THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM (1965) by Adam Hall

The Alphabet of Crime community meme over at the Mysteries in Paradise blog this week reaches the letter Q, and my nomination, is …

THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM by Adam Hall

“As I walked back to the hotel the only tracks in the snow were my own.”

1965 was a vintage year for espionage. At the cinema Sean Connery was James Bond for the fourth, and most financially successful, time in Thunderball; Michael Caine was ‘Harry Palmer’ in Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File; John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was filmed with Richard Burton; and Rod Taylor was John Gardner’s The Liquidator. On TV Diana Rigg joined Patrick Macnee in The Avengers and The Man from UNCLE went from black and white into colour. Perhaps best of all, in the UK there was Patrick McGoohan as John Drake in Danger Man and all over the globe one could find I Spy starring Bill Cosby and the late Robert Culp. In fact the genre was doing so well that parodies were already popular, with Carry On Spying (1964) already a hit in UK cinemas and Get Smart and Wild Wild West were just getting started on American TV. This was also the year that Elleston Trevor as ‘Adam Hall’ began publishing the adventures of his secret agent ‘Quiller’. The first book in the series was originally published in the UK as The Berlin Memorandum but the title was altered under its better known variation The Quiller Memorandum for the US release – which was also used for the popular movie version.

‘Quiller’ is only known by this code name – he works for a ‘Bureau’ that is so secret that it too doesn’t, for practical purposes, exist, and our hero’s involvement has to be directly requested by the Prime Minister. In Memorandum we learn that he was an infiltrator behind enemy lines during the second world war, helping prisoners escape from POW camps. This proves particularly important as this story, set in then contemporary 1960s Berlin is about neo-Nazis aiming to once again destabilise Western Europe. Quiller takes over an assignment from his assassinated colleague Kenneth Lindsay Jones in trying to find out the location of a base of operations of a group in Berlin known as Phoenix, led by Oktober, who will become the main antagonist in the story. Quiller eventually uncovers a major conspiracy involving an outbreak of pneumonic plague and military action by the Mafia, Spanish fascists and the Egyptian government – but as befits the first person narration, the focus is much tighter and less melodramatic than this might suggest. Indeed one of the hallmarks of Hall’s series is his highly suspenseful sequences in which we find Quiller able to convincingly get out of incredibly tight spots – at one point this is effectuated in a remarkable sequence in which Quiller is able to subordinate his body to his will and make it shut down and thus stop the torture of himself and Inga, a perhaps not-so-innocent woman who becomes involved in the plot – by fainting. In Otto Penzler’s The Great Detectives (1978), Hall described Quiller in typically tough and no-nonsense terms:

“In his forties, he is as fit as an alley cat and his whole makeup is tense, edgy and bitten-eared … he needs to live close to the crunch. Like bullfighters and racing drivers, he is a professional neurotic, half in love with death … Quiller is versed in psychology, sleep dynamics, the nervous system and its behaviour under stress.”

He is a loner, utterly distrustful of the motives of everyone he meets, often angry and resentful. He also refuses to carry a gun: “I have never carried a gun in peace-time. It is an impediment, physically and psychologically.” This could make for a not particularly likeable protagonist, and certainly his lack of humour can be somewhat distancing, but it does help make the character much more believable. He knows he is both good at his job but seen as expendable by his masters, thrown into a situation as any other tool to do a job, without any sentiment attached to it. His position is nicely explained in a late exchange with Pol, the local control in Berlin – it’s so good in fact that when playwright Harold Pinter came to to write the screenplay for the excellent film adaptation, which considerably simplified the story once it turned the hero into an American far too young to have fought Nazis in the war (George Segal, in fine dyspeptic form, was only 31 at the time), he kept this exchange virtually intact:

“There are two opposing armies drawn up on the field, each ready to launch the big attack. But there is a heavy fog and they can’t sight each other. You are in the gap between them. You can see us but so far you can’t see them. Your mission is to get near enough to see them, and signal their position to us, giving us the advantage. That is where you are Quiller. In the gap.”

When this was first published, no less an author(ity) than John Dickson Carr proclaimed it to be, “… one of the best spy novels I’ve ever read”. How well does it stand up today? Well, the intensity of the writing is still extremely suspenseful and the sometimes strong language is certainly up-to-date. As noted above, there is occasionally something slightly remote about our hero that won’t please every reader. Indeed Quiller’s cold and seemingly detached point of view, often referring to his own body with something approaching contempt as ‘the organism’, could make for a needless cold-blooded entertainment; but ultimately this is a taut and well executed spy story that successfully berths itself somewhere between the high octane thrills of Ian Fleming and the more introverted Whitehall skullduggery more commonly associated with Deighton and le Carre at the time. This may not be the very best of the series – personally I would have to say that I prefer The Tango Briefing (1973) in particular – but this an exciting and well told story and an excellent start to a very long-lived sequence of novels.

In total there would be nineteen volumes in the series – considerably more than say those featuring James Bond, le Carre’s George Smiley or Len Deighton’s later Bernie Sampson novels or his earlier works featuring an anonymous operative named ‘Harry Palmer’ in the movies. In the late 80s the series started being rebranded by its publishers and from the 11th book onwards all the titles would feature the word ‘Quiller’. In sequence the Quiller novels were as follows:

1. The Berlin Memorandum (1965, US as ‘The Quiller Memorandum’)
2. The 9th Directive (1966)
3. The Striker Portfolio (1968)
4. The Warsaw Document (1971)
5. The Tango Briefing (1973)
6. The Mandarin Cypher (1975)
7. The Kobra Manifesto (1976)
8. The Sinkiang Executive (1978)
9. The Scorpion Signal (1979)
10. The Pekin Target (1981, US as ‘The Peking Target’, 1982)
11. Northlight (1985, US as ‘Quiller’)
12. Quiller’s Run (1988)
13. Quiller KGB (1989)
14. Quiller Barracuda (1990)
15. Quiller Bamboo (1991)
16. Quiller Solitaire (1992)
17. Quiller Meridian (1993)
18. Quiller Salamander (1994)
19. Quiller Balalaika (1996)

For more information about the Quiller novels, visit the official website: www.quiller.net/

For a more general look at Elleston Trevor’s life and work, there is a very comprehensive article by Petri Liukkonen to be found at: www.kirjasto.sci.fi/etrevor.htm. For further details about Trevor, visit his page at the site of his literary agency at: www.spectrumliteraryagency.com/trevor.htm

***** (4 fedora tips out of 5)