This is a great action adventure yarn, starting slow and factual with the body of a dead junkie in a Notting Hill flophouse and building to exciting shoot-outs in the Iraqi desert before an explosive climax in the Mediterranean.
Bagley returns to third-person narrator which allows him to describe and portray a wider range of characters, especially as – like in High Citadel – they are split into two groups with two completely different narrative arcs.
Heroin
The story is about heroin and heroin smugglers. Interesting that in this same year, 1969, Alistair MacLean published his thriller about heroin smuggling, the gruesome Puppet On A Chain. A hot topic? Something in the air? Interesting to compare and contrast the two author’s approaches to the same issue. Bagley is characteristically more formal and factual, giving an interesting overview of the problem of heroin addiction in London, the work of a reforming doctor in the area, along with the basic facts about Papaver somniferum, the supply chains from the East, and the prices and profits to be made along the supply chains to America, before the novel metamorphoses into an action adventure in the deserts of Kurdistan, which is where our heroes find an enormous heroin factory.
MacLean’s feels like a thriller as it is full of violence and the threat of violence and the tension of impending violence from the very start. Bagley’s is an adventure as it takes well over 100 pages of careful factual build-up to get to any action scenes ie there isn’t the same sense of tension, of suppressed anxiety, as in the MacLean.
I am not James Bond
As in the previous novel, Bagley’s ‘I am not James Bond’ obsession recurs. Why does he feel the shadow of Commander Bond weighing so heavily on him?
‘You’ve picked the wrong man. I don’t think the man exists, anyway. You need a combination of St George and James Bond. I’m a doctor, not a gang-buster.’ (Ch 2, I)
Just after ten o’clock Warren strolled through the gambling rooms towards the bar…He watched the roulette for a moment and thought sardonically, If I were James Bond I’d be in there making a killing. (Ch 2, IV)
His decision was made and all qualms gone. He was tired of fighting the stupidity of the public, of which the queasiness of this narrow-gutted landlord was only a single example. If the only way to run his job was to turn into a synthetic James Bond, then a James Bond he’d be. (Ch 2, VI)
Mission impossible
Despite all his disclaimers the quiet studious doctor Nick Warren quite quickly morphs into the stock Bagley hero, clear-headed, unafraid, resourceful; taking the money of multi-millionaire movie mogul Sir Robert Hellier and assembling a scratch team of likely lads to help him tackle the heroin gangs at source.
- Dan Parker – ex-Royal Navy mechanic, good with torpedoes etc
- Andy Tozier – mercenary
- Mike Abbott – inquisitive Fleet Street journalist
- John Follett – Soho nightclub owner and con-man
The assembly of the team reminds me of the original TV series of Mission Impossible (1967-73) and way the plot depends on ‘stings’ or ‘cons’ just as much as violence is reminiscent of The A-Team (1983-87), though the premise of a small team tackling international criminal masterminds was a very common theme of popular TV series of the 1960s such as The Avengers (1961-69), Danger Man (1960-68), The Saint (1962-69), The Prisoner (1967-8), The Champions (1968-9), Department S (1969-70), The Persuaders (1971) and Jason King (1971-2). Even the title, the Spoilers fits in with these TV names.
And he may protest that he’s not James Bond but there’s a gorgeous nymphomaniac baddie, who likes to be wined and dined at the best hotels, there’s exotic locations in Iraq and the Lebanon, there’s clever gadgetry, with guns smuggled in as parts of Land Rovers, a torpedo being adjusted to travel super distances, a cutting-edge video recorder, there’s blowing up the baddy’s super-laboratory, escapes along secret underground passageways and improbable shoot-outs against the Kurdish militia, complete with panicked camels getting in everyone’s way.
Research
As usual with Bagley, the novel is larded with factual information and the reader is treated to lectures on:
- the Kurdish Question ie the Kurds’ attempts to gain their own homeland
- how to make dynamite out of fertiliser, charcoal etc
- how torpedoes work and can be re-engineered
- how to conceal weapon parts in a Land Rover
- heroin manufacturer and the economics of the dope business
- game theory
Metcalfe
Out of the blue the smuggler and baddy from Bagley’s first novel, The Golden Keel, Tom Metcalfe who chased our heroes across the Mediterranean in a high speed boat, sinks but ultimately saves them in that book – turns up here! He is running guns to the Kurdish peshmerga but rather improbably switches sides when he meets old friend and fellow mercenary Andy Tozier and learns that his deal was being funded by heroin which he, rather high-mindedly, objects to.
Related links
- The Spoilers (and Juggernaut) on Amazon
- The Spoilers Wikipedia article
- Desmond Bagley Wikipedia article
Cover of the 1973 Fontana paperback edition of The Spoilers
Bagley’s books
1963 The Golden Keel – South African boatbuilder Peter ‘Hal’ Halloran leads a motley crew to retrieve treasure hidden in the Italian mountains by partisans during WWII, planning to smuggle it out of Italy and back to SA as the golden keel of a boat he’s built for the purpose.
1965 High Citadel – Pilot Tim O’Hara leads the passengers of a charter flight crash-landed in the Andes in holding off attacking communists.
1966 Wyatt’s Hurricane – A motley crew of civilians led by meteorologist David Wyatt are caught up in a civil war on the fictional island of San Fernandes just as a hurricane strikes.
1967 Landslide – Tough Canadian geologist Bob Boyd nearly died in a car wreck ten years ago. Now he returns to the small town in British Columbia where it happened to uncover long-buried crimes and contemporary skulduggery.
1968 The Vivero Letter – ‘Grey’ accountant Jeremy Wheale leads an archaeology expedition to recover lost Mayan gold and ends up with more adventure than he bargained for as the Mafia try to muscle in.
1969 The Spoilers – Heroin specialist Nick Warren assembles a motley crew of specialists to help him break up a big drug-smuggling gang in Iraq.
1970 Running Blind – British secret agent Alan Stewart and girlfriend fend off KGB killers, CIA assassins and traitors on their own side while on the run across the bleak landscape of Iceland.
1971 The Freedom Trap – British agent Owen Stannard poses as a crook to get sent to prison and infiltrate The Scarperers, a gang which frees convicts from gaol but who turn out to be part of a spy network.
1973 The Tightrope Men – Advertising director Giles Denison goes to bed in London and wakes up in someone else’s body in Norway, having become a pawn in the complex plans of various espionage agencies to get their hands on vital secret weapon technology.
1975 The Snow Tiger – Ian Ballard is a key witness in the long formal Inquiry set up to investigate the massive avalanche which devastated the small New Zealand mining town of Hukahoronui.
1977 The Enemy – British Intelligence agent Malcolm Jaggard gets drawn personally and professionally into the secret past of industrialist George Ashton, amid Whitehall power games which climax in disaster at an experimental germ warfare station on an isolated Scottish island.
1978 Flyaway – Security consultant Max Stafford becomes mixed up in Paul Billson’s quixotic quest to find his father’s plane which crashed in the Sahara 40 years earlier, a quest involving extensive travel around North Africa with the charismatic American desert expert, Luke Byrne, before the secret is revealed.
1980 Bahama Crisis – Bahamas hotelier Tom Mangan copes with a series of disastrous misfortunes until he begins to realise they’re all part of a political plot to undermine the entire Bahamas tourist industry and ends up playing a key role in bringing the conspirators to justice.
1982 Windfall – Max Stafford, the protagonist of Bagley’s 1978 novel Flyaway, gets involved in a complex plot to redirect the fortune of a dead South African smuggler into a secret operation to arm groups planning to subvert Kenya, a plot complicated by the fact that an American security firm boss is simultaneously running his own scam to steal some of the fortune, and that one of the key conspirators is married to one of Stafford’s old flames.
1984 Night Of Error – Oceanographer Mike Trevelyan joins a boatload of old soldiers, a millionaire and his daughter to go looking for a treasure in rare minerals on the Pacific Ocean floor, a treasure two men have already died for – including Mike’s no-good brother – and which a rival group of baddies will stop at nothing to claim for themselves, all leading to a hair-raising climax as goodies and baddies are caught up in a huge underwater volcanic eruption.
1985 Juggernaut – Neil Mannix is the trouble shooter employed by British Electric to safeguard a vast transformer being carried on a huge flat-bed truck – the juggernaut of the title – across the (fictional) African country of Nyala towards the location of a flagship new power station, when a civil war breaks out and all hell breaks loose.
Books & Boots 