Author: s1115092

John le Carré and the British Television Spy Drama

The events of spyweek might be over for another year, but we’ve still plenty of spy-news to share with you with this week’s guest blogger Joseph Oldham.

Having spoken at Spyweek2017, Joseph Oldham is author of Paranoid Visions. This week, he is sharing his insights into John Le Carre on the big screen.

 

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John le Carré and the British Television Spy Drama

These days fans of John le Carré are spoiled for televised adaptations of their favourite author’s work.  Production company The Ink Factory is following up on the popular success of The Night Manager (2016), with new dramatisations of his Cold War classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)[1] and his exploration of Arab-Israeli conflict, The Little Drummer Girl (1983)[2].  As with The Night Manager, the BBC is on board as UK broadcaster for both, connecting the new cycle of adaptations with a prestigious heritage – the in-house BBC adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982) starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley.  As the Telegraph review for The Night Manager commented, these ‘are still the espionage dramas against which all contenders must be measured’.[3]

(Edge of Darkness)

Le Carré’s relationship with television drama extends back further than is often realised and did not in fact begin with the BBC.  In 1966 Associated-Rediffusion adapted a little-known le Carré short story Dare I Weep, Dare I Mourn?[4] into a little-remembered television film.[5]  Set around the same hostile Iron Curtain landscape as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, this depicted a West German businessman’s reluctant involvement in a perilous scheme to smuggle his estranged, abusive father out of the GDR.  In the lead role of Otto Hoffman was James Mason, who also starred in the same year’s The Deadly Affair (1966), a film adaptation of le Carré’s debut novel Call for the Dead (1961).

Subsequently le Carré made a unique excursion into original television writing with The End of the Line, a Pinter-esque play about a confrontation between a fugitive atomic spy and a mysterious clergyman set entirely within a railway carriage.  This tense psychological drama anticipated the focus on long conversations and interrogations that would become a celebrated feature of the Tinker Tailor adaptation a decade later.  Le Carré initially submitted this play to the BBC where it was rejected, to be produced instead by Thames Television in 1970.  Two decades later, the author loosely reworked it into an interrogation/confession sequence in The Secret Pilgrim (1990).

The BBC’s aversion to this play may have stemmed from the wider reputation of the spy drama in the 1960s.  On television this genre was then dominated by glossy, formulaic and escapist ITV adventure series such as The Avengers (1961-69) and The Saint (1962-69).  At a time when the Reithian spirit of its public service remit was a stronger force, the BBC may have been reluctant to embrace a genre that, in the shadow of James Bond, had developed such strongly commercial associations.  Yet from the turn of the 1970s a new wave of more grounded, psychological and anti-heroic ITV spy series such as Callan (1967-72) and The Sandbaggers (1978-80) helped to create a climate in which le Carré’s work would become more congruent.


(The Sandbaggers)

The BBC’s growing interest in le Carré was illustrated when he became the subject of an episode of The Lively Arts[6] to coincide with publication of The Honourable Schoolboy (1977).  This included a short dramatised excerpt of Call for the Dead in which Arthur Lowe became the first actor to portray Smiley on television.  Le Carré recently recalled this during last year’s Royal Festival Hall appearance, An Evening with George Smiley, indicating that the sequence also served as a screen test for the BBC adaptation of Tinker Tailor, then in early stages of pre-production.  The author described how, despite a creditable performance, Lowe’s association with Dad’s Army (1968-77) made his interpretation impossible to take seriously.  Nonetheless, an exchange of letters between le Carré and Guinness held in the BBC Written Archives Centre indicate that Lowe had made enough of an impression to give Guinness serious concerns about taking the part.

As I have explored in my book Paranoid Visions: Spies, Conspiracies and the Secret State, the adaptation of Tinker Tailor would have seismic effects on the British television spy drama.  This was the moment when initiative in this genre largely shifted from ITV to the BBC, and when a closer connection was forged to trends in the spy novel.  It was the beginning of a new landscape in which espionage could increasingly be the topic of ‘serious’ prestige drama with complex narratives developed over multiple episodes.  This not only led to new spy novel adaptations (including Smiley’s People and le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, 1987) but also influenced developments in original drama.  Troy Kennedy Martin, writer of the acclaimed six-part nuclear thriller Edge of Darkness (1985), credited Tinker Tailor with ushering in a landscape in which such a production was viable.

Following a Thames adaptation of A Murder of Quality (1991), Le Carré’s work disappeared from television for 25 years.  His influence was felt in the intervening years, however, most obviously in the BBC procedural spy series Spooks (2002-11).  Stephen Garrett, who initiated this series, was an avowed le Carré fan who used the author’s work as the basis for a new twist on the precinct drama.[7]  Le Carré was unimpressed, however, particularly at the series’ incorporation of action and glamour, and dismissed Spooks as ‘crap’.[8]  This did not prevent Garrett from becoming Executive Producer on The Night Manager which, with its lavish international location filming, would ultimately prove a far more glamorised production.

The new le Carré adaptations are in fact just part of a drift back to the more ‘novelistic’ style of British spy drama, composed of extended but ultimately contained miniseries.  This includes both adaptations, such as of William Boyd’s Restless (2012) and Charles Cumming’s A Foreign Country (forthcoming),[9] and original works of a similar scope such as Hugo Blick’s The Honourable Woman (2014) and Tim Rob Smith’s London Spy (2015).  In contrast, there has been little evidence of attempts to create a new long-running spy drama to succeed Spooks or to rival the US series Homeland (2011-).  The influence of le Carré on the British television spy drama may therefore stand as even more formidable force than at any previous time.

(Spooks)

 

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38630220

[2] https://inkfactoryfilms.com/projects/the-little-drummer-girl/

[3] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/02/19/the-night-manager-episode-1-event-drama-of-the-highest-calibre/

[4] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dare-Weep-Mourn-Singles-Classic-ebook/dp/B01IFH6UW6/

[5] https://player.bfi.org.uk/rentals/film/watch-dare-i-weep-dare-i-mourn-1966-online

[6] http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/1bdb93f8b8c847e4bcee57b0f013b7bc

[7] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/stephen-garrett-spooks-producer-on-his-obsession-with-spy-stories-and-working-with-john-le-carr-a6872226.html

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/16/le-carre-spy-spooks

[9] https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/thomas-kell-writer-thrilled-at-deal-with-colin-firth-for-night-managerstyle-tv-series-a3253396.html

Spies vs Detectives

As we enter our final event of Spyweek2018, Professor Penny Fielding of The University of Edinburgh gives us an insight into Spies vs Detectives
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As we head into our final Spy Week event, I’m going to introduce the topic of spies vs detectives by looking at two novels published within a couple of years of each other. But first, a few rough ideas about the differences between these genres.

The detective novel starts with a traumatic event (typically a murder). Then we follow a sequence of clues, getting some right and some wrong, until the detective tells us what really happened.  Detectives are usually pretty recognisable characters—even iconic—and they tend to be associated with specific places: Holmes and London, Rebus and Edinburgh.  When we finish a detective story, we know where it happened, how it happened, and why it happened.  Espionage novels take place in much less familiar settings as spies roam rootlessly around the world.  And when a spy novel ends, we may know that some things have changed, but we are often left with the lingering sense that the secret world will close over the heads of the protagonists and that nothing is really ‘solved’.

To glimpse how this might work in practice, we can look at these differences in two novels that have a strangely entangled publishing history.

In 1932 Graham Green published a novel called Stamboul Train. The US title was Orient Express and in 1934 it was made into a film with this title. Also in 1934 Agatha Christie published a novel with UK title Murder on the Orient Express but, in order to distinguish it from Greene’s book, the US title was Murder on the Calais Coach. Confused?  Let’s separate the two novels by the way they fall into the detection/espionage modes.

The first edition cover of Christie’s novel added some words to the title: ‘Poirot solves a Murder on the Orient Express’. So we know from the start that there’s a murder, that it will be solved, and that the solving will be done by an iconic detective.  In fact, this novel has one of the most memorable solutions of all crime novels—they ALL did it!  The novel ends with Poirot giving us the story of what really happened and proclaiming: ‘having laid my solution before you, I retire from the case.’  The story is over, the case is closed, and Poirot moves on.

Despite the journey through Europe, Murder on the Orient Express centres on one location, the train. There are a set number of characters in a confined space and we are rightly confident that the culprit will be found among them.

Although Stamboul Train takes the same geographical route, it’s a very different kind of novel.  Drenched in secrecy and subterfuge, the novel has no single, recognisable spy figure other than the underground communist Richard Czinner, heading home on a forged passport. Where the passengers in Murder on the Orient Express have a single, secret purpose, Greene’s novel throws together characters who are united only by chance.   Christie cares about her characters as they fit into the murder plot.  Greene’s passengers reflect a pre-war Europe without a clear identity and where political thought has been replaced by empty clichés, show trials or sensational reporting in the press.

As the train steams through all the disintegrated empires of Europe—Napoleonic, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman–we feel we’re in a Europe in which history is not fixed.  And in place of a detective to make sense of it all, we have only Czinner, the character who should link us to European political history, and who forms the main spy thriller element of the story, but who cannot articulate why he is there: ‘”If I could sleep”, he thought with longing, “I could remember more clearly the things that have to be remembered.”’

Of course not all novels fall as easily into such categories.  Denise Mina and Mick Herron, who are appearing at our spies vs detectives event, certainly don’t.  But to see how authors break down expectations, it’s interesting to start by thinking what those generic expectations are.

August Thomas

Edinburgh University graduate and debut novelist August Thomas kick-starts Spyweek 2018 with an insight into the impact spyweek has had on her career.

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This is a story about spies, Edinburgh – and homework.

In September 2014, I got a homework assignment that would change my life.  And I almost refused to do it.

It was my first semester in the University of Edinburgh’s Creative Writing MSc. programme.  My professor challenged each student in the Creative Writing seminar to write an “Alphabet Story” – a 26-sentence story in which each sentence begins with a successive letter of the alphabet.

I was skeptical.

An alphabet story?  Bit silly, no?  Cheesy, too. Definitely.  Excuses bubbled up.  Feels so awkward to write that way.  Good stories need freedom, don’t they?  However…the homework was due.  I needed an idea!

My mind wandered back to Turkey.  I’d studied Turkish since I was 16. I’d lived in Istanbul and Ankara.  Only a few months ago, I’d reluctantly turned down a summer internship at the U.S. Embassy in Turkey.  What if I hadn’t?

I imagined an embassy party.  A young intern sees something she was never supposed to see.  And then a bomb explodes…

My alphabet story was dreadful.  (I definitely cheated on the letter ‘X’.)  But the idea caught fire.   Soon, I had the first chapter of a spy thriller.  It was completely unlike anything I’d ever written before: rocket-paced, contemporary, laced with humor.  The other writers in my workshop wanted to know what happened next.

That spring, at Spy Week, I attended a fascinating discussion with the bestselling spy novelist Charles Cumming – who, I was surprised to learn, had graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in English Literature.  That summer, I brought a signed paperback of one of his books with me to Istanbul, as I raced ahead with my own spy thriller.

After graduation, I kept working on my book.  By spring, when I returned to Edinburgh for a visit, I had sent my agent the full manuscript, now titled Liar’s Candle.

While I waited anxiously for my agent’s comments, I enjoyed the delightful distraction of Spy Week 2016.  Listening to Dame Stella Rimington talk about her series of Liz Carlyle spy novels was inspiring.  Here was a real, live female spy novelist, the first I’d ever heard of – and she was another University of Edinburgh English Literature graduate! I just hoped being Director General of MI5 wasn’t a mandatory prerequisite.

Almost exactly two years after that fateful homework assignment, Liar’s Candle sold.  Simon & Schuster is publishing it in the UK on May 17.  One funny trace of the original alphabet story remains: a major character’s name still begins with a ‘Z’.

I’m proud – and a little startled — to belong to the third generation of spy novelists to come out of the University of Edinburgh English department.  Maybe Spy Week 2018 will inspire a new crop.

Who knew Edinburgh was such a hotbed of (fictional) espionage?

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August Thomas’ debut novel Liar’s Candle is a thrilling spy novel set in contemporary Turkey and will be released in the UK May 17th 2018. Pre-orders are currently available online!

http://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Liars-Candle/August-Thomas/9781471166457