“Some Scheme Will Doubtless Present Itself”—the Tommy Hambledon Spy Novels

            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.