Man on the Run

I have a good public character and a respectable position in society. I live by myself, and for years past have given no one any account of my movements; I am quick-witted and ready for nearly anything; I think I have little personal or social conscience. Above all, I am a murderer . . .

The voice is that of Desmond Thane, hero of John Mair’s only novel and one of the most extravagantly larger-than-life fictional characters I have ever come across. Though he displays an unappealing mixture of some of the worst human characteristics – vanity, arrogance, self-centredness, cowardice and mendacity to name but a few – Mair succeeds in making Desmond intensely likeable, and one can’t help rooting for him and hoping he will survive each fresh predicament that confronts him. In 1990, I watched a drama series on the BBC called Never Come Back. It was a superb Second World War thriller with a fine cast including James Fox, Nathaniel Parker and Martin Clunes. Then about a year later, while browsing in my local bookshop, I pulled a volume entitled Never Come Back by John Mair off the shelf and realized that the television series must have been an adaptation of it. The book had obviously been on display in the shop window for a long time because its front cover was badly faded. I almost put it back on the shelf. Thank goodness I didn’t, because Never Come Back (1941) has since become one of my favourite novels. I find it difficult to put into words exactly what it was that captivated me when I first read it all those years ago, but I do remember experiencing a delicious shiver of anticipation as I read the opening lines. Some writers are like that: you just feel very comfortable with them right from the start and sense that, in their hands, satisfaction is virtually guaranteed. So it was with me and John Mair. I have reread Never Come Back many times since and always find something new in it. Like The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh, it is one of my ‘desert island’ books, one I tend to return to when I’m feeling low and in need of a literary pick-me-up, and it never fails. Set in London during the Phoney War, Never Come Back opens with the account of an unsatisfactory romantic liaison between Desmond, a journalist, and the cold, dark and mysterious Anna Raven. Desmond picks Anna up in the Café Royal, is initially intrigued by her and quickly becomes besotted. To his fury, though, Anna does not fully reciprocate his advances, so he arranges a meeting at her flat. This culminates in a violent quarrel when he attempts to read her diary; there is a struggle, and Desmond strangles Anna. Though frightened at the thought of what might happen to him now, Desmond is far from contrite: ‘He felt no sort of conscience or pity for Anna . . . death had killed his interest in her.’ So he pockets Anna’s diary and removes himself from the scene. Three days later Desmond is apprehended by two men who tell him they are police officers. They bundle him into a car and drive him to a large, isolated house in Hertfordshire. Here Desmond is detained for several days before being alternately questioned by a man named Foster and tortured by his two accomplice kidnappers. Needless to say, they have nothing to do with the Metropolitan Police. Foster is a representative of ‘The International Opposition’, an organization described as being ‘a Federal Union of the dispossessed’ who ‘represent all the great ideological minorities of Europe’ currently out of power. The aim of the IO is to bring about ‘simultaneous coups in all the capitals that shall give us power – and revenge – in our separate countries’. Anna, it turns out, was an IO agent and her diary is actually a ‘Contact List’ – a coded notebook containing details of British members of IO. To the IO committee its loss is an emergency, and its recovery of the utmost importance. Threaded through the narrative, the deliberations of this committee as they oversee the hunt for the Contact List are some of the most entertaining committee meeting minutes one is ever likely to read. Helped by his ignorance of the true nature of the diary and unaware that Anna was a spy, Desmond holds out under torture. Then, by showing a light in his cell during the blackout, he succeeds in attracting the attention of the local bobby. When the policeman knocks on the front door, Desmond manages to make his escape. What follows, as he is pursued across southern England by Foster and his cohorts, is a sort of compendium of well-worn thriller scen-arios. There is a gunfight among some railway trucks; an exciting moonlit chase on foot; a cold-blooded murder; experiments in code- breaking; a phoney doctor; and some slow-witted heavies. But despite the familiarity of the components there is nothing stale or second- hand in the telling, which creates an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia. In his introduction to one edition of the novel, the crime writer Julian Symons observed that Mair ‘had obviously read Eric Ambler, who seems responsible for a touch here or there’. Desmond certainly has a good deal in common with the protagonists of early man-on-the-run Ambler thrillers such as Uncommon Danger and Journey into Fear: innocent professional men who find themselves caught up in life-threatening political machinations. Admittedly Desmond can-not be described as ‘innocent’, but the rest of the comparison rings true. And there are echoes too of novels like The Thirty-Nine Steps, early Graham Greene ‘entertainments’ such as A Gun for Sale and Geoffrey Household’s classic novel of pursuit Rogue Male, which was published just a year before Mair began writing Never Come Back. The pace does slacken somewhat about two-thirds of the way through, but the story gains fresh momentum when Foster recaptures his escaped prisoner. As a reward for disclosing the whereabouts of the Contact List, Desmond is sentenced to death – but of course I’m not about to reveal what happens next. I will only say that the ingenious and unexpected ending is at once believable and chilling. John Mair has been so utterly forgotten since his early death in 1942 that he doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page, let alone an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He was born in 1913, attended Westminster School and University College, London, and then became a literary journalist, reviewing books for periodicals including the New Statesman and working part-time for John o’London’s Weekly. He was a gambler, something of a dandy and an engaging conversationalist – as indeed is Desmond Thane, who is to some extent a self-portrait. Called up in the early stages of the Second World War, Mair joined the RAF as a Pilot Officer and was killed in a plane crash off the Yorkshire coast before he had turned 30. He wrote one other book, The Fourth Forger (1938), but Never Come Back is his great achievement. So what makes the novel so special, and why does it still deserve to be read, more than three-quarters of a century after it was first published? Well, it turns some earlier thriller conventions on their heads – particularly in its introduction of an amoral anti-hero – and it is written with tremendous self-confidence and brio. Never Come Back is a wonderful mélange of thrills, comedy, wartime atmosphere and sparkling dialogue, and if you have not read it I would urge you to do so at the earliest opportunity. I don’t think you will regret it.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 58 © Derek Collett 2018