Helen MacInnes "Queen of spy writers"

Taking up a considerable place on my shelves are the novels of Helen MacInnes. Published between 1941 and 1984, her twenty-one thrillers saw her regularly in the best seller lists with four of them made into films. I started to collect the entire set in Fontana paperbacks from 1970 and bought the last one in 1984. Not long after, I bought all her works in first editions, all hardbacks with dust wrappers, bar one: The Unconquerable (1944), which was given a different title in the USA - While We Still Live. In the U.K., MacInnes was published firstly by George G. Harrap (six books) and then by Collins (who also published the Fontana paperbacks).

Born in Glasgow in 1907, MacInnes attended its High School for Girls, then took her M.A. at Glasgow University. She later reminisced of being very conscious of the Great War while growing up and, partly due the knowledge of German spies in Britain then, realised "that good intelligence could win or even prevent a war, and for that you need good agents who are willing to risk a great deal". Moving to University College, London (my alma mater), she met and married Gilbert Highet, a classics scholar. After a time in Oxford, they moved to the USA in 1937, when her husband began teaching at Columbia University, New York. They lived in America until their deaths - his in 1978 and hers in on 30 September 1985.

Her first four novels - Above Suspicion (1941), Assignment in Brittany (1942), The Unconquerable (1944) and Horizon (1945) - were written during, and about, the Second World War. When war broke out, her husband suggested she wrote a novel, partly based on their travels in Europe. "I sat down in the living room and started writing 'Above Suspicion'. I actually stopped writing for two or three weeks because I feared the whole free world was going to fall apart. Then I decided 'What the hell. If everything collapses I'll send the book out underground'."

The novel went straight on to the best-seller list. About a young Oxford Professor, Richard Myles, and his wife, Frances, who are enlisted by British Intelligence to find and link up with another agent, the book was so realistic that her husband's superiors (he was about to join Intelligence) suspected she must be an agent herself. Reviews were uniformly positive:

"Here 'John Buchan's' bow is bent, if not with all its strength, with all his charm." (Birmingham Post)

"This Scotswoman has the genuine Buchan touch without being a copyist..." (Belfast Telegraph)

"Excellent novel...It is Babes in the Wood versus Gestapo, but the Babes are intelligent babes."
(Cavalcade).

Re-reading  Above Suspicion, for the first time for 50 years, I can concur with the Buchan angle. The idea of being a Hunter and being Hunted runs through the book. (A later book, published in 1974, was entitled The Snare of the Hunter). Throughout her life and writing career, MacInnes balanced her staunch anti-totalitarian views (first against Nazi then Communist ideologies) with first-rate story-telling, narrative drive, realistic dialogue and general creative impulses. Only in her last books did the black become perhaps too pitch  black (USSR) against pristine white (USA and the UK). However, she did reflect the views of millions of others in the West.  Two of the other characters in her first novel, Thornley (British) and Van Cortlandt (American) concur: 'Now you and I don't hate the Nazis because they are German. We hate the Germans because they are Nazi'. The dust wrapper rear flap aptly extols the BBC - 'From London comes The Voice of Britain...The Voice of Freedom.'

Her second novel, Assignment in Brittany, I read immediately after the first. Again, it is a rattling good read!  It is the story of a British officer, who is parachuted into Occupied Brittany to report on the Nazi movements prior to a probable invasion of England. Cornishman Martin Hearne is a 'flesh and blood' character - level-headed, brave but cautious, but not super human. He is also the physical double for Bertrand Corlay, a Breton rescued from the Dunkirk evacuation. The twist is that, well into the book, it becomes obvious that Bertrand was a Fifth Columnist in Brittany for the Germans. As C. Day Lewis, in a penetrating contemporary review, remarked: 'Hearne is now in a doubly false position: those who should be his friends are hostile; those who ought to be his enemies (German troops, French collaborationists) are embarrassingly helpful'. MacInnes builds on a strong narrative - there is a particularly tense section set on Mont St Michel - realistic portraits of Corlay's mother, fiancé and servants; of an American escaping from Paris (the same Van Cortlandt we met in Above Suspicion); of other Bretons; of various Nazis - not at all 'paste board'. 'Hurrah for the master race, goose-stepping so neatly to the fulfilment of their conquering destiny.' There is also a burgeoning love story, which in no way detracts from, or feels bolted-on to, the story.

No wonder it was chosen as the Book Society's book of the Month in January-February 1942 and was also made into 1943 film, which bore some resemblance to the book. I am certainly looking forward to re-reading more of Helen MacInnes' novels this year.

UPDATE: the 1943 film of Above Suspicion, starring Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray arrived today - actually the DVD cover says Bajo Sospecha. However, the soundtrack is still in English or, rather, American. Joan Crawford was nothing like my idea, or the book's, of Frances Myles; Fred MacMurray was more akin the husband. Remarkably, the film followed the book's sequence pretty accurately and, allowing for pretty unreal backcloths, it told the story quite well. This time there was a good German (the marvellous Conrad Veidt) instead of the American Van Cortlandt, supporting the Myles, and the bad German (played by another compelling actor, Basil Rathbone). I enjoyed it, even though one has to accept that Americans won the war and any top billing.