Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Three)

 

“Betrayal takes two, who did it to who?” That line of Richard Hell’s has been buzzing round my brain since reading the books in Len Deighton’s superb spy trilogy, Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match, in rapid succession at the very start of this year. The series was written and based in the early-to-mid-1980s Cold War-era, featuring intelligence officer Bernard Samson. This is the first in a trio of trilogies featuring Bernard: is there a word for that? Not that I know of. Ennealogy doesn’t quite cover it. Words are funny things, aren’t they? You can feel lost without a book, and you can lose yourself in a book. This particular trilogy is perfect for getting lost in.

In the opening book in the series Bernard is 40-ish. His wife Fiona is from a moneyed background, is highly educated, and has a senior position in the Intelligence service: there are echoes of this in Edward Wilson’s excellent Catesby series of books, I suspect not coincidentally. Bernard drinks and smokes more than he should, wears sheepskin car coats, old, rumpled suits, drives a souped-up Rover 3500 reluctantly, and is I guess deliberately nondescript. He has thick-rimmed glasses, but is very definitely not Harry Palmer, though there are similarities. Bernard’s a cynic but sensitive, and he is not a ladies’ man. He is insubordinate, rude, sarcastic, and prickly. According to his wife, Bernard is tough and brutal, but he knows his Gogol and likes Mozart. I rather like him.

He was pretty much born into the Intelligence Service. His father ran the Berlin Station after WW2. Samson Senior was a self-made man, an autodidact who ended up as a Colonel. While stationed in Berlin, he unusually took his family out there, and his son Bernard grew up as a “tough little Berlin street kid.” Bernard’s childhood Jewish friend Werner Volkmann figures strongly in the trilogy, and their relationship is a special one. Bernard’s a lifer in the Secret Service, having been recruited after leaving school at 16 for his linguistic skills. He is therefore the polar opposite of the Oxbridge recruits the Service is rife with. Part of the fun of the books is Bernard, with a chip on his shoulder, indulging in class warfare, if only in his own mind.

It’s odd how he seems old and embittered. I guess we don’t think of 40 as old now. Attitudes and lifestyles have changed considerably since the book was written, and this can be seen in the description of one of his bosses, Bret Rensselaer: “Like most Americans Bret was concerned with his weight, his health and his clothes.” Would that be true now? In contrast, the public-school types in the Service wore expensive clothes “with a careful scruffiness that was a vital part of their snobbery. A real English gentleman never tries: that was the article of faith.” There is a lot to unravel there: “What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?”

At the end of the first book, it is revealed that Fiona, Bernard’s wife, has been a mole, spying for the Soviet Union, and she defects in the nick of time. This is not the only Cold War trilogy about betrayal, but then this is not an either / or situation. We are lucky to have had both Le Carré and Deighton. This particular trilogy is meticulously plotted, and the small core cast allows for character development, which Deighton does magnificently.

He is brilliant on the tedium of being a spy and the office politics, with all the posturing and machinations that involves. Bernard, a former field agent, is now middle-management, approaching a senior position, reporting to his incompetent but ambitious, dilettante department head Dickie Cruyer, who when we meet him is fussing with a valuable Spode creamer in the shape of a cow (which makes me think of P.G. Wodehouse and The Code of the Woosters, coincidentally or not).

The fascination with Cold War fiction endures: look at the new titles in the thriller section of your local library or bookshop, and you will see what I mean. And it’s not just fiction: an old compañero Jack Boulter has just had published his book First Class Comrades: The Stasi in the Cold War, 1945-1961. I remember Jack way back when as a very sharp and shrewd individual, so this should be a great read. Is the continued interest in the Cold War to do with a sense that things were so much simpler then, or has time rewritten every line, as the song goes? Maybe. And yet there are great modern spy thrillers, and I say that as only an occasional dabbler. For example, Charles Beaumont’s A Spy Alone is a wonderful ‘state of the nation’ novel, and I have finally caught up with Oliver Harris’ Elliott Kane espionage novels. That guy can certainly write, and he really can weave a story.

Oddly, I think it’s Harris that inadvertently piqued my interest in this Deighton trilogy, as I had just read A Season in Exile, the latest in his other series, featuring the maverick Met detective Nick Belsey, where to escape his London problems he has skedaddled to Mexico, and landed himself in more trouble: “Don’t cry for me Mexico”.

Mexico Set starts with Bernard Samson and Dickie Cruyer in Mexico, acting on reports that the Berlin-based KGB major Erich Stinnes is out there. And so, begins an elaborate mating ritual, with the defection of Stinnes as the endgame. He is in a sense Bernard’s mirror image: without the right credentials and connections, he is repeatedly passed over for promotion, and being grudgeful he harbours a disdain for deskbound management who have not faced danger in the field. In a way, this is the central theme of the trilogy: Bernard, Stinnes, Fiona: is anyone what they seem? Is defection betrayal? Who’s betrayed who?

I am admittedly late to these Bernard Samson books, but I was at least aware of them. I certainly was not aware this initial trilogy had been filmed as the Game Set and Match TV series in 1988 for Granada, expensively put-together as 13 hour-long episodes. I have no recollection at all of this being on TV, nor can I recall seeing anyone mention it since then. But this is the modern world, so it was not too difficult to get to see it. And I am glad I did so, as it is magnificent.

The late Ian Holm was cast as Bernard Samson, and my initial reaction was that he’s too short and too old (hark who’s talking!), but I like to think he got the role because of his great performance as Desmond Cussen in Mike Newell’s Dance With A Stranger, with its spot-on Shelagh Delaney script. Holm plays Samson as a brooding and taciturn soul, a very deadpan character. Throughout the series he performs a masterclass of significant looks and meaningful silences. He also comes across as quite nihilistic, someone simply doing his job who at one point declares: “I don’t believe in anything.”

In a way it works with Ian Holm being older, as his Bernard seems to be a burnt-out case: “the price you pay for knowing too many secrets.” In the TV series, more so than in the books, he is haunted by past experiences in Eastern Europe, and dreads going back into the field, which makes him more human. The series also does an excellent job of emphasising the mundanity of a spy’s life, or as Bernard describes it: “Sitting in a car waiting for something to go wrong.”

There are plenty of fantastic performances in the TV series, individually and collectively. Michael Culver is marvellous as the abominable Dickie Cruyer, and his demonstration of the tai chi short form in his Speedos on a beach in Mexico is priceless. Interestingly, it is a very balanced Anglo-German cast, and Fassbinder-favourite Gottfried John as Erich Stinnes and Michael Degen as Werner Volkmann are exceptional, and the pair of them have quite incredibly eloquent eyebrows.

The TV series is surprisingly faithful to the novels. The adaptation was by John Howlett, which is a rather wonderful example of sweet serendipity, as in late 2023 and very early 2024 I was rather obsessed by John’s writing. The name may be familiar as he wrote (with David Sherwin) the original story that Lindsay Anderson’s If … was based on, and he also wrote a biography of James Dean which came out in 1975. I remember seeing it around, but didn’t read it back then, though I bet Morrissey had a copy, and I half expected to see it in Mick Jones’ Rock & Roll Public Library. It is still in circulation in an updated edition, and is actually a rather beautiful book, and a lovely companion to Phil Ochs’ ‘Jim Dean of Indiana’.

Anyway, I discovered John Howlett’s novels at a very tough time, and they helped me get through it. When times are bad, I tend to turn to literature about the French Resistance and Italian Partisans in WW2, stories which give me strength to draw upon. They also provide a good reality check, and put personal problems in perspective. There is also that element of what would we do in those exceptional circumstances.

So, initially, I stumbled across John’s 2012 novel, First Snow of Winter, which he self-published when in his 70s. It is part of a six-book series, the chronicles of Harry and Annie Caldwell and their family and friends, from WW1 onwards. I read it rapidly and moved straight onto its companion volume Last Snow of Winter. The two books are set among the undercover warfare and escape networks of WW2 in France, Italy and Switzerland, and the incredible bravery detailed is truly humbling.

The final book in the series, Alp Grüm, covers in whirlwind fashion the post-WW2 years through to the turn of the Millennium, with a special emphasis partly on Allende’s Chile and in particular John’s beloved Italy, making it a kind of companion volume to Sarah Winman’s exceptional  Still Life with Italy as a place of exile or sanctuary. Howlett details an Italy infected by an unholy alliance involving U.S. money, CIA interference, old fascist officials, former Nazis, Vatican power, and the Mafia: what chance do you have against all that? Post-WW2 Italian politics has never been one of my strong points, so I found the book fascinating.

I was particularly struck by a passage about the CIA in the early-1970s and “the attempted vilification of the new Italian Communist leader, Enrico Berlinguer – a man thought of (dangerously for the Americans) as a popular moderate now putting forward the theory of ‘Historic Compromise’ by way of shared government with the Christian Democrats, in an attempt to secure political stability for Italy at a time when many Italians were anticipating a military coup d’état similar to that in Chile.” But, as Howlett writes, Berlinguer “was a difficult man to slur in any way, an ‘aristocrat’ in every good sense, a practicing Catholic, and openly critical of Moscow’s violent suppression of protest in Czechoslovakia.”

Coincidentally or not, I have recently fallen in love with the incredibly poignant soundtrack (which I stumbled across, or was guided to) by Iosonouncane for the 2024 feature film The Great Ambition or Berlinguer: La Grande Ambizione. Almost too perfectly, the Berlinguer film was screened in London at the BFI while I was writing this, on the closing night of its Italian cinema season, and it really is an incredibly beautiful film, very moving and thought-provoking. Its director Andrea Segre was interviewed onstage at the end, and he was wonderfully enthusiastic about the film and the way it connects with life today.

Again, coincidentally or not, the film’s London screening was on the anniversary of the kidnapping of Christian Democrat statesman Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade: this and the subsequent murder of Moro a few months later in May 1978, John Howlett wrote, “proved a conclusive success for the Americans: Berlinguer’s Communists never did enter government.”

It’s not all grim reality in Alp Grüm, though. Frank Caldwell’s operatic interlude in the Italian Communist enclave Emilia-Romagna is comedy gold, and I believe originally formed part of a film script John Howlett had written. Incidentally, in his TV adaptation of Game Set and Match Amanda Donohoe is excellent as Gloria Cook, a smart young administrative assistant within the Intelligence Service, who has an office romance with Bernard. In one scene she gives Bernard a copy of a book, The Christmas Spy, as a fun present. This was undoubtedly an in-joke, as it’s a 1975 novel by John Howlett, which I recently read and liked very much.

Being an incurable ‘addict of connectivity’ (©Jeremy Cooper), I was overjoyed to find an overlap with the final two volumes of the Cardwell Chronicles, as the central character in The Christmas Spy is Guiseppe Giugiardini, aka Joe-Guiseppe, aka Railway Joe, aka Morgan Hunter-Brown of Interpol. Joe-Guiseppe as a very young man was a member of the SOE with Harry Caldwell and could later be found fighting with the Partisans in the Italian hills. He later became best friends with Harry’s son Frank.

Another name he had was Soho Joe, in honour of being born there in an Italian grocery, where he was raised on Lorca. Towards the end of Alp Grüm Joe and Frank return to England after a long absence, partly for the funeral of someone they loved very much: “Then with apologies Frank scooted off in a taxi to Clapham, leaving Joe alone to revisit his youth along Old Compton Street, and remember his father’s Italian grocer’s shop where all the anti-fascists of London used to meet during the 1920s and 1930s; where later the miners, the artisans, the writers, the dock workers – those who had survived – gathered once or twice a year in the kitchen behind the shop, to sing the songs of the Spanish Republic and the XVth International Brigade. The shop had long disappeared, but of that life and of those people Joe remained intensely proud.”

In The Christmas Spy Joe is described as having “eyes the colour of barbed wire” and an air of “empty English ennui … inhibited, constipated, introspective, fatuously arrogant.” He is a strange, solitary figure, haunted by ghosts from his past, perpetually persona non grata in various countries, permanently out-of-luck when it comes to love, and a man who has many enemies with long memories and little forgiveness.

I still have the first two volumes in the Harry and Annie series to read, covering WW1 and beyond (including the Caldwells in Mexico, for a while, aptly), but did recently read When War Came Again featuring the Caldwell family’s part in the Spanish Civil War, as part of the International Brigades, and what came next in Europe as a result of the Fascist victory. Strikingly John describes the Civil War as “not an argument between the left and right. This is the fight between right and wrong” and as a “battle between darkness and light.” All of which resonates strongly today.

The Harry and Annie books make up an incredible series, albeit one that is difficult to read, for you’ll frequently have tears in your eyes if you are a sentimental old Hector like me. It is a huge undertaking, and must have taken years to research, plot and write. Each title is a doorstop, as well as being informative and entertaining, inspirational and wonderfully idealistic. The series is a valuable legacy to leave behind you, and we could learn a lot from it.

At one point Harry Caldwell describes himself as incurably angry, and fittingly John Howlett himself seems to have been splenetic to the bitter end. He certainly did not go gently but was still raging as his light faded. Coinciding with his death in 2019, he and his family published possibly the angriest book I have ever read. It’s called Occupation: Democrat. Destination: Hell, a title inspired by an entry the poet Shelley left in a Swiss hotel register. The book itself is “dedicated to all those who have suffered, suffer and will continue to suffer the effects of neo-liberal greed, austerity and inhumanity.”

It is a clever book, as it is not written from the perspective of a ranting Socialist Worker-wielding hardline militant Marxist. Instead, this is the slow-burning rage of someone who’s part of a dying breed. The hero of the book is Tom Forsyth, “a humane, old fashioned one-nation, pro-Europe Tory”, once a charismatic and well-connected party activist, and a decent man who ran an engineering firm, which had been in the family for three generations, in Darlington, until it closed in 2018 having been refused credit by a high-street bank that itself had been bailed-out by taxpayers.

Subsequently Tom lost his home and lost his way, ending up on the streets of London: “His mind carefully avoiding any memory that could provoke the stabbing breathless pain that was the happy past.” When he runs into an old acquaintance, they ask why he didn’t ask for help, and he very accurately replies: “It’s not always easy to do that”.

On the streets he strikes up an unlikely friendship with Ruby, a tough Cockney lady who has been homeless for many years and is coming to the end of her life. A complex character, and very much a firebrand of the left, she helps Tom realise that “he has to get rid of this lot before they destroy our entire history.” This is the period when the “extraordinarily unintelligent and incompetent Cabinet” was floundering, trying to secure a Brexit deal at any cost, hanging on desperately. Tom, encouraged by the dying Ruby, sets out to find a way to destroy the flimsy Tory majority and so trigger an election, in theory saving an England “set to become not only the stupidest nation on earth but also the most Philistine.” 

While this is happening, as part of a grotesquely moving funeral Tom arranges for his friend, her beloved ‘Ruby Tuesday’ is played in the chapel. There is another moving moment in Alp Grüm, where at the funeral in the Swiss mountains for Annie Caldwell, so many people’s Mother Courage, a group of young relations “were singing a song that had been popular a few years back: ‘Thank you for the days, they sang, those endless days, those sacred days you gave me’.” Looking up that reference again for this, I noticed that among those in attendance was a certain elderly Colonel Samson, who had arrived with Joe-Guiseppe, the pair having met on the train.

Colonel Samson was the former commanding officer of Joe and of Frank Caldwell in the Intelligence Service and features quite prominently in the chaotic times in the immediate aftermath of WW2 as the head of Berlin Station, where he was a pillar of decency. Belatedly, he is I realised our Bernard Samson’s father, and in John Howlett’s Alp Grüm there is even a mention of baby Bernard playing with Frank’s child when he and his wife Lisl went to dine at the Samsons’ in Berlin. Are there other instances where someone’s fictional characters have popped-up in another person’s books? There must be.

More about Samson Senior can be found in Len Deighton’s Winter, a kind of prequel to or scene-setter for the Game Set & Match trilogy, which was published in 1987. It is set mainly in Berlin, chronicling the extended Winter family’s lives and times, from the end of the 19^th Century through to the time of the Nuremburg trials, via the two World Wars. It is an epic work, and very much a glorious old-school family saga, with Deighton stepping outside his comfort zone. There is an element of espionage, nevertheless. This is not (simply) Deighton writing as a military historian or as someone who has known and loved Germany and Austria so well. It is utterly engrossing, and very moving. And I guess it makes the Bernard Samson series a decalogy, rather than an ennealogy.

Where Winter links to the Game Set and Match trilogy is in providing valuable background on the families of Bernard Samson, Werner Volkmann, and tangentially Bret Rensselaer. There is also the back story of Lisl Hennig, or Tante Lisl, in whose hotel Bernard and Werner pretty much grew up. It is this unchanging, unfashionable residence that Bernard always returns to when in Berlin. There needs to be a special mention here, also, for Eva Ebner’s haunting performance as Lisl in the Game Set and Match TV adaptation.

“Hope for the best; plan for the worst. That’s all we can do, isn’t it?” says the doomed romantic and senior Secret Intelligence Service figure Alan ‘Boy’ Piper at one point in Winter, which is unnervingly a maxim that was pinned up on my wall in the darkest days of apprehension. Piper, the archetypal stiff-upper-lip English gentleman, went one better, and had a niece embroider the text on a sampler which he kept on his office wall.

More generally, Winter has so many unsettling reverberations travelling through time and, for example, it makes one shudder seeing a senior Nazi talking about making Germany great again. Reading it in early 2025 Winter seems by far the best thing Deighton wrote, and yet I had no idea about its existence until recently, which is another example of finding things at the right time. Mind you, there are still plenty of Len Deighton works I haven’t read. It is a source of consolation that there are so many great books left to read.