The Flowers of the Forest

Preface to the 2014 Edition

First published in 1980, The Flowers of the Forest is the third in Joseph Hone’s series of spy novels featuring British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. In the last few decades Hone’s standing in the field has been somewhat eclipsed by the likes of John le Carré and Len Deighton, but in his day he was widely seen as their equal. In 1972, Newsweek called the first novel in the series, The Private Sector, the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin, while Isabel Quigly wrote of The Flowers of the Forest in the Financial Times:

This is the best thriller I’ve found in years, perhaps the best I remember — too serious and rich for the world thriller and what it implies, though sticking closely to the thriller genre — a novel about the mysteriousness of human beings rather than the mysteries of intelligence and diplomacy. The weaving of the story is so close, so tight, that no image, no hint, is ever wasted: everything links up with something else pages or chapters ahead … It all works without pretentiousness, going far beyond the limitations of its genre.

The idiosyncrasies of public taste are often unfathomable, but I sometimes wonder if more people don’t know of Hone’s work simply because it was neither fish nor fowl in the genre — rather, a less easily marketed combination. Spy fiction can be divided, very roughly, into two camps: ‘Field’ and ‘Desk’. James Bond is a field agent — we follow his adventures, not those of his superior M. In John le Carré’s novels, on the other hand, the focus tends to be on those back at headquarters — George Smiley is a senior officer at the Circus (he later, briefly, becomes head of it).

I enjoy both genres, but sometimes find myself wishing that the Field book I’m reading were as deft at characterisation and prose style as it is at the suspense. Similarly, I often find myself reading a Desk book and desperately hoping that something will happen. It’s all beautifully drawn, but is everyone going to be searching their filing cabinets for that manila folder for ever? In my own work, I’ve tried to have my cake and eat it: my character Paul Dark is a Desk man sent unwillingly back into the Field. In this I was partly influenced by Hone, who combined both camps in a way that leaves me breathless — and sick with envy.

Before I was a published novelist I interviewed Mr Hone about his work, and afterwards he sent me a very charming and touching letter, and enclosed copies of many of his reviews. While it was reassuring to see that others had also highly valued his work, I found the reviews depressing reading. When I see a quote from a newspaper on the back of a novel, I’m conscious that it may have been taken wildly out of context. But here were long reviews of Hone’s work from Time, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post and other august publications, comparing him favourably with le Carré, Deighton, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. Better still, the books live up to the praise.

Hone’s protagonist — ‘a man with almost no heroic qualities’, as he describes himself — is British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. He is repeatedly being taken out of his grubby office in the Mid-East Section in Holborn and dragged into the line of fire. The plots come thick and fast, and feature ingenious twists, femmes fatales, high-octane action, Machiavellian villains — all the great spy stuff you’d want. But it’s wrapped up in prose so elegant, and characterisation so subtle and pervasive, that you put the books down feeling you’ve just read a great work of literature.

Marlow himself is a wonderful character, and I think deserves to be as well known as Smiley. He’s the constant outsider, peering in at others’ lives, meddling where he shouldn’t, and usually being set up by everyone around him. He’s a kind and intelligent man, and terribly misused, but he’s also a cynic — he sees betrayal as inevitable, and tries to prepare for it.

We first meet him in The Private Sector, where he is an English teacher in Cairo who is gradually drawn into a spy ring. In The Sixth Directorate, Marlow becomes just a little wiser, getting mixed up with a beautiful African princess in New York. Hone then wrote a standalone spy thriller, The Paris Trap, before returning to Marlow with this novel, which was published in the US under the title The Oxford Gambit.

The plot centres around questions of professional and personal betrayal. Lindsay Phillips, a senior MI6 officer, has suddenly disappeared while tending his bees: has he been kidnapped, murdered — or was he perhaps, as some are now starting to fear, a Soviet double agent? Marlow is sent in to investigate, and starts prying around the family: how much did Phillips’ wife and daughter know of his secret life?

The basic set-up is familiar from several spy novels of the era, and would be put to great effect by John le Carré in A Perfect Spy six years later, but Hone handles it very differently. The narrative is a mix of first and third person, and features murders at funerals, chases across Europe, faked deaths and hidden affairs.

Hone wrote one more Marlow novel, The Valley of the Fox, before hanging up his spy writer boots. All of these novels have now been reissued in Faber Finds. I find it hard to pick a favourite, as all of them are packed with beautiful writing, astute psychological insight and pace: Hone never forgot he was writing thrillers. It’s the melding of the prose style with the twists and turns of the plots that makes Hone so special — makes him, I think, one of the greats.

Jeremy Duns is the author of the Paul Dark novels Free Agent (2009), Free Country (a.k.a. Song of Treason, 2010) and The Moscow Option (2012), and also the non-fiction Dead Drop (2013).