In the next four years four more Sarah Gainham thrillers were published, all of them remarkable. They share a claustrophobic atmosphere with the works of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, but have their own unique stamp.
In these novels, she made extensive use of topics and settings she knew from her life with Terry, and the plots often feel like the behind-the-scenes stories of his articles—and his spying. We know from various accounts, including a couple by his own hand, that Terry worked for M.I.6 while a journalist, but the precise details of his espionage activities have yet to be declassified (and might never be). Under the guise of fiction, Gainham revealed a wealth of information about precisely what Western intelligence got up to behind the Iron Curtain, and the psychological toll it often took on its practitioners.
In the 1970s, Gainham stated that she often used real incidents as the basis for her plots, and outlined her motives for doing so:
‘I had a special feeling for using the thriller as a vehicle for ideas, or rather anti-Russian propaganda. All the best spy thrillers whose origins are known seem to be based on reality. Certainly my own stories were: they are not really fiction at all, only written as fiction.’
A case in point is her second novel, The Cold Dark Night, published in January 1957. Set in Berlin during the aforementioned Four Power Conference of 1954, it is stuffed with the kind of ‘gen’ she had helped provide Fleming for From Russia, With Love, but of course now on entirely her own terms.
Most of the main characters are Western correspondents occupying the city, and we learn about their daily work and play: the round of diplomatic parties, nights out venturing through checkpoints, the constant calls from waiters to the telephone to report back to London, the sound-proof booths in the Press Centre. It all feels entirely authentic, as does the depiction of daily life among the ruined city for locals.
But a major theme of the book is Western intelligence’s exploitation of desperate refugees as spies in East Germany, and the mechanics of espionage traffic between the sectors. This was very much of the same stamp as the information on escape routes in 1954, which she had probably also had a hand in providing, and at the same time is part of the same world Fleming would send James Bond into for The Living Daylights three years later, bringing the influence full circle. The action is worlds away from Terry’s ‘tabloiditis’ fantasies of Martin Bormann running Soviet spy schools: this is the nitty-gritty of espionage in the back alleys of Cold War Berlin. In a preface to the first edition, Gainham noted that all the characters were invented but one:
‘“Horst Schill” was a real man, and his story is true. Unfortunately, it was not possible to ask his permission to include him. He has gone where nobody is likely ever again to ask his leave for anything.’
Perhaps this was judged to be a little too close to the bone, as subsequent editions dropped it. Schill appears to have been based on Hans Bartschat, an East German soldier who defected to West Berlin only to be sent back by American intelligence for 20 dollars a trip, before finally being arrested in the Soviet Zone. The details of his and his wife’s predicament match that of the novel, and Terry reported on the case in 1954, the same year as the book is set.
The protagonist of the novel, a journalist, has a one-night-stand with Schill’s wife, and it may be that Gainham was exorcising some ghosts in her failing marriage. The plotline also feels like a rebuke to Terry professionally, in particular his agent-running activities. It is unlikely Bartschat was one of Terry’s agents, as he had written about him in print, but we know he ran agents and, from his trip to East Berlin with Ian Fleming, that he had at least one man there. Terry sometimes dismissively referred to Germans as ‘gooks’, dehumanizing them, and the novel highlights the desperation of Eastern refugees’ thrown to the wolves by uncaring Allied spymasters too afraid to do the dirty work themselves. ‘They play at security,’ Horst Schill’s wife remarks at one point:
‘They’re safe enough. Only the outside agents are in danger and they don’t count. They’re ‘gooks’. I think that means foreigners, or perhaps Germans. But all that rendezvous with passwords stuff… that’s just for fun.’
The novel suggests that the Horst Schills of the world were all too replaceable for their handlers in the West. Most ‘272s’ probably weren’t unlucky enough to face KGB snipers on crossing back into West Berlin, but some ended up in East German prisons.
Although it isn’t named in the novel, the American intelligence group in West Berlin using a naturalized German as an agent-runner was almost certainly inspired by the Gehlen organization. The novel also features a scandal involving a British official in black marketeering after the war being blackmailed into spying by the Soviets as a result. This reads remarkably like some of the information Terry later investigated concerning Robert Maxwell, suggesting that those allegations were already in currency in the ’50s.
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Gainham’s next novel, The Mythmaker, published in late 1957, was set in Austria shortly after the Second World War. The protagonist is a half-British, half-Hungarian agent, Captain Christian ‘Kit’ Quest. He is sent by British intelligence to Vienna to find Otto Berger, Hitler’s devoted personal servant, who is believed to have escaped the Bunker in Berlin and hidden a cache of platinum and precious stones to be used to fund a neo-Nazi revival: the book ends with a chase through a tunnel in the Alps.
This echoed her husband’s reporting on Martin Bormann and other escaped Nazis planning a revival of the Third Reich, but the novel also seems to contain a light critique of Fleming’s work. The name ‘Kit Quest’ sounds like a pastiche of James Bond, as well as being a play on the tradition of gallant spies fighting for God and country. As with Bond in Casino Royale, Quest is a handsome, somewhat arrogant young agent who ruthlessly uses women for his own pleasure with minimal emotional commitment, who falls unexpectedly in love:
‘In Kit’s many small loves his main preoccupation had been to protect himself from involvement without losing his pleasure. A vulgar concern which was not his choice but simply the accepted attitude to love of nearly all young men of his kind, and the very worst preparation possible for the feelings that now filled him. Not only was Deli a member of his own world and therefore not to be trifled with without serious consequences, but he found with a momentary fear that only traces remained of his habitual self-defence against emotion, he was defenceless against her simply because she was unarmed and brave. Yet he could not at once give up the essentially hostile posture which had hitherto been his real attitude to the women he had desired and who had desired him. This fear and this reservation showed in his eyes after the first flash of recognition, and in answer to them a familiar smile of ironical understanding came into Deli’s eyes. Kit looked away from her, shamed that he had betrayed a coarse caution in a moment that could never return, and spoilt it for both of them.
‘Let’s dance,’ said Deli, still with the ironical smile.’
Quest’s selfish desire to ‘protect himself from involvement without losing his pleasure’ and reluctance to relinquish his ‘real’ attitude to women—an ‘essentially hostile posture’—recalls that of Bond’s on meeting Vesper, when he wants to ‘shatter, roughly’ her candid gaze with its ‘touch of ironical disinterest’.
There might also have been a subtle dissection of Bond’s creator beneath this. A couple of years after she wrote The Mythmaker, Ian Fleming had tried to seduce her on one of his visits to Berlin. By then she had been estranged from Antony and had been tempted by the offer. She thought Fleming ‘highly intelligent and accomplished’, as well as ‘tall, good-looking, highly presentable and with the slightly piratical air given by his broken nose’. Nevertheless, she turned him down, thinking his emotional age was set at ‘pre-puberty’. However, the two had first met in June 1956, around which time she would have been writing or planning this novel, and she would have had plenty of time to size him up.
Gainham was now starting to establish her reputation as a top-notch thriller-writer. Christopher Pym gave The Mythmaker a rave review in The Spectator, calling it ‘ingenious, stylish, amusingly informative’ and ‘well-plotted’, while in The Observer Maurice Richardson felt it a ‘well-written, thoughtful and intelligent thriller’.
Her next novel was The Stone Roses, published in 1959. It’s chiefly remembered now as a footnote in popular culture because of the British band that took its name from it, but it’s a brilliant spy novel. Set in May 1948, the narrator is Toby Elyot, a British correspondent who served with the commandos and S.O.E. during the Second World War. He has now been approached by an old S.O.E. colleague, who asks him on behalf of British intelligence to find and exfiltrate a local agent working for them in Prague, using his civilian job as cover. He is initially reluctant:
‘I wanted to go on being a foreign correspondent and I could think of nothing that would disqualify me so thoroughly as getting mixed up with that crazy outfit again. Whatever it calls itself now.’
However, he then realizes that his press employers won’t disapprove of him carrying out such a job, because they are in on the idea. As a result, he re-evaluates:
‘If that was the wheel within the other wheels I could do nothing but harm to myself but refusing. So I haggled for a bit, refusing to take pay, making a favour of it. And finally agreed on condition that I wasn’t to be asked again.’
One has to wonder what Antony Terry, Ian Fleming and their masters in M.I.6 thought of Terry’s wife writing thrillers in which British journalists are shown to be working under cover for intelligence. The book effectively blew Terry’s cover and indeed the very existence of the BIN network, but perhaps as it was presented both as fiction and in plain sight it was dismissed: ‘The wife of a foreign correspondent, just fantasies—nobody takes thrillers seriously.’ Nevertheless, at least one American reviewer noted it:
‘Perhaps she does the cause of Western diplomacy no favor when, after pointing out that all Communist newspaper reporters are spies, she attires in the same sort of cloak a British newsman, Toby Elyot.’
Elyot is an intriguing protagonist. The mechanics of his dual roles as correspondent and intelligence operative are clearly closely modelled on Terry’s experiences, but his character is much closer to that of James Bond, a coolly efficient and ruthless British agent hiding a romantic streak. Although the background and prose are still reminiscent of Greene and Ambler, this is the closest Gainham came to writing something akin to Fleming at any length, and one can readily imagine aspects of it appearing in a Bond story, particularly the antagonist, Colonel Franciska Horak, a chilling young Soviet agent who wears full motorcycle leathers and passes for a man. She’s a brilliant creation, and all but steals the novel from the other characters.
In the early days of her career, Gainham was seen as a dilettante. Part of this is likely down to good old-fashioned sexism. At the time, it was rare enough for women to be taken seriously as journalists, and in the thriller field Gainham was rarely considered alongside the likes of Ambler or Greene, as her male contemporaries were. In an interview in the 1970s, she said she had ‘always wished I had taken a man's name for my pseudonym’, and it’s hard not to agree that she might have become a lot better known as a spy novelist had she done so.
Attitudes to her work gradually changed with each successive novel, and changed irrevocably in 1967 with the publication of Night Falls On The City. This was not only a brilliant novel but became an international best-seller, topping the New York Times list for months and giving her financial security for the rest of her life.
Set in Vienna at the onset of the Anschluss, it and two sequels traced the lives of a cast of characters coming face to face with life under Nazi rule. The books were a departure in that they were not thrillers or set in the Cold War, but many of her old hallmarks were there.
In 1983, Gainham returned to the world of her earlier work one last time with The Tiger, Life, her final novel. Almost completely forgotten now, it deserves to be known as a classic of spy fiction. All the themes of her earlier thrillers are there, but with the freedom, assurance and maturity of her Night Falls trilogy.
Set, like The Cold Dark Night, among the British press community of Berlin in the early Cold War, the novel is a slow-burning masterpiece. No longer the basis for a flawed hero, Terry here is barely disguised as Freddie Ingram, an outwardly eminent foreign correspondent and abusive husband who is also working for British intelligence. The protagonist is Gainham herself in the guise of Rose, Freddie’s wife, who is underestimated by him and most other characters but works out what’s going on beneath the surface of events and forges a new life for herself from the ashes of her ruined marriage. The novel lays to rest the ghost of Terry once and for all, and her portrait of him in particular is damning.
Terry read the book, but either misunderstood or pretended to misunderstand how badly he came out of it. In a 1987 letter he mentioned that he had recently celebrated 60 years as a journalist and 40 years with the Sunday Times by being interviewed on the radio in New Zealand, where he then lived:
‘The forty years’ anniversary goes back to my being hired by Ian Fleming in 1947 to be the Vienna correspondent, after my seven years in the army. In Vienna I was actually doing two rather exciting jobs, but after what happened to poor old Peter Wright recently I was a bit disconcerted to find that my activities in this field have received an unwanted airing by someone here somehow identifying me as the non-hero character in that bestseller about espionage in post-war Berlin by my former wife Rachel, pen name Sarah Gainham. The reputation I have acquired from her description of her journalist husband is of a tough, fast-living, ruthless 007 (or in the words of the Sunday Telegraph lady reviewer, ‘a clever bully’, though in the personal sense I must admit Rachel let me off rather lightly). She turned the story round a bit to cover her tracks and made what happened in Vienna happen in Berlin but most of the characters are well drawn from life and in most cases quite identifiable.’
This letter is an admission in his own hand that he had worked for M.I.6 while working for Fleming at the Sunday Times during the Cold War, but it also shows just how closely Gainham cleaved to reality in her novels. Terry was right that Freddie Ingram was a ‘non-hero’, tough and ruthless, but he is a world away from 007: he’s one of the most chilling and loathsome characters in spy fiction. At one point, he insists Rose have an abortion despite it endangering her life, an event that seems to have been even more shocking in reality. A friend found her alone, ‘lying in a pool of blood’, her husband having deliberately abandoned her. This was a side of Antony Terry that didn’t make it into his obituaries.
