Elleston Trevor

• Born: February 17, 1920
• Birthplace: Bromley, Kent, England
• Died: July 21, 1995
• Place of death: Cave Creek, Arizona

Types of Plot: Espionage; hard-boiled; psychological; private investigator; historical

Principal Series: Hugo Bishop, 1951-1957; Quiller, 1965-1996

Contribution

Elleston Trevor wrote approximately one novel per year from 1943 to the late 1980’s, under many pseudonyms. It was, however, the best seller The Berlin Memorandum (as Adam Hall, 1965; also known as The Quiller Memorandum) that brought him international acclaim. It won for him the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1966 and the French Grand Prix Littérature Policière, was filmed by Twentieth Century Fox (1966), and was later made into a British Broadcasting Corporation television series; it has been cited as a definitive example of the realistic Cold War espionage novel. Trevor made psychoanalysis a central concern of his detective and espionage fiction, and he explored deep-seated motives, needs, and compulsions that compel action at odds with the rational and conscious mind. He preferred to investigate people under pressure, driven by external and internal forces, and to focus on the animal instincts of the pursued.

The espionage novels, in the tradition of John le Carré and Len Deighton, explore double agentry—the motives, the tensions, the psychological complexities, and the fears of the clandestine life. They focus on the professional agent as a highly competent expert at survival, a tough-minded antihero beset by secret conspiracies within his own organization. At its best, the detail in Trevor’s novels creates the illusion of documentary, while the attitudes of the heroes—at times flippant, at times downright bitter and irreverent toward authority—reflect the Weltanschauung of the Cold War period.

Biography

Elleston Trevor was born Trevor Dudley-Smith on February 17, 1920, in Bromley, Kent, the son of Walter Smith and Florence (née Elleston) Smith. Educated at Yardley Court Preparatory School and Sevenoaks School, Kent, Trevor was an apprentice race car driver from 1937 to 1938, but with the outbreak of World War II joined the Royal Air Force and served as a flight engineer from 1939 to 1945. He turned to full-time writing in 1946, and in 1947 married Jonquil Burgess, with whom he had one son, Peregrine Scott, who would serve as his literary manager. Before turning to the genre that made him famous, Trevor initially focused on wartime stories about Dunkirk and other key historical events.

Trevor and his family lived in Spain for a time and then in France from 1958 to 1973. In 1973 they moved to the United States, where they lived in Fountain Hills, Arizona. Trevor’s interests included chess, travel, designing model airplanes, and astronomy, with the latter helping him “to keep a sense of perspective.” Trevor published novels for adults and adolescents as well as plays and stories. When asked his reason for writing, he first replied, “Complete inability to do anything else,” later adding, “I don’t know.” Finally, he answered that it certainly was not to escape life, which he found “too darned interesting,” but maybe it was to “escape some imprisoning memory of infancy . . . such as we all have deep in the subconscious.” The Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University, houses an Elleston and Jonquil Trevor Collection, but post-1980 materials are located at Arizona State University.

Analysis

Elleston Trevor was intrigued with the psychology of a mind under pressure, of men forced to the edge physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Trevor’s early works frequently include Freudian psychoanalysis of everything from male-female driving patterns and responses to war-induced stress syndrome. A Blaze of Roses (1952), for example, sensitively traces the roots of psychosis: how the private horror of a long-term fantasy romance exposed as illusion drives a meek and mild man to turn arsonist and embark on a wild flight to Tangiers with police in hot pursuit. The Billboard Madonna (1960), in turn, is typical in its compelling analysis of the effects of guilt on a hit-and-run driver, who pushes himself to the brink of total nervous collapse in his attempt to expiate his guilt.

The Theta Syndrome and The Sibling

All Trevor’s work questions the human reponse to shock and trauma and the psyche that provokes the response. In The Theta Syndrome (1977), the victim of one murderous attack is so terrified that she literally cannot breathe and, while in a coma, develops telekinetic and telepathic abilities to project her fears, while in The Sibling (1979), a story of sibling rivalry and reincarnation, an innocent youth must face the reality of her brother’s insanity and his incestuous and murderous intent. Trevor’s detective Hugo Bishop argues,

Human beings are never straight. . . . Our minds are spirals, curves, zigzags, circles—because before we can get anything straight in them, something gets in the way: a prejudice, a principle, a fear, a doubt, an inhibition. . . . Most of the time we don’t even realize why we do things, and say things.

Quiller

Trevor’s Quiller series observes Quiller in extreme situations: flying a Russian MiG into a trap behind Soviet lines; being attacked by a cocaine-crazed murderer; and parachuting into the Libyan desert with a small nuclear device that he must detonate to destroy British-manufactured nerve gas. In every case Quiller continually analyzes his own neurophysiology, receiving instant feedback from his various body parts under stress and sending internal commands to control their function (“shuddup stomach,” “hands grip like claws”). He tries to separate his mind from the pain and to remain objective in the most subjective of circumstances, as he feeds his internal computer the complex information necessary to make the intuitive leap in decision making that will mean the difference between life and death. Trevor relishes including physiological explanations of the functioning of brain and body under stress and using terms such as “retrogressive amnesia,” “isolation factors,” “alpha waves,” and “guilt-transference.”

To delve into this psyche, Trevor depended on either a first-person narrative or a third-person omniscient narrative that focuses on the inner thoughts or reactions of two or three main characters. The first-person narrators often engage in a stream-of-consciousness internal dialogue that reveals to the reader what the speaker hides even from himself, while the third-person narrators are as terse and controlled as an Ernest Hemingway hero.

Dialogue and Imagery

Trevor reveled in including lengthy passages of dialogue in foreign languages, particularly German, to give the reader a sense of realism, of alien culture, and of competence. He skips about in time as one would if following the memories of a fallible narrator and frequently speeds up or telescopes time in accordance with the psychological situation of his characters. Often he takes one step back for every two steps forward. Sometimes the action seems to occur in slow motion, with several pages devoted to the passage of seconds, and other times, as in the following example from The Sinkiang Executive (1978), it races forward to its inescapable outcome:

The gun had slid across one of the Chinese rugs and she wrenched herself free and got halfway there before I caught her again and threw her against the settee and went for the gun myself and got it and hit the magazine out and slipped it into my pocket and kicked the gun hard and send it spinning across the floorboards . . . as she came at me with her nails.

Trevor’s imagery grows out of a Darwinian view of nature, tooth and claw. The cat that toys coquettishly with men at the beginning of a Hugo Bishop story proves a lethal cheetah at the end. Quiller is the ferret, put down the hole to initiate a chase that will expose the enemy but that might cost Quiller his life: “An agent is sent like a ferret into a hole and he is not told if there is a dog at the other end.” Trevor records actions he finds “natural for a hunted creature,” such as instinctively making for the middle of a field or for the deeper cover of the furrows. Trevor’s narrators inevitably explore the way instinct interacts with reason to give a desperate man the same edge as a wild animal—a wild figuring of the odds and then a sudden rush based on instinct alone.

Trevor’s depiction of the police varies. In the espionage novels the police are often incompetent, unable to deal with the competition of trained assassins and competent operatives. In the pursuit novels the police are relentless, organized, methodical; their patterns are mechanical and hence often inescapable. In fact, at times they prove overzealous and jump to an erroneous interpretation of the facts, mistaking arson committed for personal reasons for carefully calculated sabotage and limited blackmail for political kidnapping.

The Berlin Memorandum

Trevor usually included arresting studies of the inner workings of a large organization: a major advertising firm that depends on the strengths and weaknesses of a handful of men to keep it solvent, a scientific project with carefully constructed safeguards that a single member can undermine, a think tank that leaks word of a nonexistent ultimate weapon and then must bear the earth-shattering consequences, a government bureau whose members reflect the cold, calculated policies necessitated by its prime directive. The description of “The Bureau” in The Berlin Memorandum is typical: “a government department” whose “nihilistic status” casts a “creeping blight over the people who work here, . . . rootless souls.” The directors are all cold-hearted and ruthless, characterized by “the non-committal eyes, the sharp nose, the lopsided jaw and the go-to-hell line of the mouth.”

Through his focus on governments and organizations, Trevor explored how far governments and individuals are willing to go to defend their political or social views and how easily conflicting motives and failures of understanding can lead to catastrophe. In Deathwatch (1984), a Moscow-produced lethal genetic virus used by a Kremlin power broker to make the world safe for communism leads to a countdown to nuclear destruction.

Trevor’s depiction of the truly hard-boiled hero focuses on his ability to inflict and receive superhuman punishment and is directly related to the author’s interest in human psychology and in the interaction of animal instinct and rational logic. Quiller might be exposed to cyanide fumes, crash in a high-speed chase, be ejected from an exploding jet, be concussed by a grenade, or be shot with a dart gun, but he forges ahead, transforming the assignment from a single impossible act to a full-scale impossible operation. The minds of Trevor’s heroes, whether hard-boiled supermen or average nonentities, grow clinically detached under pressure, calculate risks and potential actions at incredible speeds (three-second decisions), and then respond instinctively despite the calculations. As Quiller says, “By the time you’d been a few years at it you could handle pretty well anything because your mind turned into a computer, scanning the data and keeping you out of trouble.”

Violence

Part of what creates the hard-boiled effect is Trevor’s close focus. A description of a physical confrontation might involve as many as nine pages of meticulous detail of characters gouging, punching, and hammering—for example, of Quiller barely hanging on to the undercarriage of a speeding car or inching up a narrow broom closet to escape detection. Even in the more gentlemanly Bishop series the details of a fistfight or of a brutal crash are enumerated meticulously. As LeRoy Panek writes in The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890-1980 (1981), Trevor’s goal is “to bring violence home to his readers.” Whether he is describing the mutilated body of an accident victim or a fight to the death between operatives, the images of violence are intensely vivid:

Fingers at his face, scrambling blindly, live things, live weapons, move faster, digging, clawing in the night, in the dark, this is the way, feeling the soft flesh, hooking down, hooking down deep, his body shifting, yes, his arm lifting to—don’t let him—lifting to stop my fingers. . . . I . . . brought a series of eye-darts against his face and felt him jerk and swung a wedge-hand across his throat. . . . I paralysed the nerves in the bicep with a centre-knuckle . . . and drove the wedge-hand down with all the strength that was in me and felt the vertebrae snap and the head come forward . . . He didn’t move.

The effect of such detail is that the reader shares the terror, the paranoia, and the physical discomfort of being set up, being up on the run, being hunted, being interrogated, being physically abused. In other words, such explicit violence creates suspense, tension, and the illusion of realism.

The Ninth Directive

The detail may also be technical. For example, consider the description of a 561 Husqvarna in The Ninth Directive (1966):

. . . a .358 Magnum center-fire, with a three-shot magazine, 25« inch barrel, hand-checkered walnut stock, corrugated butt-plate and sling swivels. The fore-end and pistol grip are tipped with rosewood. The total weight is 7 pounds and the breech pressure is in the region of 20 tons p.s.i., giving a high muzzle velocity and an almost flat trajectory with a 150-grain bullet.

Panek believes that such technical detail and the focus on “humanistic psychology” do not fuse well with an adventure tale of what he calls “a cybernetic man,” but it is exactly this fusion that creates a typical Trevor novel. When it works well, it is stunning, as in The Sinkiang Executive’s terse but fascinating technical description of a military briefing session on how to cross Soviet airspace.

Despite the predictability of the pattern in Trevor’s work, there is always enough variety to keep the reader guessing. The changes in setting, with their well-defined topicality (Bangkok, Cambodia, the Sino-Russian border, Germany, the Amazon, the Sahara), create new situations of terrain and culture; so too do the individual natures of the assignments. The suspense always builds and the action overwhelms: car, boat, and submarine chases, the running of blockades, narrow escapes on or under water, aerial combat, and threats from individuals, groups, and machines. Pursuit is vital to a Trevor plot. It is the combination of fast action, psychological analysis, and Cold War cynicism that has earned for Trevor a permanent place in detective and espionage fiction.

Principal Series Characters:

• Hugo Bishop , lay analyst, gentleman detective, and chess enthusiast, plays a fast game of life and death among the beautiful, the rich, and the decadent, assisted by his secretary Miss Gorringe. Bishop studies people and relationships as closely as he studies the moves on his chessboard. His detached yet inquisitive nature elicits confidences, but Bishop is wise enough to realize that the truth lies hidden. Where others see the crowd with a floodlight, he claims to “use a spotlight” to “see the individual in clear focus.” As a consequence, he is quick to note the out-of-character, a clue to hidden realities. Under the pen name H. B. Ripton, he writes exhaustive theses on human behavior.
• Quiller is a British “shadow executive,” employed by a secret government bureau to handle situations so sensitive that they do not exist officially. An infiltrator who, after refusing military service, helped European Jews escape Nazi concentration camps, Quiller is an adept troubleshooter. He is also a formidable linguist, a karate expert, a practitioner of Zen mind control, a jet pilot, and a paranoid cynic (he has to be to survive). A loner who avoids the risks of associates, Quiller is sharp-tongued, suspicious, and abusive of all but the true professional. In effect, Quiller is defined only in terms of his work and needs danger and challenge to confirm his identity and to make life endurable.

Bibliography

Cawelti, John G., and Bruce A. Rosenberg. The Spy Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Scholarly study of British espionage fiction; sheds light on Trevor’s works.

East, Andy. The Cold War File. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983. Examines the representations of espionage in Cold War fiction and of the Cold War in espionage stories; provides context for understanding Trevor’s novels.

Hitz, Frederick P. The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Hitz, the former inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency, compares famous fictional spies and spy stories to real espionage agents and case studies to demonstrate that truth is stranger than fiction. Helps place Trevor’s work within the genre.

Panek, LeRoy. “Adam Hall.” In The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890-1980. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981. Scholarly study of British espionage thrillers written by a major critic in the academic study of mystery and detective fiction look at Trevor, writing as Adam Hall.

Penzler, Otto, ed. “Quiller.” In The Great Detectives. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Argues for including Trevor’s mysterious Quiller among the espionage genre’s “great detectives.”