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The Man from Department K

In 1965, Goldfinger was in the cinemas and James Bond was everywhere. I was only 10 but I thought myself as grown-up as anybody and pleaded with my parents to let me have Bond books at an age when probably the only Ian Fleming I should have been reading was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. My mother certainly had misgivings, but my parents believed in letting their children read what they wanted to. They had already given me Marchette Chute’s Stories from Shakespeare, and there is certainly as much sex and violence in Shakespeare (and in the Greek myths – another favourite) as there is in James Bond.

It wasn’t until the early Seventies, however, that I really began to explore the spy story. By then secret agents were no longer so fashionable. Ian Fleming had been dead for some years, and John le Carré and Len Deighton were on leave from the spy story, though both returned to it before long. But I didn’t care about fashion. In my later school years I read every spy novel I could find – Fleming again and again, Ambler, Deighton, le Carré, Greene, Victor Canning and John Gardner. Buchan I didn’t read until later. I had an idea that he was hopelessly old-fashioned and that his heroes preferred cold baths to women.

Yet despite this obsessive interest, I might never have discovered James Munro’s John Craig thrillers had I not seen the film of the last of them, The Innocent Bystanders, in early 1973. Christina Foyle remarked at the time of Craig’s first appearance in The Man Who Sold Death (1964) that his creator wrote like a cross between Ian Fleming and John le Carré, but although the book and its successors were well-received, Munro never found the same fame. The film sank without trace, despite an excellent cast headed by Stanley Baker, but it did inspire me to seek out the Craig books. I loved them.

Craig, the remorselessly tough yet thoughtful agent for MI6’s Department K, was no less

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In 1965, Goldfinger was in the cinemas and James Bond was everywhere. I was only 10 but I thought myself as grown-up as anybody and pleaded with my parents to let me have Bond books at an age when probably the only Ian Fleming I should have been reading was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. My mother certainly had misgivings, but my parents believed in letting their children read what they wanted to. They had already given me Marchette Chute’s Stories from Shakespeare, and there is certainly as much sex and violence in Shakespeare (and in the Greek myths – another favourite) as there is in James Bond.

It wasn’t until the early Seventies, however, that I really began to explore the spy story. By then secret agents were no longer so fashionable. Ian Fleming had been dead for some years, and John le Carré and Len Deighton were on leave from the spy story, though both returned to it before long. But I didn’t care about fashion. In my later school years I read every spy novel I could find – Fleming again and again, Ambler, Deighton, le Carré, Greene, Victor Canning and John Gardner. Buchan I didn’t read until later. I had an idea that he was hopelessly old-fashioned and that his heroes preferred cold baths to women. Yet despite this obsessive interest, I might never have discovered James Munro’s John Craig thrillers had I not seen the film of the last of them, The Innocent Bystanders, in early 1973. Christina Foyle remarked at the time of Craig’s first appearance in The Man Who Sold Death (1964) that his creator wrote like a cross between Ian Fleming and John le Carré, but although the book and its successors were well-received, Munro never found the same fame. The film sank without trace, despite an excellent cast headed by Stanley Baker, but it did inspire me to seek out the Craig books. I loved them. Craig, the remorselessly tough yet thoughtful agent for MI6’s Department K, was no less cool and attractive to women than Bond and never at a loss for the right word. I had no idea who his creator was until I discovered that James Munro was a pen name for James Mitchell, a novelist and also a television playwright and scriptwriter for The Avengers during its earliest years. After Craig, he had created another secret agent, Callan, for the television series of the same name. Mitchell had been a teacher and actor before becoming a writer. Working in the theatre and writing for television left their marks. Mitchell’s dialogue is crisp and deft, and his books as tightly plotted as a good script. Craig is not an easy man to fathom. Having just reread all four of the novels in which he features, I am still not sure about him. He is brutal to his adversaries yet kind and tender with women. He admits to being addicted to danger but dislikes killing, at which he is expert. With the kind of people he comes up against, it is invariably kill or be killed. Munro’s villains are evil men, ready to slaughter any number of innocents to achieve their ends. Craig is often subjected to brutal tortures of a kind that makes one think there is something to be said for a dull, humdrum life after all. The theme of the innocent bystander who gets entangled in the dirty world of espionage runs through all the Craig thrillers. Among these innocents are the women who fall in love with Craig, and old war comrades whose loyalty to Craig sometimes costs them their lives. Craig’s war in Greece, Sicily and Tangier was his making, freeing him from a wretched background of orphanages and foster homes. He discovered a talent for action and a knack for languages, becoming fluent in French, Italian and Greek, proficient in Arabic and German. Rather like Patrick Leigh Fermor, he was accepted by the Greeks as one of them, and various Greeks whose lives he saved appear in the books. One is badly wounded in Die Rich, Die Happy (1965), another dies while helping Craig in The Innocent Bystanders= (1969). Craig doesn’t always succeed in saving the innocent. Craig’s conscience is often troubled, but Loomis, Department K’s head, has no misgivings. People have been known to think Craig a nice chap but never Loomis, ‘a gross monster of a man with a face the colour of an angry sunset, pale manic eyes, red hair dusted with white, like sun on a wheatfield . . . a charging rhinoceros with a high IQ’. Loomis can say curious things, as when he tells Craig, accurately enough: ‘You’re going to hate me. Everybody rejects me eventually. Psychologically I’m a mess.’ One can’t imagine Bond’s M going on in this Woody Allenish way but Loomis, like everybody else in Department K, is obliged to see the eminent psychiatrist Sir Matthew Chinn from time to time. The title of The Man Who Sold Death refers not to its villain, St Briac, a right-wing French colonel who wants to involve the British in a crusade against the Algerian rebels at the time of the Algerian War, but to Craig himself. When we first encounter him he has been living for years in his native Tyneside, growing rich and respectable as the manager of a shipping company. ‘A pirate with a taste for book-keeping’ is how he describes himself. He is married to completely the wrong woman, wears a bowler hat and plays bridge and poker. All the while he is using the shipping line’s cover to run guns to the Algerian Arabs in revolt against the French colonial regime – something which puts him on the French colonels’ hit list. Craig knows he will probably have to defend himself one day. Already an expert shot from his war days, he regularly practises judo, in which he has a black belt. Then one day in April 1961 it all literally blows up. Craig is working in the garden when he hears an explosion. His sponger of a brother-in-law, wearing Craig’s tailored clothes and handmade shoes as usual, has just turned the ignition of Craig’s car, inadvertently setting off a bomb which smashes car, brother-in-law and Craig’s former life to bits. A flying brick sails into the house, hitting Craig’s wife on the head and sending her into a coma. She never emerges during the course of The Man Who Sold Death and we learn no more of her fate in the subsequent books. Then Loomis draws Craig into his net. A clever local policeman has put enough evidence together to deduce that Craig wasn’t the man in the car. Loomis sets his best man, Philip Grierson, on to the case. Grierson tracks Craig down to the flat of Tessa, a woman Craig has saved from a nightclub gangster and with whom he has fallen in love. Craig wants to settle down with Tessa, yet at the same time he is sure that neither of them will ever be safe so long as St Briac lives. Loomis wants St Briac eliminated because he has been setting up attacks on the Arabs and passing them off as the work of the British. Since it is in Craig’s own interest to dispose of St Briac, he agrees to do the job, but only as a one-off. ‘Now it was life he cared about, not death . . .’ Nevertheless Loomis succeeds in roping Craig in to work for him again at the beginning of the second book, Die Rich, Die Happy. St Briac is dead but two of his aides have got away. Just as James Bond was only granted three hours of married bliss, so Craig sees his hopes of life with Tessa destroyed. Tortured by his loss and by guilt, he flees to Greece where he settles down to drink himself into oblivion, only to be forcibly cured by Loomis who has another job for him, protecting a Greek shipping magnate with interests in Middle Eastern oil and his fragile wife. By the time of the third, The Money that Money Can’t Buy (1967), Sir Matthew Chinn is seriously worried about Craig. Formerly capable of love, he now feels affection only for his twelve-cylinder 4 1⁄2 litre Lamborghini. Sir Matthew says that Craig isn’t a psychopath yet but he is on the way. Craig denies he is crazy. ‘I just like my job,’ he says. ‘Maybe that’s crazy.’ Later he wonders ‘what criminal would behave as we do?’ The book pits Craig against a megalomaniac press baron out to create a war with Russia. He inflicts terrible torture on Craig, leaving him psychologically though not organically impotent, the worst fate that can happen to a man. Sure that Craig is finished but willing to give him one last chance, in The Innocent Bystander Loomis sets Craig on the trail of a Russian Jewish scientist who has escaped from the Gulag. In this last novel, it is a woman who restores Craig’s zest for life and also his humanity. Though James Munro wrote no more books about Craig, he is one of those characters who one feels must still be alive. I’d love to know what happened to him next and hope some secret file or other will one day be released. James Mitchell died on 15 September 2002. Since then his books, whether published under his own name or as James Munro or his earlier pseudonym of Patrick O. McGuire, have gone out of print. The early, pre-Munro books and those signed McGuire are difficult to find, but the Craig books are easily available and, for anyone who enjoys spy thrillers, well worth getting hold of.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 19 © David Platzer 2008


About the contributor

David Platzer is a freelance writer, journalist and occasional actor whose ambition it is to write a good adventure story of his own. He lives in France and his work has appeared in Apollo, The London Magazine and Undercover.

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