NBM: Why has the spy novel become such a popular genre? In the old days there were E. Phillips Oppenheim and John Buchan and almost nobody else. Is it all response to the conditions of the cold war?
Haggard: Yes. But I wouldn’t call Fleming a spy writer. In fact, he writes adventure stories. I can see why they’re madly popular and made into marvelous films, because something happens every second. They are action-packed; the action is the story.
NBM: In his early novels I think he was trying to say something serious about terrorism. It seems to me that Fleming was the first novelist to recognize terrorism as a subject for fiction.
Haggard: Yes. I’ve just turned in a book to Hodder & Stoughton called The Martello Tower, written about this coast, about terrorism. It will be out next year. It’s based on the idea that this coast is riddled with mud creeks, and they’re all guarded by those Martello Towers which we put up against Napoleon. And smuggling still goes on, but it’s soft smuggling. Things like silk, brandy, and perfume. What happens in this book is what happens if a terrorist takes it over, starts bringing in arms and mortars.
NBM: To what purpose?
Haggard: Attacking the royal family when they’re on a state drive. You could put a mortar two miles away. That’s two thousand meters. It’s quite a range. You can put that mortar anywhere, but you can’t control the whole of London with police. You put it somewhere in a backyard in Tottenham or somewhere like that They’re very accurate. You can land them on a blanket. Imagine a royal procession going up the Mall with a couple of mortars firing. If you’ve got a good crew, you can get up to fifteen rounds a minute. The Mall would be a holocaust. Fifteen rounds a minute. If you’ve got two mortars, thirty a minute. You’re going to hit something. You might not hit the royal coach, but you’ll wipe out the bodyguard and everything else and the spectators. So that’s quite a story.
NBM: What do you hope that your canon amounts to?
Haggard: I don’t grade it higher than high-class entertainment. I’m not a message writer. If you’re asking me have I got any message to give a suffering world, the answer is emphatically no. If it can give intelligent people some amusement, I’m satisfied. I’m afraid I am writing for people of above-average intelligence, because I just can’t read pulp, so why should I write it? No, I am an entertainer basically. I’ve no serious message. I don’t try to convert anybody to anything. I’m a complete skeptic myself. I look at every statement I don’t take it on trust. You’ve got to have a bloody good look at it yourself.
NBM: The celebrated mythical reader: who do you see as your ideal reader?
Haggard: In America I haven’t an idea. In this country I have a pretty shrewd one. It’s somebody over forty or even over forty-five. I don’t think I appeal to the young very much. Somebody who would rather read a civilized book than goggle the box. Somebody of a certain standard of education, not necessarily Yale or Oxford. Somebody who can appreciate a writer who doesn't take too many chances with the English language — which I don’t. I take a lot of chances with syntax but none with grammar, absolutely none. Somebody who realizes the subjunctive tense still exists; somebody who appreciates it when you say “whatsoever it be” rather than “whatsoever it is.” In other words, a fairly educated reader.
NBM: You used the word civilized a moment ago. What is a “civilized reader”?
Haggard: A civilized reader is a reader with a certain standard of education.
NBM: The genre you write in is perceived as a mass genre, a popular genre.
Haggard: Oh yes. The spy story or the suspense novel. That is perceived to be a mass genre. Oh yes, I would agree with you. But I wouldn’t agree that everybody writing in that genre has to aim at a mass readership. I certainly don’t.
NBM: If you were starting over, if it were 1958 again and you were turning novelist at the improbable age of fifty-one, with what you have learned from your thirty books, what changes would you make in your career plan?
Haggard: None.
NBM: You’ve written what you wanted to write?
Haggard: Yes, I’ve written what I wanted to write, and the only thing I’m capable of writing. I could never sit down and write one of what they call “sensitive” novels, that sort of delicate interplay where nothing happens. P. G. Wodehouse once described it beautifully as one of those books in which little happens for eighty thousand words and on the last page the undergraduate decides not to commit suicide after all. That sort of book I had no ambition and no sort of gift to write.
William Haggard
Timeo Danaos
William Haggard has written few short stories, preferring the space of the novel, which allows him to develop his plots. He regards “Timeo Danaos” as his most successful story. It first appeared in Winter's Crimes 8 (London: Macmillan, 1976); this is its first publication in America.
Agnes Withers, who'd been born van der Bijl, could do most things but blindly follow convention. She realised that on this island she'd asked for it, since she'd flown in the face of the local establishments. The English here were traditionally pro-Greek, accepting the prevalent view of the Turks as a barbarous and inferior people. Agnes Withers was therefore odd girl out Poets had sung of the Isles of#
Greece, politicians of democracy’s cradle. Agnes cared not a fig for either. Northern Dutch by birth and now British by marriage, she had a simple and often alarming directness which a Greek would most surely mistake for stupidity, and a disinclination to hide her opinions which were as Dutch as the Rubensplein, Dutcher than Bols. She thought that the Turks had been fiddled and diddled, despised in what was still partly their country as a helot and uncivilised people. That couldn’t go on forever, of course: they were bound to come in and take what belonged to them. Once it had almost happened already, and Agnes looked forward to when it did. Since she never concealed her views from anyone, it was natural that all Greeks detested her.
And now she’d been called to the local police station, and the signature was clearly Greek. To one who could read the island’s omens that signature was coldly ominous, for this wasn’t a formal no-go area where a Greek policeman would have been run out of town, but an oasis of comparative tolerance where the two races lived as near to peace as events in the rest of the island let them. But now they had changed the head man to a Greek. “Inspector,” he’d written below his name, which could only mean they were tightening up. The last one had been a Turkish sergeant. Agnes had called him Çavus Bey, which wasn’t quite correct and she knew it, but it had amused him and also flattered him greatly. She had learnt to speak Turkish and spoke it well. She wouldn’t or couldn’t speak Greek at all.
Another black mark, she thought, unrepentant, as she put on an ancient linen hat. Normally she never wore one. Well, she’d better go up to the station and see.
She began to walk steadily up the hill, a striking woman in the prime of her life. She went at a brisk light infantry pace, since she’d a pound or two to lose and meant to. Above her was the little town from which this troublesome Inspector had summoned her, and above that again was the underground lake without which these smiling fertile slopes would be as dourly parched, as grimly impoverished, as the land on the other side of the mountain. Below her the ground fell away to the sea, a warm blue sea in the strong spring sunshine.
She had gone perhaps three hundred yards when the gunman pulled his trigger and got her. He’d been hidden behind a wall and fired quickly. Agnes Withers fell down in the dark red dust.