I AM SCARCELY qualified to write this preface, for I doubt whether I have known more than a dozen spies in my life, and I am still uncertain about two of them—a certain Swiss business man whose notebook I borrowed for a few hours many years ago (strangely it contained the address of a friend of mine two thousand miles away who died a year later in a Nazi concentration camp), and another man of rather indeterminate origin with whom I planned to spend a Christmas holiday in the Banana Islands, in the company of two African blind dates—malaria robbed me of that holiday, somebody else’s malaria, which made it worse. Of one spy, however, I have reason to be certain: he had hardly the qualifications of the others, for he was illiterate, he couldn’t count above ten, and the only point of the compass he knew was the East, because he was a Mohammedan. I was reminded of him in recent years by the report of a divorce case in which the judge expressed severe criticisms of a private detective. The detective was also illiterate, he rode to his work on a bicycle and dictated his reports to his landlady who was stone deaf. Life is strange.
How very strange life is the readers of this anthology will certainly learn if they have not learned the lesson already. I wonder how many would be able to detect truth from fiction in this anthology if the editors had not printed the names of the contributors. Does Cicero’s visit to the German Embassy in Ankara seem more or less fictional than Hannay’s to the headquarters of the British Secret Service? Could the reader really tell which was fiction, between Mr Dennis Wheatley’s spy trapped in a bathroom at the Ritz, and Colonel Lawrence’s misadventure in Arabia? Of the two I find Mr Wheatley’s style a shade more convincing, for I cannot help wondering how Lawrence, bent by his captors over a bench, could observe on his own body the marks of the Circassian whip. A good spy should not embroider—it is Colonel Lawrence’s apparent embroidery which makes me, unwilling as I am to side with Mr Aldington under any circumstances, distrust the texture of his report. For in this strange funny nightmare world we welcome the prosaic. An intimate friend of mine once received simultaneously from two spies a report on the contents of a concrete shed on an African airfield—one spy said that it sheltered a tank, the other old boots. How could my friend help being biased in favour of the old boots? So I can believe in Mr Ambler’s fictional Colonel Haki and his ambition to write a detective story, while I find it hard to believe in the real Colonel Baden-Powell on a butterfly-hunt in Dalmatia incorporating the plans of fortifications into the pattern of his butterfly’s wings. Bond’s travelling equipment imagined by Mr Ian Fleming is certainly no more fantastic than the furnishings of Herr Schellenberg’s private office. This is true, that is untrue, take your pick.
For the characters in one section, A Gaggle of Suspects, I feel a personal sympathy, for there was an uncomfortable month during the winter of 1951 in Indo-China when I too found myself under suspicion. (Little did I realise that I was in such distinguished company—Wordsworth and Lawrence, Gauguin and Thomas Mann.) Some days passed before I realised what lay behind the literary interests of a member of the Sûreté stationed in Hanoi. Day by day he combed the bookshops for copies of my novels, and in the evening he would present himself with his little pile of books, seeking dédicaces for himself, for his wife, for his friends. At last I realised he was not the ‘fan’ I had been vain enough to believe: he was trying inconspicuously to carry out the directions of the Commander-in-Chief, General de Lattre, who had on one embarrassing occasion and at his own dinner-table accused me of espionage. I was able after that to save M. ‘Dupont’ further trouble. We arranged to meet in the evenings for a drink and a game of quatre-cent-vingt-et-un at the Café de la Paix where I would tell him what I had been doing during the day. The courtesy of the Sûreté demanded that the guest—and suspect—should always win: the courtesy of the suspect demanded that the drinks should be equally divided. Unfortunately my police agent was unaccustomed to anything stronger than vermouth-cassis, and his wife refused to believe it was only duty which kept him up late and sent him home under so unaccustomed an influence. I still feel a sense of guilt towards my friendly watcher when I remember that sad tired bloodhound face, apparently sprung from some spiritual liaison between M. Fernandel and Mrs Browning, lifted from the glass he didn’t want to drink, to listen to the story he didn’t want to hear, apprehensive and reproachful. How merciless one can be when right is on one’s side. He had a weak heart and there was an occasion when he passed completely out. Perhaps it was to quiet the memory of that kindly ineffective ghost that I have joined with my brother to compile The Spy’s Bedside Book and to evoke figures far more absurd and improbable.
GRAHAM GREENE