{"id":10241,"date":"2021-11-20T16:28:02","date_gmt":"2021-11-20T16:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10241"},"modified":"2022-02-02T16:31:42","modified_gmt":"2022-02-02T16:31:42","slug":"recalling-john-gardner-a-master-of-the-spy-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10241","title":{"rendered":"Recalling John Gardner, a master of the spy novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 John Gardner, who would have been 95 today, should rank with Eric Ambler, John le Carr\u00e9, Len Deighton and Philip Kerr as a virtuoso of the serious British spy novel.<\/p>\n

He is known best now for writing fourteen James Bond adventures starting with \u2018Licence Renewed\u2019 in 1981 plus novelisations of the films \u2018Licence to Kill\u2019 and \u2018GoldenEye\u2019. Before that, the Northumberland-born writer had terrific spy tales featuring Boysie Oaks and Herbie Kruger.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Len Deighton said Gardner was \u2018A master storyteller at the height of his power\u2019 when he published \u2018The Secret Generations\u2019 in 1985. It was first in a trilogy including \u2018The Secret Houses\u2019 and \u2018The Secret Families\u2019 that explored the history of two families immersed in the world of secret intelligence from World War I to the Eighties.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u2018I get letters from Bond fanatics,\u2019 Gardner told me in 1989, \u2018who probably like to believe this is what it\u2019s all about being a secret agent \u2013 dashing all over the world killing people. It\u2019s not true, you know.\u2019 He knew that spy stories needed spice, though. \u2018I think the intelligence world is a fairly boring existence most of the time except on a cerebral plain,\u2019 he said. \u2018Those of us who write about it in fictional terms have to jazz it up a little bit.\u2019<\/p>\n

Only child of an Anglican minister and his wife, Gardner said his earliest memories were of long annual vacations in Europe in the Thirties. He and his parents got out of Paris the day before World War II was declared. Growing up in a small English country town, he \u00a0became aware of eavesdropping and paranoia. \u2018You\u2019d walk down an unfamiliar street,\u2019 he said, \u2018and you\u2019d see the lace curtains twitching as people watched.<\/p>\n

An officer cadet at school, he volunteered for service when war broke out but he was too young. Instead, he staged magic shows for the Red Cross at U.S. military bases in Britain. Later, he served overseas in the Royal Marine Commandos and studied theology at Cambridge. He was ordained as a minister until he came to realise that he had made a mistake and, in his turmoil, he turned to booze. Working as a drama critic for the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, he realised he was in real trouble and, on the path to recovery, he wrote his first book, \u2018Spin the Bottle: The Autobiograpy of an Alcoholic\u2019.<\/p>\n

Gardner hadn\u2019t had a drink in thirty years when I spoke to him and his novels were always a pleasure to read. If real and fictional spy cases made people in the west fearful, he argued, \u2018The price of freedom is paranoia, as someone once said. If we\u2019re going to live in a free world then we\u2019ve got to be slightly paranoid.\u2019<\/p>\n

Glasnost<\/i> and prestroika<\/i> were in full flow in the Soviet Union but Gardner was not convinced. \u2018I don\u2019t believe Margaret Thatcher when she says the Cold War is over,\u2019 he said. \u2018I don\u2019t believe it for a moment. Maybe it\u2019s over as far as the British intelligence services are concerned but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s over for those gentlemen in Dzerzhinsky Square and in that large, peculiar building just off the Moscow ring road. I think they\u2019re hard at it.\u2019<\/p>\n

Gardner wrote the Bond stories at the request of the Ian Fleming estate but one of \u00a0his own characters might have been just as popular in movies. \u2018The Liquidator\u2019, his first novel, was a smart and funny spoof about a reluctant secret agent named Boysie Oakes. Mistakenly thought to be a ruthless killer but actually a coward who hates guns, he hires a real assassin to bump off people in order to keep the rewards coming. Gardner wrote seven Boysie books but only the first was made into a film starring Rod Taylor as Boysie, Trevor Howard as his control and comic Eric Sykes as the real killer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018It was supposed to have been a three-picture deal and that\u2019s why I liked it,\u2019 Sykes told me. \u2018The idea was that in the second one Trevor Howard found out about Taylor hiring me for the killings and in the third one he decided he didn\u2019t need Taylor and simply used me. Unfortunately, the backer ran out of money, or something, and the first film was held up in litigation for over a year. By the time it was released, the spy boom was over and it had missed its time. The deal on the other pictures fell through.\u2019<\/p>\n

Sykes remained one of Britain\u2019s most treasured comedians and Gardner wrote many more novels including a fine series featuring British secret agent Herbie Kruger based in Germany. They include a terrific yarn he had in mind for a long time, \u2018Maestro\u2019, about a celebrated orchestral conductor\u2019s secret life as a spy. Gardner kept writing until his death at the age of 80 in 2007. He told me he kept a plaque on his desk that read, \u2018Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill every time.\u2019<\/p>\n

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By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 John Gardner, who would have been 95 today, should rank with Eric Ambler, John le Carr\u00e9, Len Deighton and Philip Kerr as a virtuoso of the serious British spy novel. He is known best now … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,6,1263,2257],"tags":[5150,5147,1704,5149,5146,5148],"class_list":["post-10241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-recalling","tag-the-liquidator","tag-boysie-oakes","tag-eric-sykes","tag-herbie-kruger","tag-john-gardner","tag-rod-taylor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10241"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10280,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241\/revisions\/10280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}