The New Black Mask (No 5)

William Haggard: An Interview

William Haggard is Richard Clayton, a former civil servant in India and London. In 1958 he published his first book, Slow Burner, which introduced Col. Charles Russell of the British Security Executive, who has been the centred figure in most of the twenty-eight Haggard thrillers. His novels pack sufficient action to be classified as page turners, but Haggard is primarily interested in character motivation and the use or abuse of responsibility. It has been remarked that his fiction provides a meeting ground for the spy story and the novel of manners — an offspring of Geoffrey Household and Jane Austen.

He is not yet as well known in America as in England, but a reviewer in the Chicago Daily News declared that “The most intelligent suspense novels in the English language are being written by William Haggard.” An evident quality of his work is its conservative stance, which has upset liberal British critics. Nevertheless, Haggard is not primarily a political writer; he is concerned with the redities of power and the professionalism of those who exercise it.

William Haggard is published in England by Hodder & Stoughton and in America by Walker.

New Black Mask interviewed Mr. Clayton in his home on the Essex coast.

NBM: How did you turn thriller writer?

Haggard: I was living in a place called Hartley Whitney, which is the rough equivalent of one of those little suburban New York towns, and I was commuting to London. On the way up I read the papers — this was in 1958 — and on the way home I read suspense novels. Now this was just before the great flood of them. I couldn’t get enough to read. I read people like Geoffrey Household, but I didn’t like Ian Fleming at all, and I thought, well possibly there’s a market here. Something between the knockabout, common or garden-variety cliff-hanger and the later rather highbrow, intellectual thrillers. So I had a shot at it, and I took it to Innes Rose at the Farquharson literary agency. He told me what seemed wrong. I hadn’t constructed it properly. So I took it away. When I took it back to him after making some changes, he said, “You know, I can sell this to the first publisher I take it to.” And he did. He sold it to Cassell. That was the first book I did, called Slow Burner. That was way back in 1958, and I’d got rather hooked on writing thrillers. And I went on writing thrillers.

NBM: Slow Burner was the first novel you ever wrote?

Haggard: I’d never written a word before that.

NBM: No literary apprenticeship in school? Writing for the school magazines? That sort of thing?

Haggard: I wrote the house notes for my school, but that’s the lot. I’d never written anything else. Or ever thought of writing fiction. It must be in the blood, because my mother’s name was Haggard. That’s why I took it. As you know, there was a very successful Victorian writer called H. Rider Haggard, but I’m not descended from him. My grandfather wrote a lot of pamphlets, so I suppose the itch to write was in the# blood. So there it was. I took this up, and it seemed to go very well. One thing that went very strongly for me was that I’d read a lot of American authors.

NBM: Which ones?

Haggard: Ones that you’ve probably never heard of. People like Joseph Hergesheimer and Willa Cather, twenties and thirties. Now at that time my own contemporaries were swooning over Aldous Huxley or Rosamund Lehmann and that sort of thing. I couldn’t stomach it. I had to read some sort of fiction when I was an undergraduate. Undergraduates did have time to read fiction in the twenties. So I read these people. I still have an almost complete collection of Hergesheimer, which I very much treasure. I think he’s a much-underestimated novelist. The only other man I know of who shared that opinion is the American critic H. L. Mencken. He thought a lot of him. Well, I share his view. I think he was superb at it.

NBM: Your work is nothing like Hergesheimer’s. His writing is lush.

Haggard: Very lush. Mine’s very spare. I’ve been told I have difficulty getting it up to sixty or seventy thousand words — have to pad it a bit sometimes. My natural length is about fifty thousand words, and of course no publisher wants that.

NBM: Beyond the fact that you enjoyed reading them, why, when you commenced writing, did you settle on the intrigue or espionage novel rather than the murder novel?

Haggard: Two reasons. First, I had a political background in which I was a civil servant. I started life as a civil servant in India. Then in the war I was in the Indian army, and I went to the Staff College; and after I came out of it I went into — not the Intelligence Corps — but a department which ran the business of operating the Funnies. You know, finding them boots and stopping them sending telegrams to the viceroy. That sort of thing. So I had that background. Also, to a certain extent I enjoyed using the books as vehicles for my own political background. Which indeed I'm afraid they are.

NBM: They certainly are, and some of the English reviewers are really irritated by them.

Haggard: They don’t like it a little bit. There’s one of them writes those infuriated reviews in the Glasgow Herald — also in the New Statesman, needless to say.

NBM: It seems to me that you’re saying something about the decline of English character, about the decline of the English sense of responsibility and duty. I read your works as a lament for the English standards that have vanished since World War II.

Haggard: I agree with that. They are laments. Also I once had to put it this way: I don't think myself that the real enemy is communism. I think it’s liberal humanism. That’s what we call it. The wet Left. And to my mind it’s the wet Left that’s bringing us down. We may one day indeed even need communism to brace us up again.

NBM: Because they at least have discipline?

Haggard: They at least have discipline — and how. I was born in a country vicarage, where it’s very simple. We weren’t poor, but we were very far from rich. And that makes you extremely competitive. You can always tell children of the vicarage. People like Virginia Wade. You couldn’t get anything more competitive than Virginia Wade. You see, the background was: Look! you’re just as good as the boys up at the big house. Just as good. We can give you a good education, and after that you’re on your own. We can’t leave you any money. We’ll send you to a good school and university if you can get in — which in those days wasn’t that difficult — and then you’re on your own.

I went to Lancing, and then I went to Oxford — Christ Church. And then I went into the Indian civil service. And during the war, since I had a reserve commission, I went into the Indian army. I got mixed up in intelligence there. I don’t say I was concerned with intelligence gathering at all, evaluating it. I wasn’t. But I was certainly very concerned with keeping it on its feet. And preventing it doing anything too outrageous, because intelligence officers are very strange people. I mean they do very unmilitary things. They’re apt to be extroverts. And then when I came back I went to the home civil service. I then got mixed up in something called Enemy Property, of which I became controller in time. And in 19571 realized that I hadn’t got that much more time to do in the Civil Service — this was another factor in my turning to writing. I would have an adequate pension, and by that time I had made a little money. But what was I going to do? How was I going to fill the day? So I thought, well, I’ll try my hand at writing, and I did. And I stayed with Cassell’s until they blew up. I was very happy with Cassell’s. As you know, they were bought by another publisher that didn’t do any fiction at all. Then I went to Hodder & Stoughton where I’m even more happy. I’ve always had very happy relationships with my publishers. I’ve always got on with them.

NBM: For a while Penguin did a splendid job with you. Back in the sixties, Penguin had you in every railroad station newsstand in England. But you’re not published by Penguin now.

Haggard: It was my publishers who sold the secondary rights. They told my agents that they’d sell them to so and so. Later they sold them to some others, but at the moment I haven’t got a paperback publisher in England. I’ve got three unpublished novels in America, which I’m not too worried about. What I am worried about is the past. I don’t feel that I’ve been given an entirely fair crack of the whip. Walker took me gladly enough in America, and I don’t think they lost money on me, after the Detective Book Club and after paperbacks and so on.

NBM: I’ll put it this way: much less interesting writers are doing much better in America. Americans are being deprived of splendid reading. The kind of novel that you write isn’t written by anyone else I know.

Haggard: Certainly not Len Deighton and certainly not le Carré.

NBM: It’s Haggard. I think Americans will respond to Colonel Russell because Americans are hero, worshipers, and Colonel Russell obviously represents, for you, the best in English character.

Haggard: Yes, yes. Even I regard him as a slight hero.

NBM: But let’s take a closer look at just what Russell represents. We’ve already said standards: courage, honor, duty, responsibility. Those things that were once thought of as the cornerstones of English character. Beyond expressing your respect for these things, are you also issuing warnings? Are you telling your readers, “Look—”

Haggard: Unless we get back to these, we shall need the Russians in to put us straight. But we are collapsing now. I’m convinced of this. It doesn’t matter which government you’ve got, but under our present constitutional system, or under any government we’re likely to have, we’re going to sink to the level of Malta.

NBM: When did it start? Did it start post World War II or did it start with the intellectuals of the thirties?

Haggard: I reckon what broke us was the First World War, because that took the finest of our young lives and it cost us a terrible lot of money. Germany has beaten us twice, really. It has indeed. Look at Germany now, it’s stinking rich. Now you ask me, “Are you sounding a warning?” Perhaps I am, but not deliberately. I’m not a Billy Graham about it.

NBM: But it’s there.

Haggard: But it’s there. Oh yes, I have to admit that. For instance, that reviewer that I’ve been talking about: when he wants to be nasty about Russell he calls him a Boy Scout, which is slang for being a bit of a goodie, a bit overkeen. Well, different, having old-fashioned values, like discipline and keeping your nose clean.

NBM: This list of your titles takes us up to ’84, and it’s over twenty-five novels. How long does it take you to write a novel?

Haggard: I take much more time getting the framework up, the steelwork up, than I do writing the book. I’m not one of those writers who says, “I’m going to start a book today,” and goes out and buys a quire of paper and starts writing. I can’t do it that way. You must have a firm plot, and you must have enough incident in it — not necessarily recurring at regular intervals. All of this sounds terribly corny, but it is in fact how thrillers are constructed.

NBM: Do you have a full outline when you start?

Haggard: I have a chapter outline as to what happens for, say, fifteen chapters, the main occurrences, playing the dialogue against the description, and so on. All the old tricks. All the old corny tricks. But that takes me much longer than actually writing the book, which I can do in — well, given a fair run, I can do it in twelve weeks, comfortably. The actual writing and then typing out.

NBM: Longhand first?

Haggard: Oh, yes.

NBM: And then typescript?

Haggard: Yes.

NBM: Do you do your own typescript, or send it out to a secretary?

Haggard: No, I do my own. But only because only I can read my handwriting.

NBM: Morning writer?

Haggard: I write in the morning. I get up early, write for two or three hours, then go shopping, and then my friend and I have lunch. And then — a habit I acquired in the East — I have a couple of hours sleep in the afternoon. And then start the day again.

NBM: Russell’s age is a bit of a problem, isn’t it? You got him to about sixty, and in the recent novels he seems rather younger.

Haggard: In the last two novels; he only appears as a reference character. Now I had to talk this out with my publishers and my agents. He’d been replaced by a very anglicized West Indian, which I’m told went quite successfully. This chap went to Harrow and has become very English. And he has a delightful wife.

I had to talk to my publishers about replacing Russell, because they said you can’t really get away with Russell forever. They all said that I rather tended to project myself into Russell. To a certain extent he was what I would rather like to be, if I’d been a regular soldier, if I’d been Anglo-Irish, and if I’d been in the Irish Guards. But he’s got a lot of other characteristics. And they said, “Well, you simply can’t get away with this. He’s too old. He can’t be jumping out of windows and doing the things he does. You’ve just got to have a younger protagonist.” So I thought up this West Indian.

NBM: Let’s return to the wet Left, please.

Haggard: I can’t tell you much about the Left except I don’t like them.

NBM: I mean in terms of what they have done to English society. When did it begin, in the thirties?

Haggard: I reckon early thirties or very late twenties. I came out of the University in 1929. It wasn’t noticeable then. I went to India in 1932 when it was just noticeable. I came back in 1936 and got married. And then it was very noticeable. The sheer decay of standards. I realize I’m simply an old fogy. And the books show it. But I’m not going to change at my age. I’m pretty much dyed-in-the-wool by now.

NBM: Is it accurate to say that these Left intellectuals are motivated by a curious self-hatred?

Haggard: Entirely. Self-hatred, and another factor, particularly with the rich ones, guilt. What do they do about it? Nothing. Do they give their money away? No sir. They do not give their money away. They keep it. They run big houses. They’re all as bogus as a three-dollar bill. I’ve met them when I was working in London. But one thing I’ve always kept away from is literary society. I never went to publishers’ parties or mixed with the Left writers. Never. Even when I was actually living in London myself, in Doctorland near Harley Street. But I got a very strong distaste for them, a sort of instinctive mistrust. It’s just like I didn’t like rats.

NBM: One of the things that reviewers seem to complain about is your insistence that there are racial characteristics, there are racial differences.

Haggard: That is taboo thinking.

NBM: It seems very clear in your novels, for example, that most Indians are not to be trusted. And you prefer Turks to Greeks.

Haggard: I much prefer Turks to Greeks. I don't like Greeks. So far as the Indian martial races are concerned, I have great admiration for them: Sikhs, Marathas, Gurkhas. They’re mostly yeoman peasant stock: the eldest son runs the land, and the youngest son goes into the army. Just like that. They’ve done it for generations. I have the greatest respect for them. But apart from them, the rest of India is a four-letter word.

NBM: You regard the Swiss and the French as both feckless and bribable.

Haggard: Infinitely bribable. The French are merely a nuisance. They’ve never forgiven the Anglo-Saxons for saving them. I don’t like Germans, but I greatly admire them. In fact, you’ll get a bottle of German wine for lunch.

NBM: Do you read detective fiction?

Haggard: The standard detective novel, what they call the cozies — Agatha Christie — I can’t read. And I cannot read what we call the “whydunits.”

NBM: Who are the authors of the “whydunits”?

Haggard: Julian Symons. People like that. The genre starts off by having a crime, tells you on the first page who’s done it, and spends the rest of it in amateur psychology, explaining he didn’t get on with his wife. If I want to read psychology, I want to read the hard stuff that tells you what it’s really about or what a good priest will tell you. They’re all laid in some dreary south London suburb. Some little man going into London every day on the bus throttles his wife because she won’t sleep with him or something. The thing becomes excruciatingly boring. They’re not crime stories at all. There’s no crisis, there’s no solution, there’s nothing. It just carries you through this chap’s mind and his relations with his wife, or his mistress, or his girl friend, or whatever. They’re all sex murders in one way or another. And I find them intensely boring. Of the current thrillers, I think Len Deighton’s good. I can’t read le Carré.

NBM: Why not?

Haggard: There’s too much angst in it. He’s an angry young man, or angry old man.

NBM: What’s he angry about?

Haggard: The world. And that’s too large a target. The way the world is run. He’s angry with the whole system. And it doesn’t do. Well, I’m angry with it too, but I’ve got to live with it. He appears to think he can change it. I know he can’t.

NBM: But his George Smiley is not all that far from Colonel Russell. Same kind of man, old-fashioned standards, doing the job, getting on with it, and battling the incompetents and frauds in the government.

Haggard: That is in fact what does happen.

NBM: If Colonel Russell really had power, if he were, say, a senior minister, what would he do?

Haggard: I must slip that one, because I can’t conceive him as a politician, at least not one under the democratic system. I mean, he might, just conceivably, start some — I hate the word fascist — organization, but I can’t see him working as a politician. In fact, I’ve always been rather careful to draw the distinction between what he does and what he's told to do, which is noticeable in several books when he bends the law at risk of his own head. But fortunately he gets away with it.

NBM: He doesn’t need the job, which helps.

Haggard: He doesn’t need it, no. He’s a man in comfortable financial circumstances, and therefore he’s prepared to take a chance and does. But I can’t see him as a politician. I don’t know what he’d do. I just can’t see him taking it on. I think he’d go mad. I’m sorry I can’t answer that. I’ve never even thought what he’d do. I certainly wouldn’t ever consider a book in which he was in a political job. Never. No, it’s not his cup of tea at all.

NBM: But you think it is at least conceivable that, given the proper inducements, he could join an extra-governmental political movement.

Haggard: Put it this way; I’m sure if Russia successfully invaded this country tomorrow, the first man they would employ would be Colonel Russell.

NBM: And he’d work for them?

Haggard: Oh yes.

NBM: Why?

Haggard: Discipline. The first people they’d shoot would be the intellectual Left. They’re all going to concentration camps, or, if they're lucky, going to be shot. But people like Russell… The hard Right has got much more in common with communism than the soft Left.

NBM: Colonel Russell and the class system or William Haggard and the class system. You uphold it?

Haggard: Oh yes, uphold it strongly, but I’m not a snob. I know which class I was born to.

NBM: Define snob for me.

Haggard: That’s asking something. Now in the old days it used to mean “climber,” roughly a man who sought the company of, or kowtowed to, those in a class above him. Now it appears to mean, as currently used, anybody who dares to admit that class exists. I know exactly what class I belong to. I belong to what we used to call the professional upper-middle class. I have no wish to be anything else. I’m not upper class and never shall be.

NBM: But the Colonel is, isn’t he?

Haggard: The Colonel, I suppose, is. Yes. He’s upper class, but I hope he’s not offensively so.

NBM: Would you say that the English upper class have betrayed their responsibilities?

Haggard: Not betrayed them, they’ve failed them. There was no act of deliberate betrayal, I’m sure.

NBM: Failure of character?

Haggard: There’s no drive, I think. After all, there’s a lot to be said for them. If you’re inbred as they are you can’t have particularly powerful genes. If you line-breed a dog… There’s a very common dog around here, hunt terriers — some people call them Jack Russells, but they’re not — and they are linebred until they become absolutely daft.

The upper class has been clipped of a good deal of power deliberately. The House of Lords now has no power at all. It’s a sort of old boys’ club. And all these life peers have been pumped into it because it’s a cheap way of pensioning off politicians. Because they get paid to attend, whereas proper peers don’t. It’s got no power over a money bill. It can hold up and it can send a bill back through the Commons. But if the Speaker of the House of Commons certifies the thing as a money bill, House of Lords can’t effectively touch it.

NBM: Would it be accurate to say that one of the things Colonel Russell does is uphold the class system?

Haggard: No. I don’t think it would. I’ll put it this way: He’s aware of it but has long since given up hope of changing the direction of the world. He mistrusts what the sillies call egalitarianism, which doesn’t mean a thing. I don’t think he’s conscious of his class at all; in fact it’s one of the nice things about him. He just is upper class and that’s all, as the nicer ones are. I went to a college at Oxford which was full of the upper class, and I wasn’t treated any different because I wasn’t.

NBM: Why should Americans read you? What will they get from your work?

Haggard: I suppose something about the decadent limey state. Because I do feel we are decadent. I may not be, but then I’m old. I’m finished.

NBM: Could it be that your work requires a greater knowledge of English society than American readers have?

Haggard: Yes. I like that question; I think you put your finger on it. Certainly a greater knowledge than the average inhabitant of Croaking Bull, Ohio, has. I don't imagine that I would play in Peoria. So I can’t imagine Haggard being read in Peoria. Why should they? It isn’t all that exciting; it certainly isn't notably sexy.

NBM: I’m sure that someone along the line has said to you, “Look, if you really want to sell your books, you have to put in some bedroom scenes.” What was your response?

Haggard: I may have been in a bedroom myself, but that doesn’t make me a good writer of bedroom fiction. Those blow-by-blow accounts of sexual intercourse bore me stiff. That’s something you do, not something you write about. What’s that chap called who writes bloody great blockbusters full of sex? Harold Robbins. I can’t read Harold Robbins, can you?

NBM: Why does le Carré sell in Peoria? Not because of sexual content.

Haggard: I can’t answer that. Well, he has a certain air of gravitas, which I haven’t. He’s much more solemn than I am. That’s why I find him rather a difficult read. I don’t share his view of life. He has the extreme Protestant ethic — that what counts is that you have to find your own way to God.

NBM: Why has the spy novel become such a popular genre? In the old days there were E. Phillips Oppenheim and John Buchan and almost nobody else. Is it all response to the conditions of the cold war?

Haggard: Yes. But I wouldn’t call Fleming a spy writer. In fact, he writes adventure stories. I can see why they’re madly popular and made into marvelous films, because something happens every second. They are action-packed; the action is the story.

NBM: In his early novels I think he was trying to say something serious about terrorism. It seems to me that Fleming was the first novelist to recognize terrorism as a subject for fiction.

Haggard: Yes. I’ve just turned in a book to Hodder & Stoughton called The Martello Tower, written about this coast, about terrorism. It will be out next year. It’s based on the idea that this coast is riddled with mud creeks, and they’re all guarded by those Martello Towers which we put up against Napoleon. And smuggling still goes on, but it’s soft smuggling. Things like silk, brandy, and perfume. What happens in this book is what happens if a terrorist takes it over, starts bringing in arms and mortars.

NBM: To what purpose?

Haggard: Attacking the royal family when they’re on a state drive. You could put a mortar two miles away. That’s two thousand meters. It’s quite a range. You can put that mortar anywhere, but you can’t control the whole of London with police. You put it somewhere in a backyard in Tottenham or somewhere like that They’re very accurate. You can land them on a blanket. Imagine a royal procession going up the Mall with a couple of mortars firing. If you’ve got a good crew, you can get up to fifteen rounds a minute. The Mall would be a holocaust. Fifteen rounds a minute. If you’ve got two mortars, thirty a minute. You’re going to hit something. You might not hit the royal coach, but you’ll wipe out the bodyguard and everything else and the spectators. So that’s quite a story.

NBM: What do you hope that your canon amounts to?

Haggard: I don’t grade it higher than high-class entertainment. I’m not a message writer. If you’re asking me have I got any message to give a suffering world, the answer is emphatically no. If it can give intelligent people some amusement, I’m satisfied. I’m afraid I am writing for people of above-average intelligence, because I just can’t read pulp, so why should I write it? No, I am an entertainer basically. I’ve no serious message. I don’t try to convert anybody to anything. I’m a complete skeptic myself. I look at every statement I don’t take it on trust. You’ve got to have a bloody good look at it yourself.

NBM: The celebrated mythical reader: who do you see as your ideal reader?

Haggard: In America I haven’t an idea. In this country I have a pretty shrewd one. It’s somebody over forty or even over forty-five. I don’t think I appeal to the young very much. Somebody who would rather read a civilized book than goggle the box. Somebody of a certain standard of education, not necessarily Yale or Oxford. Somebody who can appreciate a writer who doesn't take too many chances with the English language — which I don’t. I take a lot of chances with syntax but none with grammar, absolutely none. Somebody who realizes the subjunctive tense still exists; somebody who appreciates it when you say “whatsoever it be” rather than “whatsoever it is.” In other words, a fairly educated reader.

NBM: You used the word civilized a moment ago. What is a “civilized reader”?

Haggard: A civilized reader is a reader with a certain standard of education.

NBM: The genre you write in is perceived as a mass genre, a popular genre.

Haggard: Oh yes. The spy story or the suspense novel. That is perceived to be a mass genre. Oh yes, I would agree with you. But I wouldn’t agree that everybody writing in that genre has to aim at a mass readership. I certainly don’t.

NBM: If you were starting over, if it were 1958 again and you were turning novelist at the improbable age of fifty-one, with what you have learned from your thirty books, what changes would you make in your career plan?

Haggard: None.

NBM: You’ve written what you wanted to write?

Haggard: Yes, I’ve written what I wanted to write, and the only thing I’m capable of writing. I could never sit down and write one of what they call “sensitive” novels, that sort of delicate interplay where nothing happens. P. G. Wodehouse once described it beautifully as one of those books in which little happens for eighty thousand words and on the last page the undergraduate decides not to commit suicide after all. That sort of book I had no ambition and no sort of gift to write.