To respond to the threat of a grenade-burst the sub-conscious has to evaluate a mass of data: the angle of the thrower’s arm, which governs the time-period from the beginning to the end of the throw; the size (and thus the weight) of the grenade – data which affects the time taken to throw it (the heavier the slower) and the degree of explosive force; the distance of the thrower to the intended point of impact; the height of the thrower above that point (gravity aiding momentum); and all factors pertaining, which include mass, inertia, trajectory, air resistance, so forth. (p.152)
Everything that irritated me about the first Quiller novel is here in the second. There’s a big stake – a Royal is making a state visit to Thailand and security have received realistic information that there’ll be an assassination attempt – but not much actually happens – Quiller argues with the supervisor who called him over from France to manage the project and spends a lot of time, nearly two weeks in fact, driving round Bangkok hoping to catch a glimpse of the assassin. Seriously. Just as in The Quiller Memorandum there is a steady, constant amount of ‘tagging’ or following, and counter-tagging, of driving round following other cars or being followed.
The tedium of the eventless plot is routinely interspersed with psychobabble masquerading as tradecraft and spy technique.
A simple rule of mnemonics is that if a face is to be remembered it must be forgotten in its absence. Attempted recall in the absence of the image is dangerously prone to distort it… Most instances of poor memory are examples of retroactive interference producing qualitative changes: the memory, goaded into conscious service, begins making things up. If left alone, the initial neural traces will remain absolutely clear, and will recognise the image immediately the next time it is seen – because no change has taken place. (p.34)
Psychoanalysis is crossed with the shiny new world of computer science to lace the text with themes and threads which must have seemed achingly up-to-the-minute in 1966.
The Maltz system of psycho-cybernetics breaks new ground in that it likens the subconscious to a computer to which the forebrain submits problems for resolution. Some of its concepts derive from accepted disciplines including that of the sleep processes. (p.42)
And, just as there is a detailed but utterly detached, scientific paper-style account of being injected with truth serum in the first novel, so, here, there is a similarly super-detached account of being caught in an explosion.
Reaction time covers three phases: time required to sense the signal, to decide on the correct response, and to respond. Relevant factors: age, state of health, muscle-tone, fatigue, alcohol, caffeine, so forth. Greatest artificial influential factor: training (i.e. habit formation). (p.151)
Old tech
The entire plot turns out to be about this piece of cutting edge technology, known as a ‘laser’.
The project concerned a refinement of the Laser device (Light Amplification by Stimulate Emission of Radiation). This is an electro-magnetic oscillator producing light-waves massed into an ultra-narrow wave-length band and directed along a fixed path in a ray one million times brighter than is possible in any normal way. (p.121)
Trainspotting
The tough-minded and often angry first-person narrator is as humourlessly factual about his gadgets as about every single other aspect of his world.
They let me take my pick from what they had on the shelves and I came up with a compromise: a Pentax X-15 25 mm single reflex with a 135 mm lens that took a 2 Auto teleconverter and a stock adapter for my Jupiters. This 135 x 2 x 8 (lens plus converter plus field-glasses) gave a total focal length of 2160 mm and a magnification of X 16. (p.62)
Don’t worry, there’s plenty more.
All the Husqvarnas are beautiful but the finest they make is the 561. It is a .358 Magnum, centre-fire, with a three-shot magazine, 25½-inch barrel, hand-chequered walnut stock, corrugated butt-plate and sling swivels. The fore-end and pistol-grip are tipped with rosewood. The total weight is 7¾lbs and the beech-pressure is in the region of 20 tons p.s.i., giving a high muzzle-velocity and an almost flat trajectory with a 150-grain bullet. (p.72)
I think what I don’t like about the books (apart from the ludicrous plots which consist of lots of wandering round being tagged or ‘flushing’ your tags or tagging other people) is that the tone is so relentlessly lecturing, haranguing and expounding. If it’s not guns and cameras, it’s long humourless lectures about the forebrain and the unconscious, the stomach-mind versus the head-brain. How an agent should behave before, during and after an ‘overkill’ operation. What you should know about safe houses.
A safe-house is no ordinary place: it is a cornerstone of security and bad security can wreck a mission and kill you off. You’ve got Local Control if you’re lucky but you can’t always rely on getting there if the operation hots up and you’re jumping. A safe-house is a home and sometimes it’s the only place you can run to. We think of it as a shrine, sacrosanct. It’s really a bolt-hole. (p.117)
It is always left to the discretion of the intelligence director in the field whether a killing is reported or not. (p.148)
Got that at the back? There’ll be a test on Friday.
Sex
It’s a spy novel in the 1960s, so of course there’s a dolly bird (sorry, an operative working for Mil. 6 – note the cool way he doesn’t write MI6, no, Mil.6 is what real insiders call it). Turns out she’s been tasked with ‘tagging’ Quiller all along. She is unnerved by the execution which happens in the book and so they drive to a hotel room and mechanically undress with no words.
We had nothing to say to each other; it was now too urgent for that. In the glow from the bedside lamp she moved without awkwardness, revealing her lean body with feline arrogance until she was naked except for the wafer-flat ·22 that was holstered on the inside of her thigh. She unclipped it deftly and dropped it on to her clothes. (p.127)
Ambler, Innes and MacLean wisely have little or no sex in their novels. Len Deighton’s hero refers to it in an oblique and characteristically dry way. Hall’s touch is brutal and humourless and clumsy.
She cried out the first time, and afterwards the heat of her tears touched my hand. (p.128)
The first time, eh? Give her multiples, did you, Mr Big? The next morning she apologises for crying out her boyfriend’s name ‘in the moment of passion’. This made me smile, because it is such a cliché.
But I laughed out loud when she goes on to explain why: ‘At those times we… often say things. It was because you were so… magnificent. I forgot where I was, who you were.’ (p.130) So magnificent, eh? So magnificient he makes a girl forget who she is, where she is. Modest chap, this Quiller. In his mind, the only agent who can save the Royal, an expert at psychological control, a master of all known weapons, a demon between the sheets. —Presumably, this is all meant to be serious? It isn’t all a colossal satire?
Somewhat inevitably, it turns out her man was killed on their last assignment together and, well, she just had to get it out of her system… You know how women are.
Their moment of release past, the agents both dress and get on with the job of going off to ‘tag’ the bad guys, while trying to avoid getting too ‘tagged’ in return.
Oh and more lecturing.
The sole advantage of the spring-gun is silence. It is more silent than any powder-gun, however heavily baffled. At even medium range – six feet and over – it is inefficient it it has to fire through clothing. Even at four feet an overcoat will shield the body from most of the impact. The spring-gun can kill through light clothing at any range below two feet providing it can be aimed to strike at a vital organ without hitting bone. As a useful weapon it has value only if its limitations are known and allowed for. (p.137)
The stupid plan
This continual lecturing, the complete absence of humour, the tedious expounding of Spy Basics, might all be bearable if the plot had pace or intelligence. But the first half of the book describes how Quiller is brought to Bangkok by a controller who tells him the mission is to protect a visiting Royal from a well-known Asian assassin named Kuo. Quiller tags Kuo all over Bangkok until, abruptly, he disappears – then spends over ten days driving round town trying to find him again. He figures out it will be a hit with a long-range rifle and finds the location, a tower in a Buddhist temple close to the route of the Royal car procession.
BUT, despite knowing the identity of the assassin and the location, Quiller and his Control agree a ludicrous plan which is to wait till the last possible moment, until the Royal car is coming down the parade and into view, and until the assassin is lifting his rifle to take aim, and only then giving Quiller a few seconds to shoot the assassin – from the window of a room Quiller has found in a derelict building across the way.
This seems like a bad plan. I explained it to my son and he said, how stupid. Really – you’re not going to tell MI6 (sorry, Mil.6), the local police or military or intelligence – you are going to make saving the life of a senior Royal entirely dependent on your own shooting ability and leave it to the last possible moment? Not have him arrested? Not bump him off earlier in the day? Leave everything to the last possible moment?
The absurdity of this approach closely echoes the absurdity of The Quiller Memorandum wherein Quiller lets himself be picked up twice by the Nazi gang and then lets himself be ‘tagged’ all round town before managing to slip away to make a phone call to his local Control. That’s the plot. How Quiller slips his tail to make one phone call to the office.
I wasn’t in the least bit surprised when the ‘plan’ goes horribly wrong. Who would have predicted that? Despite having cocked things up really badly, the narrator doesn’t leave off his barrage of hectoring, except it is now like trying to keep a straight face in front of a teacher who has hilariously screwed up in front of the whole class. Now you can’t take anything he says seriously, and the more deadly earnest and man-of-the-world he tries to be, the more ludicrous a figure he cuts.
There had been only a slight phuttt from the gun. Its barrel had swung up a degree to meet my hand and the dart had ripped flesh away. A trained athlete reacts as fast as a cat, and muscle-obedience to the motor nerves is almost instantaneous. (p.138)
Ah so.
He held a ·38 automatic and it had a silencer. ‘Silencer’ is a misnomer. No gun can be made silent. A full baffle will absorb a lot of noise but it will also cost a lot of impact and can make the difference between a kill and a maiming wound – and a man with a maiming wound can run and can even fight and can even close in before the second shot comes. This was a half-baffle designed to cut down the noise without costing too much fire-power. (p.140)
In many places this ‘novel’ approaches as close to a textbook or manual as a work of fiction can. And all the people in it are faultless professionals who have all been to the same finishing schools for spies and secret agents.
His hand moved fractionally into the killing-attitude, pressing the gun against his side to cushion the recoil. (p.142)
The Chinese hadn’t moved. Blood came from the hole in his neck. She had shot for the third vertebra in the cervical region, smashing it and severing the nerves. It was a surgically accurate shot, consideration having been taken of the limitations of so small a gun. (p.146)
They were working as a perfectly disciplined cell controlled by a professional of talent. (p.166)
So it’s odd, eerie, then, that the overwhelming impression the narrator makes is of an idiot, permanently angry, always shouting at his calm boss, arrogantly declaring he has the only plan to protect the visiting Royal – a plan which completely misfires allowing the Royal to be kidnapped by the gang – an idiot, and who then deliberately lets himself be cornered in a warehouse, hand grenaded, poisoned by cyanide and then has his car shot away from under him.
There are countless pages of manual-speak but next to no intelligence. Instead the crucial breakthroughs in the plot are complete accidents – he happens to see Kuo going into the temple which will be used for the hit; and he happens to glimpse out the corner of his eye a Rolls Royce with the Union Jack being flown incorrectly on it and so suspects it is being used to smuggle the Royal out of Bangkok.
The narrator goes to great lengths to show off his expertise, but comes across as a technocrat buffoon. On page 174 he accuses himself of gross stupidity and it is hard to disagree.
Related links
Fontana paperback edition of The 9th Directive, tie-in with the BBC TV series
The Quiller novels
- 1965 – The Berlin Memorandum Quiller tangles with a group of neo-Nazis led by Oktober, trying to get details of their organisation til the capture and interrogate him to get the details of his organisation.
- 1966 – The 9th Directive Quiller is in Bangkok where he uncovers a plot to assassinate ‘a leading Royal’, which he incompetently fails to realise is really a disguised plot to kidnap him. After much shooting and a high speed road chase the Royal is exchanged for an enemy spy on the Chinese border.
- 1968 – The Striker Portfolio Quiller investigates the unexplained crashes of NATO’s latest high speed jet and uncovers a sinister conspiracy.
Books & Boots 