Ken Salikof on Helen MacInnes, Ian Fleming's Challenger

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Delighted to introduce novelist Ken Salikof, the author of the Jackie Kennedy Spy Novels: Paris to Die For and Spy in a Little Black Dress. Today he's writing about his muse, Helen MacInnes. She may not be as well-known as Ian Fleming or John Le Carre, but Ken feels she deserves to be. Let's see why.

KEN SALIKOF: When people ask me about the inspiration for my two Jackie Kennedy spy novels, Paris to Die For and Spy in a Little Black Dress, I always reply that I wanted them to read like a novel by Helen MacInnes. 

Helen who?

Well, quite simply put, from 1941 through 1984, the Scottish-American Helen MacInnes was the queen bee of the romantic spy novel. 

To put her career in context, the 1960s was probably the golden age of the spy novel.  And the three biggest spy novelists of that period were Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and John Le Carre, all Englishmen.  Fleming died in 1963 just as Deighton and Le Carre were coming on the scene.  But his James Bond novels continued to sell because of the growing success of the movie series starring Sean Connery as Bond, James Bond.  Le Carre tilled a more literary patch with his anti-Bond hero, George Smiley, while Deighton’s nameless hero (called Harry Palmer in the movies) was a Modish reflection of Swinging London.

            

The only female writer who could challenge this young Old Boys Club was Helen MacInnes.  By the sixties, when Le Carre and Deighton were cutting their teeth, she was into her third decade as a suspense novelist.  And would go strong for two decades more before death put a stop to her career in 1985 at age 78.  Like clockwork, she would produce a new novel every two years that would automatically appear on the New York Times Bestseller List.  Today, though, she is almost totally forgotten.  But thankfully, Titan Books has seen fit to rectify this omission by reprinting her work.

The wife of a classics scholar and MI6 agent, Helen MacInnes spent her whole literary career writing romantic spy novels.  They took place all over Europe, her stories set in colorful locations that added a touristy element to her narratives.   Taken altogether, her works are intelligently written, complexly plotted (with an overemphasis on coincidence to move the story along), and feature an astute take on foreign affairs.  

 For the most part, her protagonists — always men— are members of ordinary professions (scholar, economist, lawyer) who become accidentally involved in an espionage plot and find themselves navigating an ominous new geography of duplicity and danger with the hint of death around every shadowy corner.  And, of course, there is always a woman to help the hero through this maze of deceit.  The books followed a formula, but it was one that MacInnes shrewdly made work for her.

The sweet spot for Helen MacInnes’ writing career was the 1960s — the height of the Cold War —during which she produced what is arguably her best work.  The Venetian Affair (1963), The Double Image (1966) and The Salzburg Connection (1968) are all about the legacy of World War II and the lingering fallout from the Nazis’ failed attempt to conquer the world.  In these novels, World War II still casts a giant noirish shadow over the decades following the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945.  The first two novels take place in sunny locations—Venice, Paris and Mykonos—but there is a pervasive chill that blows through these stories, like the one that runs through the obviously more coldly climacteric Alpine setting of the third novel.

Surprisingly, for an author whose works were so popular and cinematic, only four movies were made from her books.  Her first two novels, Above Suspicion and Assignment in Brittany, both became feature films in 1943.  The former, about a honeymoon couple on a spying mission to Nazi Germany and starring the unusual combination of Fred McMurry and Joan Crawford, is almost in the same class as Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent and Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich.  

But the two movies made in the sixties are dreadful: The Venetian Affair (1967), an M-G-M programmer starring Robert Vaughn (then the star of the popular Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series, whose episodes, coincidentally, always had the word affair in the title) and The Salzburg Connection (1972), starring Barry Newman (fresh from the cult existential road trip/car race movie, Vanishing Point).

Read together, Helen MacInnes’ novels are nothing less than an impressionistic history of the second half of the 20^th century, from World War II, through the Cold War, to the first stirrings of Detente.  Her view of world affairs is not quite as dark as Le Carre’s, but is equally as well informed.  Her books are escapist literature at its best.  I envy the reader who has yet to discover her.


SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Dear Reds and lovely readers, have you ever read Helen MacInnes? 

What mystery writer do you love who you think has been overlooked by history?

             

Ken Salikof is the author of the Jackie Kennedy spy novels, Paris to Die For and Spy in a Little Black Dress, both published by Grand Central Publishing.  He is also the award-winning screenwriter of Ernest Hemingway Slept Here.  His reviews and articles about books and movie can be found in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and the New York Daily News.