II. BLACK MASKS
Read Part I here.
In my 2010 essay Bourne Yesterday, I looked at four novels that all featured secret agents suffering from amnesia caused by a blow to the head while undercover on a mission: Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice (1964), Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980), and two novels published in 1940, Faked Passports by Dennis Wheatley and Pray Silence by Manning Coles (the pseudonym of two authors). I concluded that there might have been an earlier source I’d missed:
‘Pray Silence and Faked Passports were published just six months apart, and even in the fast-moving publishing schedule of the war it seems unlikely that they influenced each other. It is more likely that some earlier source triggered the thought in the minds of Dennis Wheatley and ‘Manning Coles’ that led to both their novels featuring British secret agents losing their memory: perhaps an earlier novel (although I haven’t found any), or a news item about a soldier returning from war with amnesia, or something similar.’
In January 2021, I was contacted by Nicholas Shakespeare, who was researching his biography of Ian Fleming. I shared all the material I had written on Fleming with him, and we had some fascinating email exchanges as a result. In response to Bourne Yesterday, he pointed out one possible source I might have missed: Eric Ambler’s debut novel The Dark Frontier, published in 1936, which was a parody of the spy thriller genre. As Ian Fleming was a great admirer of Ambler’s work, it’s very plausible he would have read it. You can read Nicholas’ perceptive analysis of this in Chapter XLIV of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (Harvill Secker, 2023).
I’m going to take a different but hopefully complementary approach here. The Dark Frontier doesn’t get written about all that much: it is far from Ambler’s best and wasn’t even published in the United States until 1990. The Mask of Dimitrios and other novels receive most of the analysis – it is of course generally more interesting and fun to read about the best works of a writer. When The Dark Frontier has been written about, the focus has usually been on two elements of it: its surreal parodying of the thriller, and its use of a nuclear weapon as a threat before such a thing existed in the real world. But let’s ignore for the moment that it’s not his best work – it’s a fascinating one. As well as being Ambler’s debut, and a key work in the development of the spy thriller, it also reaches beyond the genre. So in this essay I’m going to look in closer detail at The Dark Frontier and its subsequent impact, and use it as a jumping-off point to travel around several lesser explored aspects of the thriller in the process. And, prompted by Nicholas pointing out how Fleming might have been directly influenced by this book, I think I have in turn discovered the work Ambler directly drew on to create his parody.
Let’s start with a brief overview of the scene before Ambler arrived on it. The British thriller emerged in the 1830s from the ‘penny bloods’, also known as ‘penny dreadfuls’. These cheaply produced pamphlets featured sensational stories that drew on a range of archetypes, myths, and history. The average British reader of the time would have been familiar with most of them: King Arthur, Robin Hood, the Borgias, Jack the Ripper, Blackbeard, Dick Turpin, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Robinson Crusoe, The Man in The Iron Mask, Joan of Arc, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, and so on.
All these and more were fodder for stories, either in straightforward adaptation or through combining elements of them into new characters and settings. So a penny dreadful villain might imitate the crimes of Jack the Ripper by stalking London at night, or be fascinated with the Borgias’ use of poisons, or both. A hero might assemble a group of like-minded gentlemen around him in the vein of the Knights of the Round Table. A vigilante might be pitched as a modern-day equivalent of Robin Hood.
The 1840s saw the arrival of the ‘yellow-backs’, cheaply bound mass-produced novels, and in the United States something very similar – ‘dime novels’ – appeared from the 1860s. Towards the end of the century, ‘the pulps’ emerged in the US, magazines printed on cheap wood pulp paper. In time, several new characters established themselves in the fictional pantheon: The Three Musketeers (1844), Sweeney Todd (1846), Long John Silver (1883), Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde (1886), Sherlock Holmes (1887), Sexton Blake (1893), Dracula (1897), Raffles (1898), Arsène Lupin (1905), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), Fu-Manchu (1912), Tarzan (1912), Zorro (1919), Hercule Poirot (1920), The Saint (1928), Biggles (1932).
Below the level of household names lay a range of lesser-known fictional characters, some of which had significant followings, several of which were recognisably in the same mould. One can see this in the list above: Sexton Blake was clearly derivative of Sherlock Holmes, and The Saint had much in common with Raffles. Writers were often not only unashamed of such derivation, but advertised it. Many readers of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) would have smiled at the scene in which Richard Hannay gives an innkeeper a lightly fictionalised version of his recent history and the man responds in whispered awe that it is ‘all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle’. Hannay bears several similarities to H Rider Haggard’s character Allan Quatermain, the protagonist of King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and its sequels. Buchan made another playful acknowledgement of this in the final novel in the series, The Island of Sheep (1936), where he had Hannay read King Solomon’s Mines to his son and add comments from his own experiences. The message to the reader is clear: ‘I am following this particular literary lineage, and invite you to see my hero in a similar light.’
Buchan’s novels became highly influential in their own right, and the core plot of a cabal of powerful men conspiring to overturn world events being defeated by a resourceful British gentleman racing around following clues was a template that would be repeated and developed in dozens of subsequent thrillers.
Broadly speaking, Eric Ambler would have been aware of all this when writing The Dark Frontier, his debut novel, which was published by Hodder & Stoughton on 1 January 1936.
The novel’s protagonist is a middle-aged physicist, Professor Henry Barstow. Preoccupied and anxious after a stranger has informed him that a small Balkan nation, Ixania, has found a way to create an atomic weapon, he idly picks up a book while sitting in the lounge of his hotel. The lurid cover shows ‘a lantern-jawed man with a blue jowl and an automatic pistol’, and its title is displayed in blood-red letters:
‘CONWAY CARRUTHERS, DEPT. Y.
The Professor’s first instinct was to put the book back down again. It was someone else’s property. Then a paragraph on the open page caught his eye. He began to read.
Carruthers stiffened (ran the paragraph), then, with the agility of a panther, leaped and caught hold of the cornice with both hands. Below him he could see Krask climbing doggedly up the fire escape, an automatic gleaming in his hand. There was no time to be lost. With a sudden heave of his powerful muscles, Carruthers drew himself into the shelter of the window parapet. For the moment he was safe. But Krask had seen him and Carruthers heard him slip the safety catch of the Mauser. For once in his life Carruthers was in a quandary. To return to the inside of the building spelt certain destruction – Schwartz would see to that. Krask unarmed he could deal with easily; but there was the Mauser to be reckoned with, for Krask had the reputation of being a deadly shot. Then, that amazing resourcefulness which had made the name of Carruthers feared and hated by the criminals of four continents came to the rescue. Rapidly, yet calmly, Carruthers unwound from about his waist a long length of silken cord. It had been made for him by a Japanese fisherman whose life he had saved. Thin though it was, it could support the eight of a full-grown man and had helped him out of many a tight corner. Now, with practised ease he tied a running noose in the cord and coiled it lasso-wise in his hand. He edged his way cautiously to the lip of the cornice. Krask was now about twenty feet below, puffing and blowing, his coarse face streaming with sweat, but his automatic held ready for instant use. Carruthers made a final adjustment to his noose. An Arizona cowboy whom he had befriended had taught him all the secrets of the lasso. With a hiss the cord snaked out. Krask heard it. The next thing he knew was that the Mauser had been snatched from his hand. He paused, baffled. Then panic seized him. He turned to run. He did not get far.
‘One more step,’ said Carruthers pleasantly but with a steely ring to his voice, ‘and you’re a dead man!’
This is a spot-on parody of a vintage spy thriller. Ambler gives just enough of an excerpt that, like Professor Barstow, we start by being amused at its crude dramatics before being sucked in, and like him, want to read more, not just because it’s amusing but because there is also some genuine suspense in it.
In the next scene, Barstow drives his car through heavy fog and crashes it. But when he scrambles from the wreckage, he finds he has forgotten his identity. Instead, he now believes himself to be the hyper-competent but entirely fictional British secret agent Conway Carruthers, operating on a mission under the cover identity of a ‘Professor Barstow’. Acting accordingly, he immediately takes the train to Paris to meet his old friend Durand from the Sûreté so he can gather clues about the nuclear weapon in Ixania. As readers, we now have a front seat to a ‘real’ Carruthers mission.
In his 1985 autobiography Here Lies, Ambler suggested a model for his satire:
‘The ‘Carruthers’ half of the personality was a parody hero put there largely for my own entertainment. I enjoyed making fun both of him and of the early E. Phillips Oppenheim kind of thriller writing that went with that type of courtly superman hero.’[1]
He was more specific in his 1989 introduction to a reprint of the novel:
‘I intended to make fun of the old secret service adventure thriller as written by E. Phillips Oppenheim, John Buchan, Dornford Yates and their cruder imitators; and I meant to do it by placing some of their antique fantasies in the context of a contemporary reality.’[2]
If we revisit that passage in Peter Fleming’s One’s Company when he boards the Trans-Siberian Express, we can see that The Dark Frontier features virtually all the same plot elements Peter Fleming attributed to a typical Phillips Oppenheim thriller:
‘In fiction, drama, and the films there has been a firmer tone in Wagons Lits than ever since the early days of Oppenheim.’
In Chapter 3, Professor Barstow – now referred to as Carruthers in the narrative – buys a train ticket to Ixania’s capital Zovgorod from a Wagons-Lit bureau in Paris. One’s Company continues:
‘Complacently you weigh your chances of a foreign countess, the secret emissary of a Certain Power, her corsage stuffed with documents of the first political importance.’
On the train to Zovgorod, Carruthers encounters Countess Magda Schverzinski and one of her envoys, Rovzidski. She doesn’t have any documents stuffed in her corsage, but we learn she is the secret political power behind Ixania’s throne and heads the brutal ‘Society of the Red Gauntlet’.
‘Will anyone mistake you for No. 37, whose real name no one knows, and who is practically always in a train, being ‘whirled’ somewhere?’
Carruthers isn’t initially mistaken for a secret agent by anyone else, but mistakes himself for a secret agent working for ‘Dept. Y’. Because of his behaviour, others start to suspect he is not the physicist he in fact is.
‘You have an intoxicating vision of drugged liqueurs, rifled dispatch-cases, lights suddenly extinguished, and door-handles turning slowly under the bright eye of an automatic…’
In Chapter 6, Carruthers’ and Groom’s suitcases are brusquely searched by customs officials. When Ambler loosely adapted the novel into a screenplay, filmed as Highly Dangerous in 1950, the protagonist (now a woman) is also drugged after this scene. And in Chapter 13, American journalist Bill Casey is interrupted as he is about to leave a darkened hotel room through the window:
‘I let the rope down again and was just buttoning my coat for the descent when I heard a faint “click” from the door. I flung my leg over the sill. I got no farther. The door flew open and a stab of light from the corridor illuminated the room.
“If you move an inch you’ll be shot,” said a familiar voice.
I remained motionless. I was still half-blinded by the unexpected light and all I could see was two figures silhouetted in the doorway. Then the door shut and the room lights were switched on. It was Groom and Nikolai and in the right hand of the latter was a heavy automatic fitted with a Maxim silencer.’
Margaret Lockwood in Highly Dangerous (1950)
This is indeed all very Phillips Oppenheim, but is also familiar from dozens of other practitioners in the genre, and you can find such scenes in the work of William le Queux, John Buchan, ‘Sapper’ and many more.
Ambler may have had many or even all these in mind, but there’s also something else going on. The ending of the excerpt, in which Conway Carruthers warns the villain not to take another step, ‘pleasantly but with a steely ring to his voice’, feels reminiscent of gentlemen ‘rogue’ adventurers such as Raffles, Arsène Lupin, and The Saint: courtly playfulness mixed with ruthlessness. But the atmosphere and the surroundings feel more modern, and somewhat harder edged.
Let’s take a quick look at the work of the Canadian writer Frank L Packard. In 1914, Packard created Jimmie Dale, a ‘millionaire clubman’ by day who by night is a masked vigilante, stalking the rooftops of Manhattan to bring down particularly unpleasant criminals as ‘The Gray Seal’ – so-called because he leaves a diamond-shaped grey paper seal at each scene he visits.
Packard was highly successful, with more than two million copies of the Dale books sold.[3] In the UK, he was published by Hodder & Stoughton, who used the slogans ‘Good, it’s a Packard’ and ‘It’s Hard to Beat a Packard’ on his jacket art.
Jimmie Dale’s activities mean he’s in danger from the police, who think he is a master criminal, but also the criminal underworld, whose practitioners he is punishing. Just as Conway Carruthers is ‘feared and hated by the criminals of four continents’, Dale’s renown has spread:
‘In dens and dives, in the dark corners of that sordid world, they would be whispering blasphemous vows of vengeance against him one to another—and, relative to the hate and fear that welded them into a single unit, the police sank into insignificance.’
Like Conway Carruthers, he is well-equipped:
‘From the pockets of the little leather girdle to the pockets of his tweeds he transferred a steel picklock, a pair of light steel handcuffs, a piece of fine but exceedingly strong cord, a black silk mask, and that small metal case, within which, between sheets of oiled paper, lay those gray-coloured, diamond-shaped, adhesive paper seals that were known in every den in the underworld, known in every police bureau of two continents, as the insignia of the Gray Seal.’
He is agile:
‘Jimmie Dale slipped through the window to the fire escape, and, working cautiously, silently, but with the speed of a trained athlete, made his way down.’
Like a panther:
‘Hesitation for the smallest fraction of a second would have been fatal, but hesitation was something that in all his life Jimmie Dale had never known. Quick as a panther in its spring, he leaped full at the light and the man behind it.’
Dale’s closest friend is a newspaper reporter who doesn’t know his secret identity – Herman Carruthers.
Ambler could easily have known Packard’s work, but there are many others in a similar vein he could have drawn from. The Spider, for instance, a pulp magazine hero created by publisher Harry Steeger who first appeared in 1933. The character is heavily derivative of Packard’s Jimmie Dale: The Spider is the secret identity of millionaire American playboy Richard Wentworth, and instead of leaving behind a paper seal, his calling card is a small red seal of a spider he prints on the foreheads of criminals with his signet ring.
The Spider doesn’t just have a piece of fine but ‘exceedingly strong cord’ as Dale does – we’re told it’s ‘silken cord’, the precise phrase used by Ambler.[4] He, too, has a penchant for fights on fire escapes:
‘Once more a grim smile played across his mouth. Others had trapped the Spider, and found it a dangerous pastime. He descended the fire escape ladder that led down past the window of the apartment where lurked the Black Death.
Yet even in that he exercised care an ordinary man would not have thought of. He did not tread upon the rounds of the ladder but, taking his automatic between his teeth, gripped the sides of the iron stairway with knees and arms and glided down, lest an alarm had been connected with those rungs.
Wentworth’s thick rubber soles made no sound on the iron grilling of the fire escape platform. He examined the windows. He could make out the shadow of heavy drapes, but no faint gleam of light escaped.
From the invaluable kit of tools beneath his arm he took out a small vial made of wax, and with a plunger attached to the stopper drew a semi-circle on the glass above the window’s fastening. Hydrofluoric acid, such as etchers use. Soft wax was impervious to it, yet it ate like fire through hardened glass.
Wentworth replaced the wax bottle and took out a rubber suction cup which he fastened to the pane. When the acid had eaten through, he removed the piece of glass, soundlessly […] Without a sound the Spider eased open the fastening, inched up the sash until it was high enough to admit his body. He drew his revolver, caught up the small flashlight in his left hand, and smothering the light in his palms, stared fixedly at it for a few seconds until the pupils of his eyes became accustomed to the glare, lest bursting into a lighted room would dazzle him.
Silently he eased himself through the opening, stood erect upon the inner sill within the black drapes that covered it. Then, tearing them apart, he sprang into the room.
His gun was ready, but firing, he found, would have been futile. Behind a metal closet door peering through a peephole of bullet proof glass, crouched a man, and the muzzle of his gun was trained on the Spider’s breast.’
The chapter ends with the masked villain in control, on a cliffhanger:
‘He lifted the pistol, levelled it at Wentworth’s chest and slowly began to press the trigger.’[5]
Then there’s Doc Savage. Also first appearing in 1933, and largely written by Lester Dent, this hero wears a leather vest under his clothing that contains innumerable pouches filled with ‘tiny gas bombs’ (Meteor Menace, 1934), as well as a ‘silken cord and grappling hook’ (The Monsters, 1934). In the first story in the series, The Man of Bronze, he uses a silken cord to clamber around a New York skyscraper:
‘Thanks to the coordination of his great muscles, Doc negotiated the cord just about as fast as a man could run.
He passed the first window. It was closed, the office beyond darkened and deserted-looking.
Doc went on down. He had not seen what window the quarry had disappeared into. The second window was also closed. And the third! Doc knew then that he had passed the right window. The man could not have gone this far down the cord.
It was typical of Doc that he did not give even a glance to what was below—a sheer fall of hundreds of feet. So far downward did the brick-and-glass wall extend that it seemed to narrow with distance until it was only a yard or so across. And the street was wedge-shaped at the bottom, as though cut with a great, sharp knife.
Doc had climbed a yard upward when the silk cord gave a violent jerk. He looked up.
A window had opened. A man had shoved a chair through it, and was pushing on the cord so as to swing Doc out away from the building. The murk of the night hid the man’s face. But it was obvious he was Doc’s quarry.
Like a rock on the end of the silken rope, Doc was swung out several feet from the building. He would have to chance to grab a window sill.
The man above flashed a hand for the cord. A long knife glistened in the hand.’[6]
The pulps also had characters who worked, like Conway Carruthers, in intelligence. One such was ‘Secret Agent X’, who first appeared in February 1934 in a story titled The Torture Trust by Paul Chadwick. Like The Gray Seal and The Spider, the unnamed ‘X’ is also often found engaged in fights on fire escapes late at night:
‘His eyes were bright and piercing as bits of polished steel.
Above him were the lighted windows of the Bellaire Club. He followed the alley on up to the corner of the building. Ahead was a courtyard filled with boxes and barrels. A fire escape snaked up the side of the club, passing the windows of the kitchen, going on up to the roof.
X stood a moment, trying to locate the position of the air shaft he had figured was there. It was either by that or the fire escape that the acid thrower had entered and gone.
Then he drew in his breath. Far above him, silhouetted a moment against the starlit sky, he saw faint movement. It might have been a man’s head or hand. He couldn’t be certain which; but he crouched back in the black shadows of the courtyard.
Then, swiftly as a cat, he crossed the flagstones and leaped up. His fingers caught the end of the weighted fire escape ladder. The ladder came down slowly, its rusty hinges squeaking […] X took the iron steps two at a time. Speedily, silently, he reached the roof, while behind him a cop stepped out on the second-floor landing. The police, too, were going to search the roof. The Agent had escaped from one difficult situation only to be involved in another. His blood raced madly. Once again he was pitting his wits and courage against the forces of Fate. What if there were no other way down from the roof? What if the police trapped him? But he didn’t dwell on the dangers of the situation. Lightly as a cat, he leaped to the coping of the roof and balanced there on the balls of his feet. The top of the Bellaire Club stretched before him. Beyond was another building, higher still – a sheer cliff of offices closed for the day. But against its brick walls he saw vague movement again. A giant spider seemed to be creeping up its bare side. The Agent’s eyes had been trained to work in semi-darkness – to see things that other men missed. There was an iron ladder up the side of the building beyond. Someone was climbing it swiftly—a figure which, even at that distance, had something macabre and sinister about it. Agent X started in pursuit.’[7]
The atmosphere and vocabulary in all these passages describe a figure who is essentially the same man – agile, silent, capable, daring, determined, feared – in the same situation – a gunfight on a city’s rooftops at night. The reason it feels so modern is because variations of this scene have lasted into the present day. In The Torture Trust, the newspapers refer to the hero’s silken cord as a ‘piece of the Spider’s web’[8], and we’re all used to seeing Spider-Man sling his way around skyscrapers with his ‘web-shooters’. Millionaire playboy Jimmie Dale surveying the city below him in his black mask and leaping across Manhattan rooftops with a leather girdle full of tools and weapons in his guise as vigilante The Gray Seal is millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, who with mask and utility vest (and cape) is the vigilante Batman.
But Conway Carruthers is not quite any of these characters. There are strong similarities with the language of the Carruthers excerpt – agility, panther, cord, snaking, hissing, leaping, steely – but this changes once Barstow has his car accident and takes on the identity. The ‘new’ Carruthers we meet is of a slightly different stamp to the one we encountered in the paperback. This Carruthers still has the steely eyes and grim smile, but he follows a slightly different line of the thriller genre. And for this, Ambler had one author in mind.
With thanks to Nicholas Shakespeare.
