I have always been a keen reader and, when I was little, worked my way through many of the traditional children’s fiction series: The Famous Five, Just William, Billy Bunter, The Three Investigators (American...) and also Enid Blyton’s slightly less known series of what she always called the “Barney” books featuring Diana, Roger and Snubby plus a dog called Loony who went off on “hols” and had adventures very much like the “Five”.
Into my early teens, I developed a penchant for the rather grimmer Sven Hassel “SS Punishment Battalion on the Russian Front” type books and I also devoured all the Commando Picture Library stories that I could find.
Comic-wise at various points of my young life, I regularly read “The Topper”, “Tiger and Scorcher”, “Hotspur”, “The Beano”, “Warlord”, “Cheeky Weekly” and, later, “2000AD” – plus a few less well known titles such as “Crunch” and “Speed” which quickly merged with other publications. I then got into music in a big way and moved on to Smash Hits magazine and later graduated to the more mature “Sounds” and “Melody Maker”.
So, while I have always read a little bit to help me relax before bedtime – as an adult just as likely to be some HE Bates or DH Lawrence as well as Len Deighton and John Le Carre – since a recent bout of ill health, my literary turnover has risen quite dramatically.
In the past 2 years, I have got through a huge number of Lynda La Plante’s books: The Jane Tennison (1970s) series, the Anna Travis books, the Lorraine Page (US detective) trilogy, the Legacy/ Talisman saga, the Widows trilogy and am now working through the new Jack Warr series as they come out. The stand alone novels of hers that I have read so far – Bella Mafia, Twisted, Entwined, Sleeping Cruelty and Royal Flush have all been equally as good and I plan to work through the rest at some stage.
Other series that I have worked my way through to date include Carola Dunn’s Daisy Dalrymple books and her 4 Cornwall mysteries, Frances Brody’s Kate Shackleton mysteries, LC Tyler’s Herring stories, Jacqueline Winspeare’s Maisie Dobbs, Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway novels, Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle MI5 books, Louisa Young’s Riley Purefoy WW1 and aftermath trilogy and her Angelina Gower trilogy – as well as all of Dirk Bogarde’s volumes of autobiography, and a few other novels I found out in the shed.
I am now making in-roads into Edward Marston’s Victorian era Railway Detective books, Stephen Done’s post-WW2 equivalent, the Inspector Vignoles stories and Elly Griffiths’ Brighton Mysteries.
BUT the topic I am actually working up to writing about today is another series of historical murder mystery espionage stories set in WW2 – the Maggie Hope series written by Susan Elia MacNeal.
I am enjoying these stories immensely and a huge amount of research has obviously gone into the background and a lot of thought put into the development of the main characters. But I do have a couple of on-going niggles.
Now, I fully appreciate that MacNeal is an American author and is mainly writing for an American audience – and I applaud the fact that she has chosen to write about an American character living in England for her series of books. That being the case, I am perfectly happy to see all the usual “Americanisms” in her writing – different spellings such as “color” instead of “colour”, use of alternative words like “billfold” for “wallet” etc – but what does jar on me a bit is where she has British character from the 1940s using language which, to my mind, would never been used by somebody back in those days.
I’m not just being a bitchy whinging keyboard warrior here, by the way, I have actually written to the author and raised some of those points with her – but she hasn’t replied, yet. I do realise that famous authors receive sackloads and sackloads of unsolicited mail via their publishers all the time and it takes a long time receive them all and even longer to reply so in the absence of a meaningful dialogue on a subject that I feel quite strongly about, I am setting my thoughts out here instead.
To give an initial example of the sort of thing that I am talking about – and one that most people might readily appreciate – there is a liberal sprinkling in her books of people saying “back in the day”.
According to some very brief research that I have just done on the internet, that phrase only came into use in the US in the late 1980s through Hip Hop lyrics - so the likelihood of English people saying it in the 1940s is very remote.
There are quite a few other things that she has English people saying in the 1940s which they wouldn’t have said then – but I won’t dwell on those for now.
Suffice it to say that mentions of the “London Fire Department” (we always say “Fire Brigade”) and the “British” Civil War (which was a purely English affair back in the day – no Scots involved ) merely deprive American readers of nuggets of basic factual information that they might otherwise find interesting about British history and culture.
It’s a shame really because she has obviously put so much effort into all the other historical aspects of her books, but the person who is advising her on 1940s English dialogue has rather let her down.
As a writer and editor myself, I am often asked to read through other people’s work and my first question always is: “do you just want me to tell you how good it is - or do you want me to be picky?”
I have read lots of espionage stories over the years – including Len Deighton’s “Game Set and Match”, “Hook Line and Sinker” and “Faith, Hope and Charity” 9-book Bernard Sampson series and, as I mentioned earlier, Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle books –as well as wiring all the episode of BBC TVs “Spooks”.
Now Stella Rimington is the former head of MI5 and spent 30 years working for the security service in various roles so, so without her actually giving away any classified information or state secrets, I would imagine that novels are fairly true to life and her description of who does what and what goes on are probably pretty reliable.
So, based on Deighton’s, Rimington’s and Spooks’ various depictions of life in the British security services, if I wanted to be “picky”, there are few details that I would take issue with in the “Maggie Hope universe”.
Firstly, MacNeal keeps referring to MI5 as “MI-Five”. That, to me, comes across like when somebody uses capital letters in a text message, as if they are shouting at you, and I can safely say that I have never seen MI5 referred to as “MI-Five” anywhere else.
In fact – as far as I can tell, people within the intelligence world don’t actually call MI5 “MI5” at all and, instead, they tend to refer to it as the “Security Service” - and MI6 as SIS (Secret Intelligence Service).
Also, the fact that somebody may be an MI5 or MI6 operative is a highly guarded secret – for many patently obvious security reasons – and is not bandied about in public in the way that FBI and NCIS agents are portrayed stomping around the USA brandishing official ID shields and shouting “Federal Agent!” any time they are pursuing suspects.
In Stella Rimington’s books – and she should know what she is talking about – her main protagonist Liz Carlyle has a separate identity that she uses when dealing with members of the public or agencies outside the intelligence world. She doesn’t go around telling all and sundry that she is from MI5 and, if introductions are necessary, she is merely described as being with the “Home Office.”
So, therefore, in the latest Maggie Hope story that I am reading – Book 6 in the series “The Queen’s Accomplice” (these really all are very good, despite my complaining about Americanisms) - the instance where one of her colleagues is introduced as “Special Agent Standish from MI-Five” to a suspect in a police interrogation room is completely unbelievable, even as a fictitious fact.
MI5 and MI6 agents are NOT referred to as “Agent Smith” or “Agent Jones” (MacNeal annoyingly does that quite a lot as well) and, being all part of the establishment’s “old boy” network - as everybody in the British civil services was in those days, they would be more likely to be called “Binkie” or “Carstairs”, as was normal between colleagues at the time.
Another minor fact that sticks out like a sore thumb in Book 6 which I feel the need to point out is where Maggie Hope is observing a game of darts in a London pub.
Now, I do appreciate that the game of darts may differ in various territories across the world and that some places in the US have a different version with a different type of board but we are talking about the traditional British pub game here – and this is something that I do know a little bit about.
A lot of non-English people – and this is perpetuated a lot in American films and TV - seem to think that the aim of the game is try and throw the dart and hit the bullseye, but there are numerous different games of darts that you can play and the bullseye is not always necessarily the most important bit to aim at.
And, for the benefit of anybody who doesn’t know about this – I will explain.
A dart in the bullseye – the round dot in the centre of the board – gets you 50 points, and the outer ring of the bullseye gets you 25 points. However, the highest value zone on the dartboard is “treble 20” which gets you 60 points and, if you are playing a points game like 501 or 301, then that is what most darts players aim for.
In the traditional pub game like this, each player starts off with 501 or 301 points marked up on the blackboard and their score from each set of three darts thrown is subtracted from their total. The winner is the first to get down to zero BUT you can only win by throwing a double or hitting the bullseye.
Light hearted games with my friends in the pub in our younger days nearly always went down to all of us needing “double 1” to win and, if you are not a very good aim, that can take ages...!
But, apart for the Maggie Hope’s fixation on the bullseye on the dartboard - which I do appreciate may go on to inspire her to solve the case she is working on, even if it is not what 1940s guys in an English pub would necessarily be aiming at - the story on the whole is very good so far and, like the other books in the series, I am thoroughly enjoying reading it.
You can find out more about the Maggie Hope series here
