Desmond Bagley
Desmond Bagley was a British author known for his fourteen novels that primarily explore themes of suspense and adventure, often targeting both young adult and adult readers. Born as Simon Bagley in Kendal, England, he had a varied career that included work as a journalist and scriptwriter before turning to fiction writing. His novels typically feature intelligent male protagonists who consider themselves ordinary working-class individuals, relying on their expertise and wits to navigate dangerous situations.
Bagley’s stories are often set in diverse and unfamiliar locales, including South Africa, Greenland, and the Yucatán, enhancing the sense of discovery for the reader. His work is characterized by a focus on integrity and the struggle of his characters against overwhelming odds, often incorporating elements of existential inquiry. Unlike some contemporaries in the espionage genre, Bagley presents a more nuanced perspective on good and evil, often avoiding simple moral dichotomies.
His novels are recognized for their engaging storytelling and well-researched content, which includes specialized knowledge about geology, archaeology, and various adventurous pursuits. While he may not have achieved the same fame as authors like John le Carré or Robert Ludlum, Bagley’s unique approach and relatable characters continue to make his work a worthwhile read for fans of adventure and suspense fiction.
Desmond Bagley
- Born: October 29, 1923
- Birthplace: Kendal, Cumbria, England
- Died: April 12, 1983
- Place of death: Southampton, England
Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; espionage
Contribution
Desmond Bagley wrote fourteen novels. His work has often been recommended to the young adult reader as well as to the adult fan of suspense and adventure fiction. His typical main character is an intelligent man who thinks of himself as an ordinary workingman. The protagonist is able to use his wits as well as his special hobbyist or professional expertise to solve mysteries or, more likely, to escape danger. The settings include countries or environments—South Africa, the Yucatán, Greenland, Iran—that are foreign to most English readers’ experience. Suspense, special knowledge, and setting all contribute to the reader’s sense of discovery and enjoyment. Bagley puts himself in the camp of John le Carré, considering espionage more evil than necessary, rather than in the camp of Ian Fleming, whose hero cannot lose or be representative of anything less than the right. Bagley did not become as famous as did le Carré or Robert Ludlum in espionage or as Dick Francis has become in tales of the amateur sleuth. It may be that Bagley’s novels lack the signature touches, the disenchanted George Smiley, the ultracomplex plots, the horse-racing connection, which have made the reputations of these authors. Nevertheless, Bagley’s novels are worth discovering. His main characters have integrity, and they are driven to solve their various problems in ways that engage the reader.
Biography
Desmond Bagley was born Simon Bagley in Kendal, in the county of Westmorland, 260 miles north of London. His parents ran a theatrical boardinghouse, where, as a small child, he met Basil Rathbone, who was playing Shakespearean roles with Sir Frank Benson’s touring company at the time. Bagley attended schools in Bolton and Blackpool, but he did not follow in the public school tradition. The spirit of Bagley’s characters is discernible in his own act of quitting school at the age of fourteen to take on his first job, as a printer’s devil. He subsequently worked in a factory making plastic electrical fittings and, when World War II broke out, in an aircraft factory, making parts for planes.
In 1947, Bagley traveled to South Africa. He is said to have departed from Blackpool during a blizzard, to have gone three thousand miles across the Sahara Desert guided by star and compass, and to have traveled across Nigeria, then west to Kampala, Uganda, where he contracted malaria. Next he traveled down the African continent, working in asbestos and gold mines, until he reached Natal Province, South Africa. There, he wrote feature stories for the press and pieces for radio, worked as a nightclub photographer, and began to indulge his hobbies of sailing and motorboating. Bagley became a freelance journalist in 1957, and he later became a script writer for a South African subsidiary of Twentieth Century Fox. He married Joan Margaret Brown in 1960.
Bagley lived his later years on the English Channel island of Guernsey. In 1983, he suddenly became ill and was taken to the Southampton General Hospital, where he died on April 12.
Analysis
Desmond Bagley’s early novels offer the kind of suspense that is created when a workingman fights against the odds. The first two published, The Golden Keel (1963) and High Citadel (1965), offer pure adventure, and most of the villains are purely bad.
The thoughts of Bagley’s characters are portrayed through a first-person narrative or are implied through a third-person point of view. Despite the ordinariness of their voices, Bagley’s characters can be found exploring existential questions in the mode of John le Carré’s writing. Bagley’s protagonists search for their identities, having lost wives, brothers, memories, names, jobs, or faces (by plastic surgery).
Bagley customarily began writing with the first chapter and “a group of people in an interesting situation and environment.” He knew “roughly” how he wanted the book to end. Then, “the characters and environment interact (I regard the place as another character in the book) and the plot grows organically like a tree.” The result is that Bagley’s main characters, such as Jaggard in The Enemy, undergo an experience that parallels life and adds to the reader’s store of experience accordingly.
The Golden Keel
The Golden Keel takes place in an environment with which the author is familiar (South Africa), and it has a main character, Peter Halloran, who bears a resemblance to the author, having worked in an aircraft factory during World War II, emigrated to South Africa with no ready job or capital, and spent time with boats. Bagley’s characters are in some ways rough, and they are ready to risk an adventure. Halloran, for example, has just lost his wife. He has strong survival instincts, but he now has less to lose. The language of this book is sometimes awkwardly plain—at the beginning, for example, and during romantic scenes. Bagley is a good storyteller, however, and the fun and excitement of the book prevail. It is a story of man against the sea as well as of man against man.
High Citadel
The setting of High Citadel includes snow-covered mountains complete with avalanches and blizzards. The major character, O’ Hara, an alcoholic pilot about to lose his last job, has a reason for his character flaws: He was tortured as a Korean War prisoner. His ordeal in the story is brought on by the actions of South American communist terrorists, and it allows him to purge himself of the effects of his war experience. This book, while concentrating on O’Hara, is narrated in the third person so that Bagley can enter the minds of other characters fighting the terrorists. The narrator moves back and forth across a mountain pass, between characters, so that the readers may view the battle lines of the high citadel. Discovering whether the stranded victims of the plane crash will survive an attack makes an exciting reading experience.
These and the other amateur-sleuth adventure books also contain fascinating specialized information about such things as geology, archaeology, rain forests, and mountain climbing. Bagley said that he researched extensively throughout his career as a novelist. He acquired information about avalanches for The Snow Tiger (1974), for example, during a period of twelve years, in remote places such as the Antarctic and the South Pole and by talking to snow and ice scientists. He said that he took photographs but no notes, that he had a retentive memory, “a mind like flypaper.”
The Spoilers
Even in the early books, however, Bagley goes beyond interesting facts and mere suspense to touch on concerns with political intrigue. In The Spoilers (1969), the characters are amateur agents rather than amateur sleuths. The assembled team is made up of the protagonist, who is a doctor, and one idealist, one con man, two mercenaries, one torpedo specialist, and one fast-talking journalist. Their mission is to make an assault on the drug trade in the Middle East and includes a strange and secret underground bombing in Iran.
In his later novels, Bagley continued to deliver intense stories of one person’s mind, creating sophisticated plots using a storehouse of tricks and motifs, such as handlers and operatives, special techniques for following a subject, and ghastly, customized ammunition—all available to the authentic spy. Bagley did not, apparently, consider himself a writer in a certain genre of fiction. He claimed to be mystified by his reputation as a writer of crime and suspense: “My books are not specifically about crime although some people think they are.” He admitted to fitting under the umbrella of suspense. “Yet,” he went on to say, “all novels must have suspense or they are nothing.”
Landslide and The Freedom Trap
Bagley {I}Trap{/I} should also be remembered for his interest in the question of identity. This can be seen as early as Landslide (1967). The book is a good adventure story: A geologist is hunted by and exposes murderers, and he alerts the area to a geological fault that will jeopardize lives. Yet paralleling the physical threats involved in the adventure story are the psychological dangers for the protagonist, Robert Boyd. This man was burned so severely in an accident that he could not be identified with certainty. He might have been one of two different people, one antisocial, one not, before he suffered amnesia and had plastic surgery, which gave him a completely new face. He fears that he may have an evil side that will return if his memory comes back. Boyd earns love and respect without solving the mystery of his identity.
In The Vivero Letter (1968), the protagonist reacts against the overheard words of a thoughtless girl. She calls him a gray little man, and in reaction he is emboldened to launch an expedition into the steamy jungles of the Yucatán. In The Tightrope Men (1973), an innocent civilian has been given plastic surgery while he is unconscious, and he wakes up looking like a certain Finnish scientist sought by the Russians. In The Freedom Trap (1971; revised as The Mackintosh Man, 1973), appearance fools the reader. The protagonist appears to be an incarcerated criminal and speaks as such in his own voice, but he proves to be a government agent whom no one left alive in the government knows to be an agent.
The Enemy
In The Enemy (1977), Bagley brings together a down-to-earth male protagonist, high suspense, specialized information, political issues, and espionage. This novel serves as a good example of Bagley’s mature voice and of his having achieved control of the ingredients of his art. Unlike his early female characters, Penelope Ashton in The Enemy is drawn with enough subtlety to avoid false notes, sufficiently engaged in the action to engage the reader’s sympathy, and as technically proficient and resourceful as Malcom Jaggard, the protagonist. The maturity and authority of Jaggard are evident in his voice, and as the book is told in first person, Jaggard’s voice is the dominant element of Bagley’s style.
Jaggard characterizes himself early in the book as someone who tries to make no false claims. (By the end of the book, it will have become clear how difficult, though important, it is to do so.) When he talks about his growing acquaintance with Penelope Ashton, modesty, self-mockery, and an intentional restraint characterize his voice and style: “And, as they say, one thing led to another and soon I was squiring her around regularly. . . . We could have been a couple of Americans doing the tourist bit.” “Squiring her around” and “the tourist bit” are ordinary clichés that show the character’s intentional avoidance of elitism.
Bagley leads his readers to the experiences of secondary characters through the narrator’s viewpoint. Jaggard is conscientiously tentative about describing what may be in someone else’s mind. Sometimes he retreats to being sure only about his own thoughts: “After six weeks of this I think we both thought that things were becoming pretty serious. I, at least, took it seriously enough to go to Cambridge to see my father.”
Bagley’s style also includes humor. A situation in a Swedish town in The Enemy is described as
becoming positively ridiculous; two of Cutler’s men were idling away their time in antique shops ready for the emergence of Ashton [Penny’s father] and Benson and unaware that they were being watched by a couple of Russians who, in their turn, were not aware of being under the surveillance of the department. It could have been a Peter Sellers comedy.
Later, Jaggard says, “I followed behind, passing Ashton who was already carrying a tail like a comet.”
The fun is only a backdrop, however, to the serious themes of the novel. Jaggard’s authority is demonstrated when Jaggard says, “You won’t get me back in the department. I’m tired of lies and evasions; I’m tired of self-interest masquerading as patriotism. It came to me when Cregar [a dishonest, power-hungry member of the House of Lords] called me an honest man. . . . How could an honest man do what I did to Ashton?” (Jaggard refrained from telling Ashton the truth because of the agency’s orders. Ignorance of the truth led to Ashton’s death.)
Bagley is a writer who follows rules of decency, and thus he is often recommended to young adult readers. Jaggard does what most young adults would like to do, telling his employers repeatedly to “stuff it.” In The Enemy, Bagley continues to offer both young and old readers the catharsis of suspense. There are searches for a man who assaulted Penny’s sister with battery acid and exciting searches for Penny’s father and his valet (which entail a look into the past, from which it is determined that Penny’s father, Ashton, was a brilliant physicist and Russian defector). There are searches for Ashton’s cleverly hidden research and a desperate search for Penny herself when she disappears from sight.
A catharsis of a new kind is provided, however—a purging that depends on admitting that the good man is not always rescued alive, that the good elements in government do not necessarily emerge victorious, that even the hero does not always get to live happily ever after. As Jaggard says at the beginning of the last chapter, “this is not a fairy tale.” In this chapter, it is learned that he is terminally ill.
As in the previous novels, The Enemy shows evidence of research having been done in specialized areas—this time computer programs, model railroads, and genetic engineering. The railroad-schedule microprocessors are discovered to be a disguised computer, fascinatingly described, for storage of Ashton’s theoretical genetic research. There is much information about Escherichia coli, a species of intestinal bacteria, about mutations of it caused by the splicing of DNA strings, and about dangers to the human race if this sort of engineering is not controlled.
Espionage and intrigue in The Enemy are not gratuitous. Competing power-hungry departments within the British government exemplify the human faults of pride, covetousness, and consequent deceit. The one supervisor Jaggard has believed to be true finally equivocates and is prepared to make deals in the end, while Jaggard himself has betrayed Ashton.
At the time Bagley wrote High Citadel, he seemed to have thought that political decisions could be made sharply and with clarity. The North Koreans were evil, there were evil effects from their torturing of O’Hara, and the enemy in the South American setting of that novel is also evil. The main character, O’Hara, must learn to conquer his psychological problems, and this action constitutes a vague subplot. There is nothing vague about who the villains are, however, and only the female characters in the novel and a college professor have any qualms about using a range of weapons, ending with bombing, to hurt and kill the communists. By 1977, Bagley was less definite. In his books of that time, the main character’s fellow spy is more likely than not to be a double agent, and the people supposedly on the same side at home may not be helping. The Enemy begins with these quotations: “We have met the enemy, and he is ours,” from Oliver Hazard Perry, heroic American commodore; “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” from Walt Kelly, subversive sociological cartoonist.
Bibliography
Bagley, Desmond. “A Word with Desmond Bagley.” Interview by Deryk Harvey. The Armchair Detective 7 (August, 1974): 258-260. A revealing interview that details Bagley’s approach to writing and his appraisal of the state of the mystery genre in the mid-to late twentieth century.
Bagley, Desmond. Interview. The Mystery FANcier 7 (March/April, 1983): 13-18. Bagley discusses his work and his writing process.
Keating, H. R. F., ed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense, and Spy Fiction. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982. Reader’s guide to various crime genres focused especially on the representation of criminals. Index. Provides context for understanding Bagley’s work.
Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Critical study consisting of fifteen overview essays devoted to specific genres or periods within crime fiction. Contains a chapter on spy fiction as well as one on thrillers that will shed light on Bagley’s works. Bibliographic references and index.
Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Contains some mention of Bagley and places his work in context.
Winn, Dilys, ed. Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader’s Companion. New York: Workman, 1977. Overview of the mystery genre, its conventions, and its practitioners. Helps readers understand Bagley’s place in the genre.