The Guns of Navarone is a riveting tale about a team of mission specialists in World War II who are given the assignment of destroying huge guns on the island of Navarone, off the coast of Turkey. The guns disrupt a shipping lane that British ships need to use in order to rescue twelve hundred men from the nearby island of Kheros. Keith Mallory, a world famous mountain climber, is chosen to lead the group. Mallory is also a skilled saboteur and speaks Greek and German fluently. The others in the group are Lieutenant Andy Stevens, who will navigate the boat and is also a skilled Alpine climber, Corporal Dusty Miller, an explosives expert, Casey Brown, engineer of the boat and guerilla fighter, and finally the hulking presence of Andrea Stavrov, skilled in hand-to-hand combat and a “complete fighting machine.” Andrea is Greek and knows the intricacies of the language and customs. Together, they must accomplish what the British Navy and Air Force could not. They must infiltrate the island of Navarone and blow up the enormous guns. The mission appears to be suicidal.

  There are, of course, multiple obstacles to achieving success. First, they sail to the island in a dark storm in a boat with a very unreliable engine. They encounter a Nazi ship on the way. The storm batters them against the rocks. Once on the island, they must overcome guards, then climb the sheer cliffs. They are confronted by more guards at the top, are captured, shot at by Stuka dive-bombers and troops on the ground. They must also discover the identity of a traitor in their midst, who keeps the Germans on their tail continuously. One escapade follows another until the great climactic scene when they finally reach the guns.

  MacLean uses the techniques he is famous for, bringing together a group of greater-than-life heroes who must beat insurmountable odds to achieve the seemingly impossible. Their resilience and determination are qualities that he favored throughout his career, although in many books one of the group is a traitor, with the consequence that loyalty is emphasized as another virtue. Sex and romance aren’t present because the author thought these elements slowed the action. The plot has an episodic structure as the heroes struggle from one crisis to another. In a sense, the book is a serial novel with each scene ascending to a climax and a very brief denouement before the next scene begins. While the characters are not complex, the descriptive prose creates a strong sense of realism. At heart, the entertainment value and the imaginative storytelling are what make MacLean’s books effective. Nobody had a better grasp of how to plunge readers straight into the meat of a story and to keep them gripped through the twists and turns of the next three hundred pages.

  Of course, there are elements of MacLean’s work that appear old-fashioned these days. He brought a very British sense of fair play to his work. His heroes fight by the rules. They don’t ever actually complain about “something not being cricket,” but there is little question that they think it.

  Nonetheless, MacLean had several great achievements. He is one of the writers who defined the fictional version of World War II. A “good war,” fought by honest, hardworking men, pressed into a civilian army that was fighting for a noble cause. It was a war that turned ordinary guys into heroes. And it was a war where stealth, courage, and determination allowed the ordinary soldier to make a difference. Watch any World War II drama since the late 1950s, and the image of the war they portray is essentially MacLean’s.

  Next, he had a major influence on the adventure story. His heroes were men pitched into conspiracies, wars, conflicts, who struggled against impossible odds, both to overcome their opponent and to maintain a sense of decency. The work of later authors such as Frederick Forsyth and Tom Clancy owes a huge debt to MacLean. Through the qualities of his heroes, his lean, punchy prose style, and the furious pacing of his stories, he helped to create the contemporary adventure thriller. Indeed, it is hard to watch any modern Hollywood action movie without seeing MacLean’s finger-prints all over the script.

  In addition, MacLean’s work had a significant impact on the maritime thriller, influencing authors like Clive Cussler, who acknowledged that he studied MacLean’s fiction and used it as an example when he began his career. But MacLean had an even broader influence, providing a modern template for the Mission Impossible or Dirty Dozen type of story in which a band of various and sometimes mismatched heroes takes on a seemingly unachievable task against overwhelming odds.

  Given all this, it’s puzzling why his books are no longer in print in the United States. One reason might be that these days there is little interest in stories about World War II or the Cold War. Nuclear weapons in the hands of Arab terrorists are perhaps more relevant to contemporary readers. A pity. With one of the greatest thriller plots ever invented,The Guns of Navarone is a novel that deserves to be in print and enjoyed for many more decades to come.

  Larry Gandle is the assistant editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. He is also a creator of the Barry Award for best thriller, one of the first awards to have that objective. Now there are others such as the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award of Great Britain’s Crime Writers Association and the Thriller Award of the International Thriller Writers organization. Larry works as a radiation oncologist in Florida and resides in Tampa.

  50

  Richard Condon’s

  THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1959)

  Robert S. Levinson

  Richard Condon (1915–1996) published his first novel,The Oldest Profession, in 1958, and a year later scored his first major success with The Manchurian Candidate, a bravura thriller that brought him fame, fortune, and a writing career that included two dozen other books that bristle with wit, satire, and irreverent, often wicked, wisdom. His themes were frequently political in nature, among them Winter Kills, a critical success dealing with a family not unlike the Kennedys,The Final Addiction, and Emperor of America, while he more memorably invaded Mafia lore with Prizzi’s Honor and three sequels. Condon turned to fiction after twenty-two years working as a movie publicist, including a long term with Walt Disney Productions promoting Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Dumbo. A native New Yorker, he settled for a time in Paris, before moving with his wife and two daughters to homes in Spain, Ireland, and Switzerland, ultimately settling in Dallas prior to his death. Condon called himself a compulsive writer, who spent seven hours a day, seven days a week at the typewriter, and often quoted “Condon’s Law” about writing fiction: “When you don’t know the whole truth, the worst you can imagine is bound to be close.”

  If you write one book that, for whatever reason, becomes iconic it’s an extraordinary blessing.

  —John le Carré

  That’s precisely what Richard Condon did, bless him.

  He wrote a book fifty years ago that has come to be considered a cultural icon of another time in America’s history, containing elements that have continued to ring true through the decades, seem relevant today, and suggest a relevancy that will continue into the future.

  The Manchurian Candidate was an instant best seller, pitched into controversial orbit by unorthodox storytelling as chilling as it was thrilling, a volatile mix of Cold War politics, sex, cynicism, satire, suspense, humor, intrigue, incest, murder, suicide, and blackmail. The overload of information frequently threatened to crash a story praised for its brilliance and originality by some, condemned by others for a pulp prose style that elevated kitsch to another dimension.

  As Condon laid it out, an American army patrol is captured during the Korean War and taken to a Chinese research facility where the members are brainwashed into believing they’re attending a ladies’ garden club meeting. In fact, they’re witnessing the murder of two members of their unit by Sergeant Raymond Shaw, who has been programmed to obey commands triggered by the suggestion that he pass the time by playing a game of solitaire. No one who has read the book or seen the movie can forget the significance of the queen of diamonds.

  The patrol members are set free, convinced that Raymond rescued them from death at the hands of an overwhelming enemy force. Raymond returns home a walking time bomb, chosen by the Communists to commit an unspecified assassination sometime in the future because of his ties to the corridors of power. His stepfather is U.S. Senator Johnny Iselin, a clownish lush being steered to higher office by his wife, Raymond’s domineering mother, through the use of repeated and wholly invented claims about Communist agents occupying sensitive positions in various agencies of government.

  At the same time, once back home, the patrol’s leader, Captain Ben Marco, suffers a recurring nightmare. Visions of the garden club meeting conflict with images of Raymond killing the two soldiers and feed a growing belief that the enemy encounter never happened. He brings his suspicions to the military authorities, who judge Marco to be a mental invalid of the Korean War until another platoon member reveals he’s tortured by the same nightmare.

  Marco, leading the government’s pursuit after the truth, locks onto Raymond who, although suffering his own anxieties, remains completely controlled by his Soviet handlers and will commit five murders on command—his beloved wife among the victims—before he turns the queen of diamonds face up in a game of solitaire and is directed to his ultimate assassination target.

  The clock is ticking as Marco finally pieces together the puzzle. He charges after Raymond in a desperate pursuit that leads to Madison Square Garden and the political convention where Senator Iselin is about to be introduced as his party’s nominee for vice president and to a series of climactic twists that play out like a Greek tragedy.

  Upon publication,The Manchurian Candidate was awarded immediate cachet as a mirror of the times. It dealt with the first armed conflict of a Cold War so failed and open-ended (to this day, unresolved between North Korea and the U.S.) that it was labeled a “police action” in official records; an ultimately disgraced U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy, who kept changing the number of Communists he’d allegedly uncovered in our government; and, especially, the concept of mind control through a technique that proved to be valid and ultimately came to be known as brainwashing.

  I couldn’t afford the hardcover when it was published to all the hoopla and huzzahs, so I had to wait for the paperback edition, which I began reading on a business flight to New York. I was less than thrilled. For one thing, the plot was frequently nonlinear. For another, Condon’s writing offered more details than a Bond Street tailor lavishes on a suit, far too many for this off-the-rack guy. If Condon mentioned the Medal of Honor, he felt the need to interrupt the story to provide a page about its history. The same for political conventions. The same for—

  I set aside the book after twenty-five or thirty pages, quietly cursing the reviewers who had convinced me to invest two bits and my time (“A breathlessly up-to-date thriller,”New York Times; “Brilliant,”The New Yorker), but I’ve never been one to quit a book (or a movie), no matter how bad, without seeing it through to the bitter end. I went back to The Manchurian Candidate after returning from an evening at the theater. Settling in bed, I expected Condon’s expansive, occasionally mind-numbing prose to shuttle me to dreamland after a few pages.

  Au contraire.

  The story took off, kept me awake all night, riveted to an innovative thriller that a half century later handily holds its own against changes in storytelling techniques, whose influence is often revealed in the themes and conceits of more than a few authors working today.

  The movie versions, the first in 1962 with Frank Sinatra as Marco and Laurence Harvey as Raymond, and the second in 2004 with Denzel Washington and Liev Schreiber, practiced a less diabolical form of brainwashing, tricking people into believing they know the book. Not so, if only because they’re denied the greater truths Condon packed into his final paragraphs.

  For any doubters among you, why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?

  Robert S. Levinson, best-selling author of The Traitor in Us All, In the Key of Death, Where the Lies Begin, Ask a Dead Man, and the Neil Gulliver-Stevie Marriner mystery-thrillers The Elvis and Marilyn Affair, The James Dean Affair, The John Lennon Affair, and Hot Paint, was an award-winning newspaperman, public relations executive, and television writer-producer before he turned to writing fiction. Among other credits: short stories in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines, Ellery Queen Readers Award recognition three times, stories in four “year’s best” anthologies, stage plays premiered at RiverPark Center’s International Mystery Writers Festival, 2007 and 2008. He wrote and produced two Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award galas, as well as two International Thriller Writers Thriller Award shows. He also served on the Writers Guild of America-West board of directors, four years on the Mystery Writers of America national board, and six terms as president of the Hollywood Press Club.

  51

  Len Deighton’s

  THE IPCRESS FILE (1962)

  Jeffery Deaver

  Len Deighton (1929–) is the only cook-artist-historian-spy writer that I know of. The proclivity toward cooking, and later food journalism, came from his chef mother, the art from innate talent later nurtured by training at the Royal College of Art. The historian-spy part? Certainly a stint with Royal Air Force’s Special Investigations Branch could be cited as an influence. But equally important was the boy’s experience in wartime Britain—where one couldn’t escape either the blunt or subtle aspects of global conflict and the intrigue they engendered. Born in England, Leonard Cyril Deighton worked a number of jobs in countries all over the world: photographer, chef, waiter, illustrator, advertising executive, airline steward, and food columnist. He wrote his first novel,The IPCRESS File, in the early 1960s. It became a successful movie, released in 1965, starring Michael Caine. (The film was titled The Ipcress File —note the difference in capitalization—the word an acronym, whose meaning I won’t reveal, in the interest of, well, keeping covert what should remain covert.) Deighton has been writing successful spy and thriller novels, short stories, and nonfiction history books ever since.

  Set in the fog of the Cold War,The IPCRESS File features an unnamed protagonist (he was Harry Palmer only in the movie version). The agent (I’ll call him our “Spy”) was a former military intelligence officer now working as an operative for one of the smallest of the British security organizations. When brilliant British scientists begin disappearing, a very 1960’s conceit, our Spy is recruited to handle the case, and he soon tumbles into a web of brainwashing and mind control plots, Eastern Bloc shenanigans, and home-front intrigue and infighting. The exotic locations of Lebanon and the South Pacific figure prominently.

  The novel was a huge bestseller when it was first published in 1962. Three years later, the book was successfully adapted to the screen (minus the Mideast and Asian settings), and Michael Caine’s subtle and wry Cockney-inflected characterization of the protagonist set the standard for portraying an unsuperhero spy (I’m thinking especially of European New Wave and noir cinema of the ’60s and some of the grittier TV shows like Patrick McGoohan’s Secret Agent, which originated as Danger Man in the UK, and The Prisoner).

  The plot of The IPCRESS File is more than serviceable—and offers up a good whammy twist at the end—but the storytelling is elliptical, even meandering; one doesn’t read The IPCRESS File for Matt Damon Bourne Identity roller-coaster speed. Its significance lies elsewhere.

  First, of course, with our Spy.

  Though Deighton refined his plotting in later books,The IPCRESS File is at heart a character-driven look at a man in conflict and those whom he crashes up against or glances off of. And what a character he is—a classic antihero from the 1960s: a forty-something civil servant obliquely making his way as best he can through life, contemptuous of classist British society, paranoid (he’s weirdly fastidious about keeping an escape package with a new identity up to date), and flippant and fast with his wry asides (words as a shield, it always struck me). When we think of Len Deighton and The IPCRESS File, we are immediately reminded of Alan Sillitoe (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) and John Osborne, creators of working-class antiheroic protagonists smoldering in gritty postwar England.

  Yet our Spy’s skepticism about the Establishment doesn’t derail his strong moral center and his courage to act upon it. “I have a clear mind and pure heart,” he says. “I am a loyal and diligent employee and will attempt every day to be worthy of the trust my paternal employer puts in me.” He’s cynical yet not bitter—a very hard act for an author to pull off.

  We are with this unnamed fellow 100 percent, even when he plods along without much direction—largely, I think, because that is how most of us live our lives: stumbling in the general direction of our rather vague missions.

  He comes alive within us.

  And so, I should point out, does the world he inhabits. For this, we have to marvel at Deighton’s narrative ability to create a character with a keen eye and observant nature and the intelligence to articulate those observations for our benefit.