Simon Harvester
Simon Harvester was a British author known for his espionage novels that blend thrilling narratives with political insights, particularly reflecting his anticommunist stance. Born Henry St. John Clair Rumbold-Gibbs in 1910 in Wiltshire, England, Harvester's diverse career spanned roles as an industrial reporter, foreign correspondent, and political analyst, contributing to the authenticity of his writing. His most notable character, Dorian Silk, features in a series of thirteen novels, beginning with "Dragon Road" in 1956, and has been recognized as a complex portrayal of a secret service agent, marked by a commitment to public safety amidst international intrigue.
Harvester's novels often draw from his extensive travels in Third World countries, where he aimed to authentically capture political contexts and the implications of communism. While his books provide adventure and education, they are sometimes criticized for presenting dated information and for their treatment of female characters, who often fall into stereotypical roles. Despite these criticisms, Harvester's attention to detail and vivid descriptions of settings contribute to the immersive quality of his stories. Readers interested in post-World War II espionage literature may find Harvester's works both entertaining and thought-provoking, as they reflect the era's geopolitical concerns.
Simon Harvester
- Born: June 28, 1910
- Birthplace: Salisbury, Wiltshire, England
- Died: April 1, 1975
- Place of death: Unknown
Type of Plot: Espionage
Principal Series: Roger Fleming, 1942-1951; Malcolm Kenton, 1955-1957; Dorian Silk, 1956-1976; Heron Murmur, 1960-1962
Contribution
Simon Harvester’s espionage novels have been praised for their authenticity and for their ability to offer readers both an adventure and an education. Based on his travels in Third World countries and on his considerable insight into world politics, Harvester’s novels are characterized by an underlying anticommunist philosophy. Dorian Silk, introduced in Dragon Road (1956) and featured in thirteen “Road” novels, represents Harvester at his best. The Dorian Silk novels have been called “the truest portrait of a secret service agent.”
Biography
Simon Harvester was born Henry St. John Clair Rumbold-Gibbs on June 28, 1910, in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. Following graduation from Marlborough College, Wiltshire, Harvester studied painting in London, Paris, and Venice. He was married three times and had one son, from his first marriage.
Harvester’s career included work as an industrial reporter, film critic, publisher’s reader, foreign and war correspondent, chicken farmer, and political analyst. He also served in the Royal Corps of Signals and the Royal Intelligence Corps of the British Army. By the close of World War II, Harvester had visited nearly every Third World country, using his knowledge of many languages (English, French, German, Afrikaans, Arabic, Hindustani, and various dialects) to gather background information for his novels. In 1950, he received the Anisfield-Wolf Award (for improving racial understanding) for Twilight in South Africa (1950). Harvester died in April, 1975.
Analysis
Simon Harvester began his writing career during World War II, after being given a medical discharge from the British army. His first espionage novel, Let Them Prey (1942), was followed by some forty more, with his last work, Siberian Road, being published in 1976, the year following his death. These novels, in particular those published following World War II, are based for the most part on Harvester’s own travels and the conclusions he drew as a result of those travels. Often fictionalizations of actual events in international politics, Harvester’s novels have been praised for their authenticity and for the education they offer.
Yet the educational value of Harvester’s novels is limited, largely because most of the information they contain is dated. In addition, the account of most of the events described in the novels is colored by Harvester’s unswerving anticommunist philosophy, a philosophy to which he gave full voice in his nonfictional works, which were published under the name Henry Gibbs. In his nonfiction, Harvester analyzed the political situation in Africa and other emerging nations, giving close attention to Russian influence in these areas. Most of these works, like his award-winning study of South Africa, warn of Russian intrigues.
Harvester’s concern over the spread of communism in the Third World is clearly reflected in his fiction, particularly in his efforts to make his novels as true to life as possible. The authenticity of the novels’ settings, the topicality of their themes, their frequent reference to the myopia of free world governments, and their sometimes tiresome monologues about the Russian threat to democracy suggest that Harvester intended his fiction to be taken seriously. As a result, Harvester’s espionage novels may be read simply as exciting adventures in international espionage or they may be studied as examples of post-World War II anticommunist literature.
Harvester’s commitment to realism is also reflected in the care that he took to make his agents as authentic as possible. In creating his spies, Harvester appears to have been inspired by the writings of serious students of espionage, such as Allen Dulles, from whose book The Craft of Intelligence (1963) Harvester quotes in an epigraph in Assassins Road (1965):
There is in the intelligence officer . . . a certain “front-line” mentality, a “first-line-of-defence” mentality. His awareness is sharpened because in his daily work he is almost continually confronted with evidence of the enemy in action. If the sense of adventure plays some role here, as it surely does, it is adventure with a large measure of concern for the public safety.
Harvester’s greatest spy, Dorian Silk, is this kind of intelligence officer. Featured in thirteen “Road” novels, Silk is a professional agent’s agent. Far from being a James Bond kind of spy, he is convincingly human, neither a soldier of fortune nor a devil-may-care freelancer. If adventure is involved in a Silk story—and it almost always is—there is also, underlying whatever is happening and never far from Silk’s mind, “a large measure of concern for the public safety.”
The authenticity so evident in Harvester’s settings and his characterization of men is strangely absent in the women featured in his stories. Whether this was a concession to what he believed readers of espionage novels wanted or reflective of his own bias, Harvester was apparently unable to escape from a rather jaded, lurid portrayal of the female protagonists in his novels. Throughout the novels, Harvester’s male protagonists are hindered in their fight against the heinous designs of communism by beautiful women whose only goal in life is to sacrifice their bodies to some spy.
Moscow Road
In Moscow Road (1970), for example, Dorian Silk’s important mission to Moscow is sidetracked by an unexpected encounter with Russian agent Irena Gerina. Silk had last seen Irena in Yemen four years before—just after he had killed her husband—and her last words had been a promise to hunt him down and shoot him like a dog. Beautiful in her wrath but even more beautiful now, Irena surprises Silk by informing him that during the intervening four years she has been waiting, not to shoot him, but to let him know that she is his. Calling herself an archetypal primitive woman, Irena Gerina compares herself to the women in Greek tragedies, women who fall in love with the soldiers who kill their husbands and ravish them in the process. Forgoing any resort to euphemisms, Irena simply murmurs, “I want to go to bed with you.”
Assassins Road
Although Harvester’s female characters never seem to stray from this weary stereotype, their language is not always as blunt as Irena Gerina’s. In Assassins Road, for example, Harvester achieves an almost Song of Songs quality in Nofret Gohar’s appeal to Silk:
“Man, must I die of thirst for the wine of thy love to relieve me?” she murmured huskily. “Must thou torment me? O man, since we parted my body has been a desert burnt by merciless heat awaiting thy presence to give it freshness and meaning. Thou hast obsessed my senses. Thy vigour and strength torment me. I think of thee every minute. I crave to be the instrument under thy hands. Must thou deny us the solace of our passion? I await thee. Must time mock our failure to fill these hours? Thy need is my delight. O lion, thou would find me thy true mate.”
Aside from his portrayal of women, Harvester’s novels are wholly realistic. His descriptions of cities, villages, and local topography demonstrate a careful attention to detail. Perhaps reflecting his early training as a portrait painter, Harvester’s descriptions provide authentic physical and geographic details while evoking subtly the mood of the place described. In Assassins Road, for example, Harvester begins his story with an excellent thumbnail sketch of Jerusalem that also sets the mood for what follows. The opening sentence, “This is a city,” when read along with the description, recalls Moby Dick’s famous “Call me Ishmael.” Also in Assassins Road, Harvester writes,
Some people say you can guess something or know it or imagine it but you cannot “sense” it. That is wrong here. You sense the essential difference of these men. . . . What differentiates these men from others is their eyes. You sense that they believe they live on the verge of some gigantic manifestation of divine intervention. Among the young and middle aged the eyes are hot and brooding; among the old they are contemplative and brooding. You sense that they believe themselves animated by realities unfelt by men elsewhere, as if each one regarded himself as a part of legend.
This attention to detail and the ability to work this detail into authentic descriptions serve Harvester well as he establishes a mood for his stories. Once the story becomes more involved, however, Harvester is not at all selective about the details. His novels suffer as a result, as is evident in the following passage from Zion Road (1968):
According to a cheap pock-marked alarm-clock wedged amid a litter of filthy chipped crockery, each item of which had either a coagulated brown tidemark or a bile-coloured puddle covered by greyish scum, surrounded by makeshift ashtrays overflowing like multiplying bacteria that spread like contagion over an ancient kitchen table, it was nearly quarter to eight when they were taken into the small ground-floor room occupied by Kabak and a man who sat fidgeting at a radio.
The two similes contained in this sample (“overflowing like multiplying bacteria” and “spread like contagion”) are also characteristic of the style of Harvester, who was seldom satisfied with a description that did not contain the word “like”:
A second pistol hit him on the left side of the head. . . . tinsel streamers whizzed around like comets and plunged into his head. Something hit his head again. . . . The tinsel glowed like molten silver. . . . He tried to stiffen his knees. . . . Instead they seemed to burst like little paper bags full of water. Something hit his face or his face hit it. Out of a black void a roar like a giant wind rushed into him.
In spite of this tendency to overwrite, Harvester involves the reader in the excitement of his stories. The intensity of his feeling about the threat of communism and the effort he put into giving his stories authenticity make them eminently readable—although the reader who attempts several of Harvester’s novels in succession will find that scenes and conversations begin to sound familiar. This is not surprising, given the fact that Harvester produced an average of more than two books each year from 1942 until 1975. Even so, the reader who takes Harvester in limited doses, who can skim through some overblown prose and wink at his characterization of women, will find that, among the writers of espionage fiction, Harvester stands out as one of the genre’s master storytellers.
Principal Series Character:
Dorian Silk is a British spy with an unlimited knowledge of languages and local customs of the exotic corners of the world to which he is sent. Sardonic, a hater of cities and bureaucracy, Silk is deeply motivated by the Protestant work ethic but often has trouble completing his missions because so many of the women who are involved in international espionage find him irresistibly attractive and refuse to leave him alone.
Bibliography
Britton, Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Traces the evolution of the figure of the spy in espionage thrillers and other works of film and fiction. Provides perspective for Harvester’s works.
Hepburn, Allan. Intrigue: Espionage and Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. This study of British and American spy fiction begins with three general chapters on the appeal, emotional effects, and narrative codes of the genre, thus helping readers understand Harvester’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 fictional spies to actual intelligence agents with the intent of demonstrating that truth is stranger than fiction. Although Harvester is not directly discussed, the work helps place his fiction within the genre.
McCormick, Donald, and Katy Fletcher. Spy Fiction: A Connoisseur’s Guide. New York: Facts on File, 1990. Includes an entry on Harvester, comparing him to his contemporaries, precursors, and followers.
Smith, Myron J., Jr., and Terry White. Cloak and Dagger Fiction: An Annotated Guide to Spy Thrillers. 3d ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Detailed annotated bibliography of spy fiction comments on Harvester’s works and career.