scuba diver. These hobbies have helped in the creation of his earlier books, including Subterranean, Deep Fathom, Amazonia, and Sandstorm. His thrillers Map of Bones, Black Order, and The Judas Strain earned national accolades, such as one of 2005’s “top crowd pleasers” (New York Times) and as one of 2006’s “hottest summer reads” (People magazine). He was also handpicked to novelize Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. His works include The Last Oracle as well as his first middle-school book,Jake Ransom and the Skull King’s Shadow, and his Sigma thriller,The Doomsday Key. His most recent thriller is Altar of Eden (2010).

  47

  Hammond Innes’s

  THE WRECK OF THE MARY DEARE (1956)

  Matt Lynn

  Hammond Innes (1913–1998) is the missing link in British thrillers, a writer who took the adventure stories of writers such as H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan and updated them for the audiences of the 1950s and 1960s even as the Cold War spy stories of Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and Len Deighton were starting to emerge. Innes was a prolific author and journalist, who, over a career that spanned four decades, produced more than thirty novels, as well as several nonfiction books. Born in Horsham in Sussex, and educated at Cranbrook School in Kent, he started working for the Financial News (now the Financial Times) in 1934, and published his first thriller The Doppelganger in 1937. But it was only after World War II, in which he served in the Royal Artillery and rose to the rank of major, that he hit his stride as a writer. A succession of masterfully plotted action stories such as The Blue Ice and The Angry Mountain were published after the war. But it was The Wreck of the Mary Deare, later made into a film starring Gary Cooper, which transformed Innes into a global best seller. He carried on writing well into the 1990s.

  For the English, the Channel—that narrow strip of water that separates their country from Continental Europe—is no more noticeable, or remarkable, than a few light clouds in winter. The ferries that plough the short section of sea from Dover to Calais, taking only an hour and a half, are the closest most of us ever get to it. Viewed from those massive ships, over such a short distance, it is a toy town sea, about as threatening as a suburban garden, and about as interesting.

  But there is, of course, much more to the Channel than that, as there is to any sea-lane. The genius of The Wreck of the Mary Deare is that it brings the Channel snarling to life. The novel, the finest of more than thirty that Hammond Innes turned out in a long career, has many fine characters, but none finer than the teasing, vengeful sea in which it is set.

  Innes belonged to the tradition of action adventure writers that started with storytellers such as H. Rider Haggard, Anthony Hope, John Buchan, and Edgar Wallace. The rules of the genre are relatively straightforward, and Innes doesn’t deviate from them. Typically, an ordinary man is pitched into a conspiracy and has to fight his way out, relying on only his resources and wits.

  In Innes’s work, as in Buchan’s, there are no supermen, special agents, or sleuths: just men, probably much like the readers themselves, who happen to find themselves facing terrible and overwhelming odds. But, while he drew on that tradition, Innes also refined the form, pushing it toward a new level of literary achievement by virtue of his painstaking research and the drama and detail he brought to his extraordinary settings.

  Nowhere is that more true than in his breakthrough work. With an ordinary man in an ordinary place,The Wreck of the Mary Deare displays Innes’s mighty talent at full sail. John Sands is steering his boat, the Sea Witch, out across the Channel in a bad gale. A salvage operator, Sands is no hero: he isn’t especially brave or clever, but he does have a sense of honor and, like most sailors, is willing to help a fellow seaman in trouble. A shipwreck looms out of the distance, pitching wildly into the stormy seas, apparently abandoned by its crew. After climbing aboard, Sands discovers its captain, Gideon Patch, alone on the damaged ship. After a long battle against a terrible storm, the ship is ultimately broken on the Minkies, a treacherous series of rocks often hidden under the waters between Jersey and Saint-Malo in France.

  The plot is straightforward enough. Sands and Patch, a man with a past, are caught up in a conspiracy by the ship’s owners to switch cargos and claim the insurance. There is an inquiry, and eventually the return to the wrecked ship. What starts as a mystery turns quickly into a chase. There is nothing particularly original about it—insurance scams have been a frequent plot device in thrillers. But the setting and the skill with which Innes handles his tale set the story apart.

  The sea is so well described you can taste the salt on every sentence. The lights from the wrecked boat that Sands first notices across the water have “a ghastly brilliance like a bloated glow worm.” The waves and spray are “cold and clammy,” the water sticking to the skin. The rough sailing conditions where the Atlantic meets the Channel, and the rocks and reefs that lurk off the coast of Brittany, are a constant menace, waiting to ensnare the unwary.

  Then there is the captain, Gideon Patch, a man driven to the point of insanity by the conspiracy around him. “Sweat had seamed his face, making grime streaked runnels as though he had wept big tears,” notes Sands when he first spots him on board. The captain is as wild and unpredictable as the seas he sails in, and every bit as dangerous. It is a measure of Innes’s skill that he can make Patch both threatening and sympathetic at the same time: he can switch from one to the other in the space of a paragraph. The captain is a man searching for redemption—after an earlier ship was lost, his career was also lost in the doldrums for many years—and when he is offered the bridge of the Mary Deare, it is only so he can be set up to sink the vessel.

  But it is the Channel that is the true major character of the story, and which inevitably controls its outcome. At times punishing, at others forgiving, the Channel lives and breathes on every page. Innes was a keen yachtsman, and all his experience of sailing off the English coast is distilled into the narrative, but there is nothing flat or technical about the descriptions of the gales, the wrecks, and the rocks.

  As a writer, I’ve always identified with Innes. That’s partly because I live close to where he was born and grew up. Indeed, my daughters go to Cranbrook School, a couple of miles down the road from my house, where Innes himself was educated. It is also partly because Innes was a financial journalist before becoming a thriller writer, the same path I have followed. But it is mostly, because, along with near contemporaries such as Alistair MacLean, he is part of a tradition of British adventure writing: a tradition that my own work, successfully or otherwise, attempts to tap into. There is something instinctively appealing about taking an ordinary man, with no special skills or exceptional courage, and then pitching him loose in a grand, dramatic narrative. He grabs readers with a raw energy, identifying them with the action, in a way that more accomplished heroes can’t, and achieves the ultimate aim of popular fiction, which is to take readers on an enthralling journey both to a different place and to a different self. Innes was a master of that, and nowhere more so than in The Wreck of the Mary Deare.

  Matt Lynn was born in Exeter and grew up in London. He started his career as a financial journalist and worked for The Sunday Times in London from 1992 to 2000. Today, he writes a weekly column on European economics for Bloomberg and is a regular contributor to The Spectator. His career as a thriller writer began with Insecurity in 1997.The Watchmen was published the following year. In 2000,The Month of the Leopard appeared under the pen name James Harland. Over the next five years, he embarked on seven ghostwritten action adventure thrillers, for a series of well-known writers, three of which were number one bestsellers. In 2008, he returned to writing under his own name with Death Force, the first in a new series of thrillers featuring a group of mercenaries thrown into action around the world.

  48

  Ian Fleming’s

  FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE (1957)

  Raymond Benson

  Ian Fleming (1908–1964) created one of the most famous characters in thriller history—James Bond, 007—arguably inventing a new genre, the “fantasy” spy novel. After a career as a journalist, he began writing novels in his forties. During World War II, he served as the personal assistant to Britain’s director of Naval Intelligence, an experience that shaped the fictional background of his suave but ruthless secret agent. Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953. A new Bond thriller was published each subsequent year until 1966—a total of twelve novels and two collections of short stories. A hugely successful James Bond film series began in 1962 and is now the longest-running movie franchise in cinema history, although few of the movies present Bond as Fleming envisioned him: humorless, cold, ruthless, and brooding.

  During his lifetime, Ian Fleming never received the critical appreciation he deserved. In his native England, the James Bond novels were politely acknowledged as entertaining reads but generally disregarded among the literati . Fleming began to see the huge international sales of his thrillers only after President John F. Kennedy expressed admiration for the books in a 1961 Life magazine article, and especially a year later when the successful film series got underway. By 1964, however, the author was dead of a heart attack and was unable to benefit from the huge acclaim his character subsequently enjoyed. Now his character is known around the world, not a bad legacy for an author who borrowed James Bond’s name from that of someone who wrote a guide about birds of the West Indies.

  Picking a quintessential Bond novel is a difficult task. One might say that Dr. No (1958) encompasses all the necessary ingredients—a larger-than-life villain, an exotic locale, a beautiful but flawed heroine, elements of the fantastic, and plenty of “sex, sadism, and snobbery,” as one critic put it. Typical of the series, it emphasizes Bond’s taste for the material aspects of life—food, alcohol, cars, gambling, and women—because he knows that the next morning he might not be alive . Other favorites are Goldfinger (1959) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963). However, most hardcore Bond fans agree that From Russia, with Love, Fleming’s fifth novel (1957), remains the most striking and innovative of the 007 thrillers.

  The book’s narrative structure is a departure from most of the series— the protagonist doesn’t appear until nearly a third of the way into the novel. (Fleming tried a similar experiment in The Spy Who Loved Me, 1962, which is written in the first person by the female main character—Bond appears only in the last third of the book.) The first ten chapters of From Russia, with Love deal exclusively with the villains and their attempts to fashion a foolproof plot to assassinate 007 in an embarrassing fashion. In addition, the book ends with a surprise shocker, a completely offbeat change from Fleming’s previous books—the reader is led to believe that James Bond is dead.

  While From Russia, with Love contains everything one expects from a Bond novel—a sweeping, fast pace; colorful, descriptive prose; exotic locations (Russia, Turkey, the Orient Express); and a wonderfully clever plot—it also demonstrates Fleming’s attempt to “elevate the Bond books to a higher literary level” by providing a greater degree of characterization.

  The story concerns the Russian spy outfit SMERSH’s elaborate plot for revenge against the British Secret Service and, in particular, James Bond. (In the movie version, the villains are the criminal organization SPECTRE instead of SMERSH, evidently an attempt by the filmmakers to practice a bit of detente.) Rosa Klebb, head of operations and executions, handpicks an assassin, Red Grant, as well as a beautiful, innocent Russian girl, Tatiana Romanova, to act as pawns in SMERSH’s ploy. The Secret Service learns from Kerim, their man in Istanbul, that Romanova is willing to defect to the West and hand over a much coveted Russian Spektor Coding Machine only if James Bond will come to Istanbul and rescue her (she claims that she fell in love with the agent after seeing his photograph in the KGB file). Tatiana insists on escaping via the Orient Express, so the couple joins Kerim aboard the famous train. But Red Grant is also present. After drugging the girl and murdering Kerim, Grant reveals his true identity and explains the entire scheme to Bond. After a furious battle, Bond kills Grant and manages to escape from the train with the girl and the Spektor. Later in Paris, Bond locates Rosa Klebb in a hotel room. The woman attempts to stab Bond with poison-tipped knitting needles, but the Deuxième Bureau arrives in time to take the woman away. Before she is arrested, however, she kicks Bond in the shin with a poison-tipped blade contained in her shoe. Bond falls to the floor, presumably dead, and the novel ends.

  The startling finish validates Fleming’s courageous structural experiment of focusing entirely on the villains in the first third. By elaborately detailing SMERSH’s plot to kill Bond in the beginning, the feeling of imminent danger is present throughout the book and the suspense builds to a shattering climax aboard the Orient Express. Once Bond escapes this danger, the tension is momentarily relieved until he meets Rosa Klebb in Paris. With that unexpected kick in the shin, all the looming disaster that hung over Bond throughout the novel finally hits home.

  In fact, when Fleming wrote the book, he was discouraged by Bond’s lack of success and really did want to kill him off, but his publisher and a few friends persuaded the author to resurrect the character the following year (in Dr. No). In that book, we learn that 007 was rushed to the hospital in the nick of time and that his life was saved.

  From Russia, with Love is arguably the only real Cold War espionage tale in Fleming’s series. It’s spy vs. spy, and that isn’t always the case with Fleming, even though all his thrillers take place during the shady political arena of the fifties and early sixties. Notable as well is that Fleming provides Bond with the first of the spy “gadgets” that appear from time to time in the novels (and are used to an absurd extreme in the films). Here, the Armorer equips 007 with an attaché case that has secret compartments for money, ammunition, and a silencer for his Beretta. The case also contains two throwing knives hidden in the lining, one of which saves Bond’s life in his fight with Grant.

  From Russia, with Love might not be representative of the Bond series because of its unusual structure and surprise ending in which Bond doesn’t “win”—but it is the book with the most successful blend of full characterizations in addition to a highly original, fascinating, and suspenseful plot.

  Between 1996 and 2002, Raymond Benson was commissioned by the James Bond literary copyright holders to take over writing the 007 novels. In total, he authored six original 007 novels, three film novelizations, and three short stories. Some of his Bond work appeared in the anthologies The Union Trilogy and Choice of Weapons. His The James Bond Bedside Companion, an encyclopedia of the 007 phenomenon, was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for Best Biographical/Critical Work. As David Michaels, Raymond also penned the New York Times best-selling books,Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell—Operation Barracuda. Along with his novelization of the popular videogame,Metal Gear Solid, Raymond’s original suspense novels include Evil Hours, Face Blind, Sweetie’s Diamonds, and A Hard Day’s Death, the first in a series of rock’n’ roll thrillers that includes Dark Side of the Morgue.

  49

  Alistair MacLean’s

  THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (1957)

  Larry Gandle

  Alistair MacLean (1922–1987) was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He was the son of a Scottish minister and learned English as a second language after Scottish Gaelic. He spent most of his childhood near Inverness. In 1941, he joined the Royal Navy and spent two and a half years aboard a cruiser as a torpedo man. His experience in the East Coast Convoy Escorts gave him intimate knowledge of the navy and the northern Atlantic during wartime. After the war, he studied English at the University of Glasgow and graduated in 1953. He then worked as a teacher. In his spare time, he wrote short stories and won a competition in 1954 for his maritime tale, “The Dileas.” The story was published in the Glasgow Herald, where the wife of an editor at Collins read it and showed it to her husband. The editor tracked down MacLean and convinced him to write a full-length novel. The result was MacLean’s first novel,H.M.S. Ulysses (1955), a huge commercial success that was partially based on MacLean’s wartime experiences and was favorably compared to Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. This was followed by The Guns of Navarone in 1957, another best seller. In 1961, it became an Academy Award-nominated film starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn. A 1968 film based on another of his novels,Where Eagles Dare, starred Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Over the next thirty years, MacLean published a total of twenty-eight novels. After his death in 1987, his popularity went into a decline with few books now in print in the U.S., although most are still available in the UK.