Harry's Game

Introduction To The Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Robert Harris

Thrillers exist for one purpose only — to entertain, to ‘thrill’ — and for that reason are among the most ephemeral of literary forms. Bought, read, discarded and forgotten inside a fortnight: such is the life-cycle of the average thriller.

But every so often the genre throws up a novel of such remarkable quality, the cycle is broken. Having finished it you don’t want to throw it out: on the contrary, you press it on your friends. You don’t forget it: its characters and atmosphere linger in your mind for years. John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is a superlative example. So is Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, and Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park. These are thrillers that have justly become classics of popular entertainment — novels that are likely to endure well into the next century — and this is the pantheon to which Harry’s Game belongs.

Published in 1975, it was Gerald Seymour’s first novel and has never been out of print since. Time (‘that old common arbitrator’ as Shakespeare called it) has judged it a classic — and for three good reasons.

First, and most obviously, it is a masterpiece of story-telling. From the opening scenes in which a nameless IRA assassin hurries across London to commit a murder, to the final, bloody confrontation on Ypres Avenue, Belfast, the plot uncoils with perfect logic and precision, and with remorseless speed.

Secondly, the character of Harry Brown — brave and patriotic, vulnerable and suspicious — is vastly superior to the standard thriller caricature of an undercover agent. Harry is no cardboard hero. He is a believable, flesh-and-blood figure. So, too, is his terrorist quarry, Billy Downs — his ‘game’. It is this depth and subtlety of characterization that help make the book so believable.

Indeed, I can think of no contemporary British novelist who has drawn a more convincing picture of the terrorist war in Northern Ireland than Gerald Seymour (readers who enjoy this novel should make sure they read The Journeyman Tailor). This is the third and decisive factor which makes Harry’s Game a classic. The crumbling streets of Catholic Belfast, with their warren of men’s hostels, boarding houses and bars, have seldom been better evoked. The smells and sounds of the city rise off the page, so that Belfast becomes almost a character in its own right, all the more frightening for being so familiar. This, after all, is not Berlin under the Nazis or Communist Moscow: this terrifying urban landscape into which Harry Brown descends, with its bomb sites and safe houses and street ambushes, is a British town.

It is twenty years since Harry’s Game was published. As I write, it seems for the first time possible — just possible — that the violent struggle it so brilliantly depicts may be drawing to a close. If that proves to be the case, and if a new generation of readers ever wishes to know what it was like, long ago, when marksmen and armoured cars had to maintain order in a major European city, they will find no better place to start than in the pages which follow.