M LIKED HIS AGENTS’ COVER STORIES TO CONTAIN AN ELEMENT OF truth, and, as we know, Olga had been told to pretend that she was working for an author with “unpredictable hours.” But this does not really explain why her spymaster now began to write a book.
Many years earlier M had written short detective stories, and although he had made it into print on several occasions around this time, it had not been for his fiction. In 1923, M had had several articles published in the magazine Animal Ailments. These were well-informed pieces about how to treat eczema and mange in pets, or the dangers of inbreeding, all surprisingly lively, in spite of the subject matter. Now ten years later, he began work on what he hoped would be his first full-length book.
It had nothing to do with animals. Rather than take on a subject he could write about with insight, passion, and encyclopedic knowledge, he chose instead to describe the cartoonish exploits of an imaginary gang of American drug smugglers as they tried to hijack a cruise ship.
Everyone in M’s book plays to type. His English toffs say things like “my hat!” The Italians are emotional. The naval officers are sturdy. At one point the French maid exclaims “oh, la, la!” M gave the American gangsters names including “Lobo the Killer,” “Eddie the Swede,” “Fingers Reilly,” and “Duke Lyman,” the last of whom he describes rather confusingly, in a phrase that speaks for the whole novel, as a man who was “about as reliable as a tame rattlesnake.”
As M himself acknowledged, his story was full of characters and scenes reminiscent of “a hundred similar ones in stage comedy-dramas.” Although the plot becomes darker toward the end, with one character ending up in a vat of acid, M’s book was intended to be what Graham Greene would call “an entertainment.” “They amused me,” said M of this book and another one. “I don’t know whether they amused anybody else.” What they did, instead, was reveal a lot about their author.
M emerges from these books as a diehard devotee of American gangster films, and a writer who owed a lot to Damon Runyon, whose stories inspired the musical Guys and Dolls. He also comes across as being suspicious of foreigners or anyone who was Jewish. A similar charge could be leveled at most British novelists writing in this genre during the 1930s. Given that one of M’s most trusted agents in later years was the German Jewish actor Ferdy Mayne, and that possibly his only Jewish colleague in MI5, Victor Rothschild, was a man he admired and greatly liked, there is not too much to read into this. It is evidence of the passive anti-Semitism of 1930s Middle England, one that usually melted away when challenged by reality.
These books also reveal something about the man that M aspired to be. An M hero tends to observe a situation before stepping in at the last moment. He is courageous, tough, and endlessly patient. He can throw a good punch, but does so only in self-defense. He is not above taking the law into his own hands to protect the people he cares about. He has a dry sense of humor and is an excellent judge of character. Above all, he is loyal—loyal to his country and loyal to his friends.
Another feature of M’s first book is that the plot does not feature any happily married couples. While the MI5 spymaster slogged away at his first novel, his wife continued to run a pub out on Exmoor. M tried to see her on weekends, but the pressure of work, the distance between them, and his desire to finish his thriller made these visits infrequent. Gwladys still saw a lot of her childhood friends, and the pub was loud and jolly, but around this time she began to feel increasingly lonely.
When Gwladys read M’s manuscript, perhaps she felt a pang of recognition at the scene in which the hero and heroine are about to consummate their relationship before both pull back. “You are not my style,” she tells him, “nor I yours.” Instead, they agree to remain close friends. In a similar sense, M’s marriage to Gwladys had become an act of distant companionship. They were two friends who got on well and could make each other laugh, but who seem to have accepted that nothing was going to happen between them sexually, and that for now they were unable to live together.
Gwladys may have also been curious about the inspiration for the main character in her husband’s first novel. M described his protagonist as a young man who had spent several years on HMS Worcester before leaving to become a junior naval officer, just as M had done himself. Yet his physical characteristics are not M’s. Instead, he was “a decent, well-built young chap, little more than a boy, with a rather florid face and bright brown eyes.” Then there is the character’s name, which is the giveaway.
The hero in M’s first book was named “Joycey,” and he was, very simply, a hybrid of William Joyce and M. The MI5 spymaster could have chosen anyone, yet he decided to splice his own character to that of Joyce, a man he would soon describe as having a “very violent temper,” a “tendency towards theatricality,” and a “marked conspiratorial complex,” the kind of person who would never “be swayed by arguments where his inherent instincts are touched.” But Joyce’s considerable flaws were balanced out, M believed, by his “boundless physical and moral courage; considerable brain power; tremendous energy and application.” He was “well-read politically and historically,” “patriotic,” and, the ultimate accolade, he had “a sense of humour.” M was also impressed by the fact that William Joyce had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. “It has been alleged that he is a pompous, conceited little creature,” he went on, “but a tendency to agree with this should be weighed up against the fact that he has made his way in his own small world entirely by his own efforts and in the face of very considerable difficulties.” He was also “very loyal to his friends.”
M had a strange and abiding fascination with this man. Although he resented Joyce’s cheating on his wife, Hazel, the woman M had once loved, his marriage to her only drew the two men closer together, and M was a frequent visitor to the Joyce household. While there were elements of Joyce’s character that M obviously disliked, he was drawn to the others in spite of himself—Joyce’s unpredictability, his virility, his learning, and his wicked, lively intelligence. They were also bound forever by their experiences together at the heart of K, and that fateful meeting at the Lambeth Baths when Joyce had been attacked. Perhaps the MI5 spymaster still experienced flickers of guilt about this, feeling that he should have done more to warn Joyce of what was coming that night, which distorted the way he saw his old comrade.
Unaware that he was being used to inspire a character in M’s novel, William Joyce had taken a job by then as a teacher at the Victoria Tutorial College in London, and now had a young family to support. He had also enrolled recently for a PhD in philosophy and psychology at King’s College, London, and his future seemed to lie in academia.
Although Joyce may have reminisced occasionally about his days with the British Fascists, like most former members of K he recognized that this organization was in its death throes. Fascism in continental Europe seemed to have an irresistible momentum behind it. In Britain it was going nowhere. Yet unknown to either Joyce or M, by 1932, one Englishman was mapping out a very different future for the movement.
Sir Oswald Mosley, a colorful former MP for the Labour Party, had recently gone to meet Mussolini in Rome. On the same trip he had visited Nazi Germany, and was so impressed by what he saw that on his return he decided to start a new Fascist party in Britain.
Mosley contacted the extant Fascist groups to propose a fresh alliance with a visionary new leader at its head—him. The men he approached at the British Fascists were two of M’s former comrades: Neil Francis-Hawkins, a doctor’s son who had once been touted as a future leader of the movement; and Geoff Roe, a schoolmaster from Lewisham who asked to be known as E. G. Mandeville-Roe. Both men recognized that the BF was close to collapse and there was little to lose by joining Mosley’s alliance. They also felt that it was time to embrace a more European version of Fascism, including its pronounced anti-Semitism.
Francis-Hawkins and Mandeville-Roe formally proposed to the leadership of the British Fascists that they join Mosley. Rotha Lintorn-Orman wanted nothing to do with this, and she voted against the proposal. So too did every representative of the BF Women’s Units and the motion was rejected. Rather than accept this, Francis-Hawkins and Mandeville-Roe joined Mosley’s new venture anyway, taking with them several senior BF figures and the all-important membership list.
In the subsequent issue of British Fascism, the BF’s paper, both Francis-Hawkins and Mandeville-Roe were named as disgraced former members who were now to be deprived of the “Order of the Fasces.” Curiously, on the same list of prominent members who had recently jumped ship, there was the name “Mr. Knight.”
Although C, the head of MI6, had assured the Secret Service Committee several years earlier that M had left the British Fascists in 1927, it seems that he did not formally part company with them until 1932, almost a year after joining MI5. Of course, if he was questioned about this by his colleagues in the Office, he could always say that he was merely keeping tabs on this group. Yet given the feeble state of British Fascism at that time it is doubtful that any of his colleagues were particularly interested, at that point, in M’s Fascist past.
Several months later, Sir Oswald Mosley launched his new political party. His previous venture had been the New Party. This one was to be called the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Among Mosley’s earliest recruits were Francis-Hawkins, Mandeville-Roe, and another of M’s old friends, William Joyce, who had decided to get back into politics.