The Valley of the Fox

Preface to the 2014 Edition

First published in 1982, The Valley of the Fox is the fourth and final book in a series by Joseph Hone, who I regard as one of the great spy novelists of the twentieth century. In the last few decades, Hone’s standing in the genre 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 Private Sector the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin, while in 1984 the New York Times’ Anatole Broyard called The Sixth Directorate ‘one of the best suspense novels of the last ten years’.

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, he gets mixed up with an African princess at the United Nations in New York, while in The Flowers of the Forest he travels to Belgium on the trail of a vanished spook. In The Valley of the Fox, Marlow has retired to the Cotswolds, where he is writing his memoirs. Then a man breaks into his home, and he is forced to go on the run. This is a classic chase thriller, in the tradition of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. Some passages pay explicit homage to that book, with Marlow surviving on his wits in the countryside.

It’s a tremendous end to a superb but all-too-short-lived run of spy novels, which also includes the standalone The Paris Trap. All of these novels have now been reissued as Faber Finds. I find it hard to pick a favourite among them, as all 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 make Hone so special, and which I think makes him 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).