The Sixth Directorate
by
Joseph Hone
For
SMB
and
HMB
Preface to the 2014 Edition
First published in 1975, The Sixth Directorate is the second of Joseph Hone’s spy novels featuring British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. In the last few decades Hone’s standing in the field has been somewhat eclipsed by the likes of John le Carré and Len Deighton, but in his day he was widely seen as their equal. In 1972, Newsweek called the first novel in the series, The Private Sector, the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin, while in 1984 the New York Times’ Anatole Broyard singled out The Sixth Directorate as being ‘one of the best suspense novels of the last ten years’, and added:
It has elegance, wit, sympathy, irony, surprise, action, a rueful love affair and a melancholy Decline of the West mood. Only the crimes in its pages separate the book from what is known as serious novels.
The idiosyncrasies of public taste are often unfathomable, but I sometimes wonder if more people don’t know of Hone’s work simply because it was neither fish nor fowl in the genre — rather, a less easily marketed combination. Spy fiction can be divided, very roughly, into two camps: ‘Field’ and ‘Desk’. James Bond is a field agent — we follow his adventures, not those of his superior M. In John le Carré’s novels, on the other hand, the focus tends to be on those back at headquarters — George Smiley is a senior officer at the Circus (he later, briefly, becomes head of it).
I enjoy both genres, but sometimes find myself wishing that the Field book I’m reading were as deft at characterisation and prose style as it is at the suspense. Similarly, I often find myself reading a Desk book and desperately hoping that something will happen. It’s all beautifully drawn, but is everyone going to be searching their filing cabinets for that manila folder for ever? In my own work, I’ve tried to have my cake and eat it: my character Paul Dark is a Desk man sent unwillingly back into the Field. In this I was partly influenced by Hone, who combined both camps in a way that leaves me breathless — and sick with envy.
Before I was a published novelist I interviewed Mr Hone about his work, and afterwards he sent me a very charming and touching letter, and enclosed copies of many of his reviews. While it was reassuring to see that others had also highly valued his work, I found the reviews depressing reading. When I see a quote from a newspaper on the back of a novel, I’m conscious that it may have been taken wildly out of context. But here were long reviews of Hone’s work from Time, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post and other august publications, comparing him favourably with le Carré, Deighton, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. Better still, the books live up to the praise.
Hone’s protagonist — ‘a man with almost no heroic qualities’, as he describes himself — is British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. He is repeatedly being taken out of his grubby office in the Mid-East Section in Holborn and dragged into the line of fire. The plots come thick and fast, and feature ingenious twists, femmes fatales, high-octane action, Machiavellian villains — all the great spy stuff you’d want. But it’s wrapped up in prose so elegant, and characterisation so subtle and pervasive, that you put the books down feeling you’ve just read a great work of literature.
Marlow himself is a wonderful character, and I think deserves to be as well known as Smiley. He’s the constant outsider, peering in at others’ lives, meddling where he shouldn’t, and usually being set up by everyone around him. He’s a kind and intelligent man, and terribly misused, but he’s also a cynic — he sees betrayal as inevitable, and tries to prepare for it.
We first meet him in The Private Sector, where he is an English teacher in Cairo who is gradually drawn into a spy ring. In The Sixth Directorate Marlow has become just a little wiser. MI5 has caught a Soviet sleeper red-handed, and locked him away. But they need to know more. Marlow looks enough like the sleeper that he is sent on a mission to Manhattan to impersonate him. Before long, he finds himself fending off the advances of a beautiful African princess who works for the United Nations. Yes, only in spy novels, but Hone somehow manages to make the whole thing seem real, and has fun with the genre while he’s at it:
‘Having coffee with a spy.’ She said it in a deep, funny voice. ‘Do you carry a revolver?’
‘No, as a matter of fact. No guns, no golden Dunhills, no dark glasses.’
‘No vodka martinis either — very dry, stirred and not shaken. Or is it the other way round?’
I felt the skin on my face move awkwardly, creases rising inexplicably over my cheeks. Then I realised I was smiling.
‘Yes, I drink. Sometimes. Bottles of light ale, though. I’m a spy from one of those seedier thrillers, I’m afraid.’
‘Let’s have a drink then.’
‘Here?’
‘God, no. Upstairs.’
I looked at her blankly.
‘Women are out too, are they? Not even “sometimes”? What a very dull book you are.’
‘I disappoint you.’
‘Not yet.’
She stood up and tightened her belt a notch. She was already pretty thin.’
It’s not that seedy a thriller, of course. At one point, Tony Richardson, the director of Look Back in Anger and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, intended to film The Sixth Directorate, taking an option on it and commissioning a script, but the project fell through. That’s a real shame, as it could have made a terrific film, and introduced Hone to a wider audience.
Hone went on to write two further Marlow novels — The Flowers of the Forest (published as The Oxford Gambit in the US) and The Valley of the Fox — as well as a standalone spy thriller, The Paris Trap. All of these novels have now been reissued as Faber Finds. All of them are packed with beautiful writing, astute psychological insight and pace: Hone never forgot he was writing thrillers. It’s the melding of the prose style with the twists and turns of the plots that makes Hone so special — makes him, I think, one of the greats.
Jeremy Duns is the author of the Paul Dark novels Free Agent (2009), Free Country (a.k.a. Song of Treason, 2010) and The Moscow Option (2012), and also the non-fiction Dead Drop (2013).
Book One
1
The comedian left the stage, the long applause died, and a balalaika ensemble took over, starting on a softly held high chord, a minute vivid fingering on all the dozen instruments, which rose gradually in volume into a long, trembling vibrato before the key was released suddenly, the tune emerged, and a sad and restless music spread over the hall.
In one of the boxes where two couples sat above the audience Mrs Andropov turned to her husband with an uncertain smile. ‘He’s good, Yuri, isn’t he?’