Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (100 page)

His first success as ‘Louis L’Amour’ was
Hondo
(1953, as it was eventually titled) which was adapted into a big-budget movie starring John Wayne. Wayne, in fact, liked the short story on which the novelisation was based (‘The Gift of Cochise’) so much he bought it for his own production company. It is the only role in his long career in which Wayne plays a ‘half-breed’ – part-white, brought up by Indians, and discriminated against by both races. The novel, which routinely features in ‘best ever Western’ polls, sold an estimated 2 million copies by the time of L’Amour’s death. On the strength of this success, he signed a contract with Bantam Books, by which he would supply three titles a year. In 1956 he married a TV actress (she had earlier appeared in
Gunsmoke
), Katherine Adams, twenty-six years his junior and the couple had two children – Beau (1961) and Angelique (1964).

The early 1960s was a period in which Westerns were popular on TV and in film, and L’Amour, financially secure, took up residence with his family in a Beverly Hills mansion. He was now the mogul of Western writers. He had published his first ‘Sackett’ novel,
The Daybreakers
, in 1960. Initially featuring two brothers, Tyrel and Orrin, it extended into a long saga, comprising seventeen volumes, concluding with
Jubal Sackett
(1985). Bantam claimed to have sold over 30 million copies of the series. The decade marked the highpoint of L’Amour’s creativity: in 1960 he produced what many consider his best novel,
Flint
(ageing gunman returns to the West to die in peace, but he can’t. John Wayne picked up the theme in his last film role,
The Shootist
, in 1976). In 1963 L’Amour’s epic
How the West was Won
was adapted into a five-part mini-series and a big-screen film. Some forty of his titles were filmed in all and his later career was garlanded with awards and decorations: a ‘Golden Spur’ from the Western Writers of America in 1969, a Congressional (National) Gold Medal in 1983 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan (a great fan) in 1984, a posthumous Ph.D. from Bowling Green University (the home of popular fiction studies) in 1988. He died of lung cancer – a
non-smoker, he presumably contracted the disease as a miner in his ‘yondering’ years.

Our greatest thriller writer.
Graham Greene

Eric Ambler was the son of Lancashire parents both of whom had been puppeteers and music-hall performers, under the stage name ‘The What Nots’. They specialised in ‘living marionettes’, i.e. real character dolls (precursors of
Spitting Image
), but didn’t make the big time. Eric was born and brought up working-class – but decent – in London. There was, however, a jailbird Uncle Frank in his life. The First World War necessarily meant an austere lifestyle, but pulp fiction was one affordable pastime. As a schoolboy Eric devoured the ‘Nelson Lee’ Library (a series based on a schoolmaster who is also a private detective, aided by a juvenile Watson, his pupil ‘Nipper’). He was also devoted to John Buchan’s ‘Hannay’ and E. W. Hornung’s ‘Raffles’ stories and the sub-Zendaish romances which were then the rage. He lost any religious belief early in life: ‘Supernatural Christianity is false,’ he determined, ‘prayer is useless.’

An unusually clever lad, he won a scholarship at sixteen to attend Northampton Engineering College, Islington, but dropped out to do odd-job work around the time of the 1926 General Strike – an event which he records as politicising him. By the early 1930s, after some desultory attempts at higher education, Ambler was settled in an advertising agency, writing copy: ‘a deeply dishonest business – learning how to arrange half-truths so they didn’t look like half-truths.’ He particularly recalls a jingle for a chocolate laxative, Ex-Lax, and the famous Horlicks bedtime drink ‘night starvation’ campaign. In 1929 he got a married lady pregnant and had to borrow 16 guineas (doctors never dealt in pounds) from a friendly uncle for a criminal abortion. But he was good at his job, and earned enough to travel in Europe without any avuncular help.

He was constitutionally footloose and dated his inception into writing as 1934 when, on holiday in Marseilles, he lost all his travel money playing poker-dice with a barman. He retreated to his hotel room, with only Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man
to read and fantasised about murdering barmen. The following year he published his first Ruritanian thriller,
The Dark Frontier
, with Hodder and Stoughton, a firm with a traditional line in thrillers. Crude as the plotwork is, the scenario is strikingly prophetic. A gang of Balkan Fascists develops an atom bomb (this is 1935, remember) and blackmails the free world with it. Ambler had steeped himself in the work of novelists, like Somerset Maugham and Compton Mackenzie, who had firsthand knowledge of MI6 and the result was
Uncommon Danger
(1937), a spy thriller with a Levantine setting. It was filmed in 1943 as
Background to Danger
, directed by Raoul Walsh, starring George Raft.
Epitaph for a Spy
(1938) followed and was serialised in the
Daily Express
, earning Ambler a six-book contract from Hodder. He was, he said, never sure whether he was writing thrillers ‘or parodies of thrillers’ – he settled for the definition ‘good trash’.

In the late 1930s Ambler was often in Paris where he met his first wife, the American fashion correspondent, Louise Crombie. They married in the year everything changed, 1939. In the same year, on the eve of the Second World War, he published
The Mask of Dimitrios
, reckoned to be the best of Ambler’s works. It was filmed in 1944 with rather more ‘B-movie clichés’ than the author liked. Book and film have an elaborate flashback structure – fashionable in the 1940s – reconstructing, as his corpse (is it, though?) lies in the morgue, the elusive character of Dimitrios Makropoulos – murderer, assassin, spy, drug-trafficker – in his murky career from Smyrna to Paris. The narrator, Latimer, concludes:

But it was useless to try to explain him in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town.

Ambler had been disillusioned, like other previously left-leaning literary people, by the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, and was now less radical and more straightforwardly patriotic in his views (although he would vote for Attlee, not Churchill, in 1945). Given his American connections, not least his wife and the thousands Hollywood was paying him, he could, like Aldous Huxley or Christopher Isherwood, have gone to America. He chose to stay and face the music: ‘I don’t think I believe in democracy,’ he once said, ‘except in wartime.’

While awaiting call-up – thirty-year-olds not being in immediate demand – he wrote
Journey into Fear
(1940), a story of international intrigue and arms smuggling, set in Turkey. The novel was filmed in 1942, starring a comically unhappy
Orson Welles. By now Ambler’s fiction had fallen into its groove: all his plots used a device lifted from Anthony Hope’s
The Prisoner of Zenda
– an essentially apolitical Englishman is caught up in the intrigues of Middle European politics, high finance and espionage; only narrowly escaping with his life before returning to the safety (and moral decencies) of England.

Ambler entered the armed forces as a private soldier. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery, before being transferred to the army cinematographic unit. Here he worked with a number of the country’s leading film-makers, Thorold Dickinson and Carol Reed notably, producing material for the War Department to uplift the morale of the fighting man. Wars are won by lenses, as well as bullets. He later worked alongside US film director John Huston covering the Allies’ Italian campaign, ending the war a full colonel and director of the army film unit. He had also earned, from his country’s principal ally, an American Bronze Star. Ambler had a good war and one which pointed the way to a decent post-war career, writing for movies. ‘The script’, he believed, ‘is the heart of a film.’ And he was one of the greatest scriptwriters around. He worked with David Lean (unhappily), and had an unexpected hit with the Ealing Studios adaptation of Arnold Bennett’s Black Country comedy,
The Card
, in 1952, a novel he had loved since childhood. Although he did not much care for what Hollywood did to his own novels – Jean Negulesco’s
The Mask of Dimitrios
(1944) made him physically sick – he was internationally known and could write his own ticket in the film world. But, as the 1940s ended, he had not written an original book for some ten years. ‘In the army’, he realised, ‘I had lost the habit of a concentrated and solitary writing routine.’

Ambler returned to authorship under a pseudonym, ‘Eliot Reed’, and with a collaborator, Charles Rodda. His career as a thriller writer under his own name was relaunched with
Judgement on Deltchev
(1951), a Cold War spy story with an against-the-grain (for the time) pro-Soviet slant. He also wrote screenplays for Nicholas Monsarrat’s
The Cruel Sea
(1953) and
A Night To Remember
(1958), the first and better
Titanic
movie – two high-points of British post-war film. Both celebrate English sangfroid in the face of hardship and disaster. The instincts of the wartime propagandist were ineradicable. He adapted his by now venerable international intrigue formula for the Cold War with thrillers such as
The Intercom Conspiracy
(1969);
The Levanter
(1972), a title which doomed the novel’s sales prospects; and
The Care of Time
(1981), his seventeenth novel. But by this point his real money came from screenplays – as much as $1,500 a week when he was under contract in Hollywood (roughly what the average British worker was earning a year).

Ambler divorced his first wife in 1958 and moved with his second (Joan Mary Harrison, a film and television producer, and a former assistant to Alfred Hitchcock)
to Switzerland, to protect his dollars from the English taxman and enjoy spending them. He had done his bit for his country – and more. He remained domiciled in Switzerland for sixteen years, returning when Mrs Thatcher’s reforms made England again hospitable to the super-rich like himself. An OBE in 1981 may have eased his way back. He died in London. Towards the end of his life he wrote an elegant memoir, with the punning gravestone title:
Here Lies Eric Ambler
.

I never found a place where I even began to fit.

An African-American writer of crime thrillers, notable for their Harlem setting and crazed comedy, Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in a middle-class home, the family later settling in Cleveland, Ohio. His father was a college teacher of trade skills – something which followers of Booker T. Washington fondly believed would raise the black race in America. The family broke up during his childhood – largely, as Himes later claimed, on the grounds of his mother being so much lighter-skinned than her husband that she could pass for white ‘and believed she should’. Thereafter Chester’s adolescence and early adult life was troubled, as he bounced between the race barriers in America. According to his autobiography, while working as a bus boy (i.e. waiter’s assistant) in a fashionable hotel in Cleveland, he attempted suicide by throwing himself down a lift shaft, after being snubbed sexually by two white girls. He spent a year or so at Ohio State University, before being expelled for what is vaguely described a ‘prank’. He confesses using drugs at this period, and met his first wife at an opium party.

Himes began to write while serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence in the Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery, in 1928. The brutal ‘third degree’ inflicted on him by white detectives to extract his ‘confession’, scarred him for life. Some of his early stories appeared in
Esquire
with his prison number as their byline. Himes’s start in literature coincided with widespread liberal anger in the US as a result of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’ case (1931–7) in which nine black men were falsely accused of raping a white woman. It led, after Supreme Court intervention, to the first faltering steps towards civil rights reforms thirty years later.

Himes was paroled in 1936. On his release, the Grand Old Man of black American writing, Langston Hughes, took an interest in him. He married Jean Johnson in 1936, did a couple of years with the Federal Writers Project, and moved on to Los Angeles in the early 1940s. There he picked up work in the film industry and published his first novels, notably the
roman à thèse, If He Hollers Let Him Go
(1945). Set in the LA factories (where, with white folks in khaki, immigrant blacks could at last find blue-collar work), the novel’s barbed title signals Himes’s willingness to confront the ‘race theme’ head on. He was in LA at the period of the Zoot Suit race riots, in 1943 and politically aligned himself with the NAACP and the American left. He hollered – but to little effect. With the Cold War, Himes had little expectation that ‘niggers’ like him would ever be let go. There was also, he recalls in his autobiography, an ugly break-up with the white woman he was currently dating, in which he came perilously close to killing her. It would have meant the electric chair.