My favorite sequence of spy stories starts
at the beginning of the Second World War and was written by a British
Intelligence officer, Cyril Henry Coles (1899-1965) and Adelaide Frances Oke
Manning (1891-1959), who had worked in the War Office during the first war.
Together they invent the English spy Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon and follow
his career over the course of the next twenty years into the depth of the Cold
War. Tommy Hambledon appears in the first book, set during World War I, as a
public school teacher of modern languages who is in fact already working to
recruit students with language aptitude for the spy trade. Eventually he and
one of his students establish themselves in Cologne in the disguise of a Dutch
importer and his nephew, where they perform subtle and not-so-subtle acts of
sabotage, including the killing of a scientist whom they are convinced,
mistakenly, to be involved in growing cholera germs for infiltration into
English water supplies. Cyril Coles may possibly have had such an experience in
his time as a real spy.
Hambledon does not work from carefully prearranged plans,
but encourages his protégés to wait for something to suggest itself and to take
advantage of any fortunate circumstance. Near the end of the war, Hambledon’s
protégé escapes while Hambledon is apparently killed. But at the beginning of
the second book a man is found injured on the beach at Ostend, having lost his
memory. When, fifteen years later, he regains it, he finds himself to be not
Klaus Lehmann, as he has been calling himself, but Tommy Hambledon, and somehow
he has managed to become Chief of Police in Hitler’s Berlin, and is now
standing in front of the burning Reichstag. Once he has time to assess the
situation, he determines to do as much damage to Hitler’s Germany as he can,
and then to escape, if he can.
Hambledon despises complicated
plans; his advice is to wait for something to suggest itself, but once
something does, he reacts quickly with imagination and resourcefulness. He makes
it out of Germany alive, and during the remainder of the war his adventures
have mostly to do with foiling sabotage plots in the homeland. But he returns
to Germany once, when German agents in a resort town in Switzerland kidnap him,
having mistaken him for a chemist who is supposedly developing a powerful
explosive. Hambledon keeps up the deception, managing to get British
Intelligence to send him a real chemist to help him, and together they arrange
for some sabotage of their own. They escape through a careful manipulation of the
very efficiency of their German “hosts.”
Despite the grimness of the first
two books, a distinctive humor appears early in the Hambledon tales. The
authors are not above setting the denouement of a novel in an insane asylum to
amplify the confusion of discovery, resistance, and escape that characterizes
the blowing of Hambledon’s cover in these thrillers. The comedy is always
ramped up when Hambledon calls in two friends, Forgan and Campbell, to help
him. These two were adventurers in South America in their youth, now run a toy
model shop in the Clerkenwell Road, and have as their joint specialty
distraction and comic mayhem when the guns come out and the going gets tense.
In two of the wartime books,
Hambledon steps aside and merely aids the main character—in one case a wrongly
cashiered officer who mounts his own counterintelligence campaign against
German spies in England, and in another an escapee from Maidstone Jail who
adopts different identities and ends up befriending a German officer in an
English internment camp, through him infiltrates the German spy network in
England, and with Hambledon’s help finds the head of the network.
After the war Hambledon investigates
various plots to revive the Third Reich in the Netherlands, Spain, and Germany,
but soon his activities shift into Cold War mode. He and a CIA man foil
Russia’s attempts to install in Central America rockets with warheads—and the
book, Dangerous by Nature, was
published a dozen years before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and half a dozen years
before Maugham’s Our Man in Havana, a
similarly prescient spy novel. Twice Hambledon infiltrates Soviet territory for
rescues, once of a young Baltic prince and again of an Oxford undergraduate.
During these postwar years a number of books set in Europe allow Hambledon to
develop friendships with Antoine Letord of the French Sûreté, Heinrich
Spelmann, who begins as a Cologne private detective and in a later book has
become head of security in Bonn, and Lucius Lombard of the Austrian Special
Police. These become recurring characters when Hambledon is in their countries.
The services of Forgan and Campbell are employed by Tommy half a dozen times in
the books.
The
Tommy Hambledon Books:
Drink to Yesterday (1940)
Pray Silence (1940. US:
A Toast to Tomorrow)
They Tell No Tales (1941)
Without Lawful Authority (1943)
Green Hazard (1945)
The Fifth Man (1946)
Let the Tiger Die (1947)
A Brother for Hugh (1947. US: With Intent to Deceive)
Among Those Absent (1948)
Diamonds to Amsterdam (1949)
Not Negotiable (1949)
Dangerous by Nature (195)
Now or Never (1950)
Operation Manhunt (1953. US: Alias Uncle Hugo, 1952)
Night Train to Paris (1952)
A Knife for the Juggler (1953)
Not for Export
(1954. US: All That Glitters)
The Man in the Green Hat (1955)
The Basle Express (1956)
The Three Beans (1957.
US: Birdwatcher’s Quarry, 1956)
Death of an Ambassador (1957)
No Entry (1958)
Crime in Concrete
(1960. US: Concrete Crime)
Search for a Sultan (1960)
The House at Pluck’s Gutter (1963)
Adelaide Manning died in 1959, and
Coles finished the book they had been working on, Crime in Concrete (1960), by himself. He went on to write two more
Hambledon books with another collaborator, but the last three books lack the
combination of humor, imagination, and insouciant resourcefulness on
Hambledon’s part that were Manning and Coles’s trademark writing virtues as a
team. Together they take Tommy Hambledon from being a competent but youthful
wartime spy scarcely older than his public school pupils to being a grey-haired
veteran of the Cold War who still cannot avoid the occasional rough-and-tumble
in his adventures.
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