Deighton, through the Spy, nails the personalities of those he meets, in the same way that a perceptive observant journalist/psychotherapist might. We immediately feel the avarice, cowardice, foolishness, courage, nobility, and sleaze of those who populate the book. In compensation for breathless plotting, the author offers a breathtaking journey into the murky world of gray versus gray—and that shading refers, if I may indulge, both to geopolitics and the human mind.

  As a rebellious teenager in that turbulent era, I picked our Spy as my preferred espionage protagonist. He taught me cool, he taught me healthy skepticism . . . and he taught me a thing or two about living on one’s own and self-reliance. Why, he even provided cooking lessons! (Some trivia: A gourmet cook, Len Deighton taught Michael Caine how to crack an egg like an expert during the filming of the movie.)

  Another reason that The IPCRESS File appeals to me is the author’s prose. It’s weighty and complex, far from the staccato, pop vernacular of most crime fiction of that era. You sift through it slowly, enjoying. Deighton showed that spy writing could be both stylish and yet not a pastiche of Graham Greene. I like to think that his style derived from his love of drawing and of cooking, two skills whose success depends more on inspirational improvisation than hewing mindlessly to preliminary sketches and printed recipes.

  The Sunday Times of London called him “the poet of the spy story.” I also appreciate The IPCRESS File for its role in the history of espionage literature. The triumvirate of that era, of course, was composed of Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and Len Deighton. Of their creations, James Bond was the flashy superhero, George Smiley the tireless, yet world-weary bureaucrat. Deighton’s unnamed Spy was a combination of the two: a physically brave field agent informed by cynicism and a complex worldview and with a disdain, if not contempt, for glitz and gimmickry. Deighton’s writing was more accessible than le Carré’s dense narrative, but transcended Fleming’s journalistic prose.

  While Fleming was well established when Deighton first published (and indeed would survive the publication of The IPCRESS File by only a few years), I can’t help but speculate that le Carré—just getting his own writing career underway—was a careful reader of Deighton’s fiction.

  Finally, the novel stands as a vivid historic tableau of life in the Cold War era. We’ve largely forgotten about those days of East vs. West, of simple enemies in simple conflict, thanks to the emergence of nonstate threats like Al-Qaida. But read The IPCRESS File, and, if you’re of a certain age, you’ll get vivid flashbacks to a time when you’d lie awake nights, worried about warmongering Bolsheviks poised over nuclear missile launch buttons.

  There were several other novels featuring our unnamed Spy, including Funeral in Berlin, which was, in my opinion, the best in the series.

  So why did I pick The IPCRESS File as my must-read selection? Because it was the first Len Deighton book, it was my first Len Deighton book, it was the first to elevate an antihero to such heights in popular culture. And is anything ever better than the first ? I don’t think so—whether it’s your first beer, your first car, your first lover.

  Or your first covert assignment snatching a roll of stolen microfilm from a dead-drop site on a foggy night in East Berlin, right under the noses of those nasty Stasi agents.

  We’ve all been there, right?

  A former journalist, folk singer, and attorney, Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one best-selling author. His numerous books include The Bodies Left Behind, The Broken Window, and The Sleeping Doll as well as A Maiden’s Grave, which became an HBO film starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and The Bone Collector, which was adapted into a major feature film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. He’s been awarded the Steel Dagger and Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association. In addition, he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story and has been nominated for six Edgar Awards, an Anthony Award, and a Gumshoe Award. In 2009, ITW gave him its Best Novel Award for The Bodies Left Behind.

  52

  Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey’s

  SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (1962)

  James Grady

  The superb Cold War political thriller,Seven Days In May, came from two Washington journalists, fact hunters who added street savvy to classical educations and created fiction. Fletcher Knebel came to big-time D.C. journalism via the Sorbonne and rural Pennsylvania reporting. For this book, their fiction debut, he partnered with Harvard scion Charles Bailey II, who came out of the Minneapolis Tribune and who, even as his book career flourished, went on to be Washington editor for National Public Radio. They used newspaper skills to sharpen inspiration into a blockbuster that couldn’t be ignored as implausible. Their other novels include Convention and No High Ground. On his own, Knebel wrote Night of Camp David, Vanished, and Dark Horse, among others. Knebel (who died of cancer) famously said: “Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.” Together they created a masterpiece, one that inspired legions of their fellow D.C. reporters to spend long nights tapping keyboards and failing to produce a political thriller better than Seven Days in May.

  Fall back in time and space to the mushroom cloud fears of 1961 and Washington, D.C., a post World War II “sleepy Southern town” rebranding itself after the witch-hunting McCarthy era as a modern Camelot for young President John F. Kennedy. Come back to a world dominated by the Cold War with sideshows in places like Vietnam that few Americans could find on a map, though we all knew where Cuba was after a failed invasion at its Bay of Pigs, which was not so secretly backed by our Central Intelligence Agency. World news in that era skimmed stories of military coups dotting the globe—coups that we now know often bore the fingerprints of our spies. Autumn in the next year meant “the missiles of October,” a nuclear-tipped showdown again triggered by Cuba, when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went eyeball to eyeball and blinked our way back from atomic Armageddon.

  In 1961, Fletcher Knebel was a newspaper journalist and the driving force for a thriller he cowrote with Charles W. Bailey II, a book ignited by the paranoia of the times and little-known twists of American history, a novel that created a template for the American political thriller for the next half century: Seven Days in May.

  The plot is simple: a charismatic Air Force general sets up a coup to overthrow America’s democracy and an unpopular, diplomacy-driven president “for the good of the nation.” A Marine colonel named Jiggs discovers the plot by accident, then works with the president and a handful of Washington insiders to thwart the plot against a ticking countdown clock of seven days—all without alarming the trusting nation or the trigger-nervous world.

  Seven Days in May is a literary triumph of the big “what if.” There’d been “American loses its democracy” books before—notably Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis’s anti-Fascist 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. Living memory in 1961 included challenges to America’s rule of law and civilian control of the military such as the 1933 “Businessmen’s Plot” when big money tycoons tried to convince retired Marine Corps hero General Smedley Butler to lead a coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Smedley blew the whistle). President Harry Truman had fired the pompous but vastly more popular General Douglas MacArthur over Korean war policy disagreements, and Washington during Camelot buzzed with rumors about how Air Force General Curtis LeMay (later vice presidential candidate for George Wallace) considered his commander in chief JFK a weak-willed appeaser of America’s enemies.

  But it took Knebel and Bailey to “what if” all that into a page-turning, feels-real novel that scared the hell out of Americans and showed them the fragility of democracy. The Academy Award-nominated movie adaptation that starred Burt Lancaster as the egomaniacal coup leader general and Kirk Douglas as the square-jawed Marine hero turned Seven Days in May into an American cultural icon.

  What’s amazing nearly a half century of “big idea” and “what-if” novels later is how the book still grips a reader—even though it’s a thriller with almost no action.

  Conversations and conjectures drive the novel. The most dynamic scene fills a few lines when an Army sentry gets knocked unconscious by his honorable commanding officer and a secretly imprisoned United States senator. A Secret Service agent tails villains without getting caught. People meet and move the plot forward . . . by talking. “Off camera” an admiral confesses, a plane accidentally crashes, and Jiggs—after crude sweet talk—makes love to his own wife. The greatest personal peril our Marine hero faces comes from his irresistibility to a New York career woman whom he asks . . . for gossip. The showdown comes in a long mano a mano debate between the evil general and the virtuous president, with a “double tap” bullet of speechifying fired into the general on the White House lawn by the president’s buddies who promise to expose the general’s extramarital affair if he fails to disappear from public life. The epilogue wrapping up loose ends is a transcript of a Monday morning presidential press conference in which nothing nefarious is revealed.

  More action explodes in chapter one of many post-JFK assassination thrillers than in the whole of Seven Days in May. And yet, most of them are forgotten while Knebel and Bailey’s work lives on—in our cultural consciousness, though not on our bookshelves. It’s out of print.

  Seven Days in May triumphs because it never loses sight of its big idea and because it personifies a few good men confronting a massive evil. The authors set the fiction in their distant future of 1974—ironically, the spring of the Watergate hearings that brought about the downfall of a rogue president, not a renegade chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and while many of Knebel and Bailey’s assumptions about that era’s everyday life never came true, their big “what if” endures because the challenges to government, politics, freedom, law, justice, and loyalty are ever present.

  If we’d never been blessed with Seven Days in May, which I read as a teenager, I’m not sure I’d have written Six Days of the Condor. Knebel and Bailey—along with Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal —showed a new generation of authors like me how to use a ticking clock as the central and endemic organizing principle for a big “what if.”Seven Days in May perhaps more than any other novel showed how to create powerful fiction by spinning an ultrarealistic plot “behind” the reality that’s believable to readers when they start page one and after they lift their eyes from the end, so that “what if” becomes not only “what could happen” but “maybe it already did.”

  That’s a classic thriller.

  James Grady published his first novel,Six Days of the Condor, in 1974 when he was twenty-five. A former U.S. Senate aide and national investigative reporter, he is the author of a dozen more novels, including Runner in the Street and River of Darkness, plus numerous short stories as well as scripts for television and films. Grady received an Edgar nomination for his short story, “Kiss the Sky,” won France’s 2001 Grand Prix du Roman Noir, Italy’s 2004 Raymond Chandler medal, and Japan’s 2008 World Baka-Misu Award for fiction. In 2008, London’s Daily Telegraph named Grady as “one of fifty crime writers to read before you die.” He lives inside Washington, D.C.’s Beltway with his writer wife, Bonnie Goldstein. Their son, Nathan, is a college student; their daughter, Rachel, is a documentary director/producer nominated for a 2007 Academy Award.

  53

  Lionel Davidson’s

  THE ROSE OF TIBET (1962)

  Milton C. Toby

  Lionel Davidson (1922–2009) may be an unfamiliar author to many readers on the American side of the Atlantic. In England, though, Davidson was touted as a rising superstar when his first novel,The Night of Wenceslas, was published in 1960. He drew immediate comparisons to Eric Ambler, John le Carré, and other masters of spy fiction, and that debut novel won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger. Davidson won a second CWA Gold Dagger with A Long Way to Shiloh, published in 1966, and his third with The Chelsea Murders, published in 1978. In 2001, Davidson received the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for his sustained excellence and for a significant contribution to crime fiction. Davidson later called his four CWA awards “extraordinary,” telling an interviewer that only The Chelsea Murders was “even about crime.” There is no pretense of crime in the author’s second novel,The Rose of Tibet, and his most recent work, Kolymsky Heights, written thirty-two years apart. Both are great adventure stories. Despite Davidson’s numerous honors, his novels are difficult to find these days, but the search is well worth the effort.

  H. Rider Haggard established a lofty standard for adventure novels with his Victorian classics King’s Solomon’s Mines and She. It was another seventy-five years before Lionel Davidson raised the bar even higher with The Rose of Tibet. Although sharing some thematic and stylistic elements with King Solomon’s Mines and She, The Rose of Tibet is far more than a simple retelling of the Haggard tales. And, thankfully, it has little in common with an early film version of King Solomon’s Mines that had actor and singer Paul Robeson as Umbopa breaking into song at odd times during a hazardous trek across the African desert.

  An account by protagonist Charles Houston of his eighteen-month journey to Tibet to search for his brother,The Rose of Tibet is presented as a first-person narrative told by a third-person narrator. This unusual literary device allows Davidson, the author, to appear in the book as Davidson, the character, a dubious book editor who takes it upon himself to verify, and then to prepare a record of, Houston’s amazing story for publication.

  Readers are introduced to Charles Houston when Davidson learns that Houston dictated the details of his travels to an elderly friend, who offers the notebooks for publication. Unfortunately, Houston is not in a position to confirm any of the details surrounding his time in Tibet; having returned to England with £500,000 and an injury requiring the amputation of his right arm, he has vanished somewhere in the Caribbean.

  In the introduction, sprinkled through the narrative, and finally in a lengthy epilogue, Davidson tries to pin down elements of Houston’s story, communicating with Tibet scholars and government officials while trying to locate eyewitnesses to the astonishing events described by Houston. H. Rider Haggard employed a similar technique in She, where the author-as-editor publishes a manuscript ostensibly written by L. Horace Holly, who was mysteriously absent in “Thibet” without a forwarding address.

  Both Haggard and Davidson had real-world experience reworking and publishing the manuscripts of others. Employed as fiction editor at the magazine John Bull during the early 1950s, following time in the submarine service during World War II, Davidson serialized the likes of authors Agatha Christie and Graham Greene. His attention to detail in recounting the investigation into Houston’s story, and throughout the book itself, lends an air of credibility to the whole affair. It leaves the reader wondering if there might be some factual basis to the novel.

  The Rose of Tibet starts slowly, building momentum for the first fifty or so pages while Houston debates whether to travel to India, and then to Tibet to search for his brother, a filmmaker who vanished during an assignment. By the time Houston commits himself to the quest, there is no doubt that he is singularly ill suited to the task and that things won’t proceed as planned.

  Arriving in India, he is stonewalled by the Tibetans, who are reluctant to give outsiders any information about the missing film crew. He hires a young Sherpa named Ringling who leads him over the Himalayas to the monastery at Yamdring, where rumors hint that a group of foreigners are being held. Mistaken for the god Hu-Tzung because Ringling mispronounces his name as Hoo-tsung, Houston locates his brother and makes frequent visits to the bed of Mei-Hua—the high priestess of the monastery, the eighteenth incarnation of the Rose of Tibet.

  In spite of its remoteness and inaccessibility, or perhaps because of it, Tibet has been coveted by outsiders for centuries. A delegation of Russian Cossacks was turned back near Lhasa in 1879. Then in 1904 the British staged a brutal military invasion led by Sir Francis Younghusband in which thousands of Tibetans were killed. The most recent invaders, the Chinese, are still there. They stormed into Tibet in 1951 and created a “hell on earth” according to the Dalai Lama, who fled to India a step ahead of the invaders.

  With the Chinese invasion as a backdrop, Houston, Mei-Hua, Ringling, and the British film crew attempt a tortuous escape from Tibet. The final third of the book holds its own with any thriller as the party tries to dodge the Chinese army and struggles to survive in a harsh and unyielding environment. Nearly everyone dies, leaving Houston and Mei-Hua to spend months wintering in a tiny cave near a village occupied by the Chinese.

  The Rose of Tibet works on several levels, as a tale of high adventure and as a richly textured glimpse into an exotic place that few people ever will experience firsthand. When the book was published in 1962, most outsiders knew little about Tibet, and Lhasa was considered the Holy Grail of exotic destinations. Not a lot had changed when I visited Tibet in 1985, shortly after the area was opened to foreigners by the Chinese, although my arrival by airplane was far less arduous and eventful than Houston’s overland treks by bicycle, mule, horseback, and on foot.

  Obvious tensions between Tibetans and the Chinese notwithstanding, Tibet was, and is, a special and magical place. Lionel Davidson has done it justice, and The Rose of Tibet is clear evidence that a rousing adventure is timeless.

  Milton C. Toby is an attorney and author who lives in Georgetown, Kentucky. His practice includes the representation of death row inmates and equine law, an unlikely combination of interests that has been the basis for several award-winning short stories. Before becoming a lawyer, Toby worked as a journalist and freelance photographer in the United States, China (from where he traveled in Tibet), Costa Rica, and Colombia. He is the author of five nonfiction books, including Ruffian, a biography of the ill-fated filly that might be the best Thoroughbred race-horse of all time, and The Complete Handbook of Equine Law and Business, as well as numerous magazine articles on legal topics. He serves as chair of the Contracts Committee for the American Society of Journalists and Authors and speaks on copyright issues affecting writers and photographers.