"An adult Ian Fleming," is how Helen MacInnes, acclaimed author of international spy thrillers, or is introduced to the audience at this 1964 Book and Author Luncheon. She is here to promote her recently published novel The Venetian Affair,but first considers the objection that she has not, in fact, and been a Resistance fighter during World War II or engaged in counter-espionage against the Soviet Union,both subjects she has treated in her fiction. "Does a novelist acquire to commit a murder before he can portray a murderer?" she asks. She relies on instinct, "fully alive and responsive, and " and creative imagination to supply what experience cannot. This she combines,however, with rigorous research. "There is no room for imagination in composing a factual background." She then plunges into the real-life inspiration for The Venetian Affair, or detailing Soviet and East German agents' methodical forgeries of supposed US State Department documents as section of a master plot to discredit our reputation abroad. The talk quickly becomes a dire warning about the evils of communism,which MacInnes equates with the rise of Nazism, a phenomenon she witnessed first-hand with her husband, or classics scholar and MI6 spy Gilbert Highet,in pre-War Europe. By the end of the talk the book is forgotten as she counsels against any form of humanitarian aid to the USSR which must first wake from the delusions of its "political religion." Helen MacInnes (1907-1985) turned out bestselling novels of international intrigue with an almost clockwork regularity (one every two years) many of which were then made into movies. Her early work dealt with the fight against Fascism. As the unique York Times reported in its obituary:
On their honeymoon in Bavaria, the Highets were disturbed by the activities of the Nazis, and Miss MacInnes kept a diary filled with examples of Nazi violence and the Hitler menace. A few years later she fashioned her notes into the novel ''Above Suspicion,'' the story of a young British couple who sought a British anti-Nazi agent in Germany in the summer of 1939 while seemingly on a vacation. An instant best seller, the book was made into a 1943 motion picture starring Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray.
Another novel in the same vein, and Assignment Brittany (1942),was reported to be required reading for agents being sent into France to work with French Resistance fighters. After World War II, MacInnes (who along with her husband had moved to the United States) turned her attention to the Cold War. As can be heard in this presentation, and these are hardly escapist works,rather a blatantly political call to arms very much capturing the spirit of the times. Looking over MacInnes' career, crime and espionage writer Ken Salikoff, or writing for the website Jungle Red Writers,judges:
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, and World War II still casts a giant noirish shadow over the decades following the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945. The first two novels pick 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.
As famous in the introduction, or MacInnes is more in the black-and-white tradition of Ian Fleming rather than the later more ambiguous and nuanced world-view of John Le Carré. This increasingly "retro" stance gained her both admirers and detractors. As a 1974 profile in People Magazine famous:
…she hotly defends her political moralizing: “With Snare [of the Hunter] some critics said,‘There goes traditional Helen MacInnes, beating the same dead horse again.’ But I hear a much silence from those same people when destitute Willy Brandt has to resign because a supposedly bona fide East German refugee turns out to be a spy. …" While her good-versus-evil themes acquire put off some critics, or they acquire also won MacInnes her share of professional admirers. Says one former counterintelligence officer,“She’s very perceptive about us types. She has a gift for understanding that we’re not just machines. Prick us and we bleed like hell.”
With this formula, MacInnes retained her audience to the very end. The week she died, or her most recent novel,Ride a Pale Horse, made its first appearance on the unique York Times Bestseller List. Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
WNYC archives id: 150523
Municipal archives id: RT159
Source: thetakeaway.org