Prescient Dialogue from Alec Gunness

George Segal and Alec Guinness in "The Quiller Memorandum"

Watching The Quiller Memorandum from 1966. 

“We’ve been engaged in some rather tough work here,” says Alec Guinness, in low, ominous tones. “Nazis, from top to toe, in the classic tradition. Not just the remains of the old lot, oh no. There’s quite a bit of new blood. Youth. Firm believers, very dangerous. It wouldn’t do to underestimate them.”

Yeah, tell me about it, Alec.

Elleston Trevor — Bishop Exposed

The film was retitled for U.S. release

My great friend and mentor Elleston Trevor wrote novels that were made (and remade) into major Hollywood movies — The Flight of the Phoenix and The Quiller Memorandum. But after his stint fixing the Spitfires on World War II airfields and before his move to Phoenix in the 1960s, he wrote novels that were made into movies in England. He never liked to talk about them much, regarding them as inferior to Hollywood’s product.

I ran across this, Elleston’s 1952 novel Queen in Danger made into a 1953 movie called Mantrap and starring, of all people, Paul Henreid (of Casablanca), Hugh Sinclair (one of the Saints) and Lois Maxwell (of the James Bond films). It was directed by Hammer Films’ Terence Fisher. The whole movie’s here. Henreid stars as Hugo Bishop, Elleston’s amateur detective hero who studies humanity under stress. The Bishop novels all had chess references in the titles, and at the time Elleston was still writing under his original name, Trevor Dudley-Smith. After his Quiller novels became famous, the Bishop novels were reissued under his spy novelist pen name, Adam Hall.

Paul Henreid as Hugo Bishop

The Quiller Memorabilia

Here’s John Barry, the composer, and George Segal, the star, on The Quiller Memorandum, the film made from my friend and mentor’s Elleston Trevor's novel (written under his pen name, Adam Hall). Elleston never liked the movie much, but I certainly did, and we would argue about it in a friendly way. Here’s Matt Monro singing John Barry’s haunting theme. And below is a chance meeting of spies in June 1966. Michael Caine bumped into George Segal on location in Berlin when Caine was reprising his Harry Palmer role in Funeral in Berlin while Segal was shooting The Quiller Memorandum.

The Shadow Executive in Berlin

“The Quiller Memorandum” (1966) is an excellent, low-key spy film.

Morally ironic, almost eerie at times, this film’s protagonist splits the difference between James Bond and Alec Leamus. Quiller is the ultimate professional, a “shadow executive” featured in a series of top-rank thrillers by Elleston Trevor (a/k/a Adam Hall).

George Segal plays an Americanized Quiller here, with Max von Sydow as his perfectly chilling neo-Nazi “German gentleman” adversary. Alec Guinness didn’t think much of the film, but he’s good in it as Quiller's sinister contact Pol (watch the scene in which he uses a raisin to describe Quiller’s ambiguous position, and then pops it in his mouth). The John Barry score is icing on the thrill cake.

Elleston himself, who was my late friend and mentor, didn’t like the film, and we argued about that. He said George Segal was “for the girls and comedies and so on,” and that screenwriter Harold Pinter was “obviously a very fine writer” but “hadn’t got the knack of adapting.” Specifically, Elleston thought Pinter had changed the character of the main female character too much.

I argued that the movie retained much of the book’s suspense and innovation, including the fact that Quiller is presented as a secret agent who thinks carrying a gun is a mistake. Seeing Quiller invade the enemy headquarters unarmed impressed me with his courage, even when I was 12.

I always thought that the box office had something to do with Elleston’s opinion of the film. He had a much higher opinion of the 1965 film adaptation of his novel “The Flight of the Phoenix,” which was a hit.

However, the star of “Quiller Memorandum,” George Segal, noted that the film had been lavishly praised by director Quentin Tarantino as one of the best spy films of the era.

Scenes from 'The Quiller Memorandum' (1966)

Audio Novel 7: The Man With the Midas Touch

Art by Isdailic

Sir Ian McKellen as Auric Goldfinger? Why the hell not? Here's another BBC radio play of an Ian Fleming novel, this time "Goldfinger," the most famous of the James Bond tales.
The seventh Ian Fleming novel, published in 1959, became the third Bond film in 1964. The film "Dr. No" was a hit in 1962 and "From Russia With Love" a bigger hit in 1963. But with "Goldfinger," the James Bond mega-hit was born, with lines around the block for tickets and 24-hour screenings.
My friend and mentor Elleston Trevor — creator of the taut Quiller spy series — thought Fleming's novel ridiculous, and it does have a couple of implausible turns, even by Fleming's standards (why in hell does Goldfinger keep Bond around as a "secretary?")
But finally, there's really no arguing with Ian Fleming's golden touch, is there?

A London Pick-Up

Artist Jean-Pierre Trevor and his father, novelist Elleston Trevor

By Dan Hagen

What should I find had hopped the pond for me yesterday but a bubble-wrapped package from my mate Greg Harris in London. In it was a hardcover edition of the novel “The Big Pick-Up” by my late friend and mentor Elleston Trevor. The novel, which I’ve never been able to find in hardcover in this country, was used as part of the basis for the film “Dunkirk.” It’s even signed by Elleston.

In it, he writes, “Bellman had a child. Donald, two and half. And men were trying to burn his child alive, while he tried to burn theirs. And that was the difference between war and peace — but what in God’s name could you call it, this difference? A turning of the brain? A change of heart? A reversion to barbarism in the midstream of civilization? Or longer words, more complicated phrases? Was there a word for a thing like this, really a single word that wouldn’t stick in the throat and choke you before you could say it to a soul?”

Elleston prided himself on hitting all the marks as a professional writer, and had little or no patience for unprofessionalism of any sort. But he was disdainful about being an artist, in part because he felt uncertain in that area, I think. And yet anyone who can write passages like that — and he wrote many of them — should never have been uncertain about that.

A Hero Is a Rare Thing

Editor’s note: This column about my late friend and mentor Elleston Trevor originally appeared in the July 26, 1995, edition of the Sullivan, IL, News-Progress.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

— Henry David Thoreau

By Dan Hagen

Elleston Trevor was transacting some business one day when his banker, making small talk, asked him what he was learning in his new martial art of aikido.

Elleston Trevor (r) with his son Jean-Pierre

    Without hesitation, this man in his late 60s proceeded to show the banker what he'd learned—by doing a flying roll there in a bank lobby full of people. Trevor enjoyed the moment immensely.

     That was Trevor for you. He always said that if he found himself standing in a queue waiting for a bus, his impulse was to face away from the bus stop—in the opposite direction as everybody else—as if to pretend he wasn't waiting.

     Mining his character, you'd find a rich, deep vein of individualism. In his earliest days, he learned that one must find and live by one's own principles. From the first, Thoreau's different drummer was clearly audible to Trevor.

     An Englishman born in Bromley, Kent, he grew up under the care of parents who loved him, but warred constantly with each other. He found no refuge in his English public school, where thin chains played regularly on the backs of boys who had committed such crimes as receiving bad marks in Latin. The undisguised sadism soured him on formal education. A reporter from the Manchester Guardian once asked Trevor if he'd be afraid to return to that school for a visit. Trevor—who had started studying karate at age 58 and swiftly earned his black belt—said oh, no. He smiled and told the reporter that if they tried it on him again, he'd kill them.

    Imperiled on all sides as a boy, he found a "safe house" in his own resilient character, and his ability to write. A boy named Trevor Dudley-Smith became Elleston Trevor, his own man and the first of his many creations.

    Seeking to test himself against challenge and adventure, the young Trevor apprenticed as a race driver. Then World War II descended, and the swift and deadly Spitfires caught his eye. Unfortunately, that eye was extremely light-sensitive, so he was forbidden to fly them. He got as close to the beguiling beauties as he could, working as an airfield mechanic.

     In his off-hours, as the pilots flew their missions against the Nazis, Trevor began writing novels and never stopped. Some 100 books would be published under his name, and his various pen names, as the decades rolled by.

     Several of the novels caught Hollywood's attention, and his The Flight of the Phoenix and The Quiller Memorandum became major motion pictures in the 1960s. During the filming of the former, Trevor listened with politely disguised disinterest as actor Richard Attenborough described his dream of someday making a film about Gandhi. "Poverty and celibacy are not my sort of thing," Trevor explained later.

     His Quiller series of espionage novels, written under the pen name of Adam Hall, inspired a film, a BBC TV series, undiluted praise from the New York Times and earned him the highest honor in the suspense novel field — the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The novels starring his tense, terse "shadow executive" also won him a cult following among fans, which he wasn't quite sure how to explain. "I think I hit people's funny bone in terms of their inner drives, motivations, neuroses," Trevor said. "I think they see in Quiller something that is in themselves."

The English spy novelist in Arizona

     Trevor married a former beauty queen who'd worked for Royal Air Force Intelligence during the war. They courted in cars parked in war-ravaged London, steaming privacy onto the windows. "It was the wickedest winter, but we had our love to keep us warm," Trevor recalled. He and Jonquil raised a son, Jean-Pierre, a super-realistic painter who has done matte work for films such as the Stars Wars series.

     Disenchanted with the socialist tide in England, which they believed had destroyed the work ethic there and the sense of life's challenges, the Trevors set out for "somewhere civilized and in the sun"—the South of France during the '50s and '60s, then Phoenix, Arizona. They loved the openness of America, where everyone seemed to wear their hearts on their bumpers. Jonquil served informally as Trevor's business manager, and in the U.S. began studying for her Ph.D. in English. In a mock-rueful tone, but secretly proud, Trevor dryly noted that their mail would be addressed to "Dr. and Mr. Elleston Trevor."

     Like other strong and generous individuals, Trevor had spent his time and energy figuring out how to ease his loved one's lot, financially and emotionally, after his death. But when a brain tumor felled Jonquil unexpectedly a few years ago, he was left in a situation for which he was unprepared, and which nearly destroyed him with grief. A young family friend, Chaille, gave him his life back, or perhaps a second life. They married. With her, the cool and deadly secret agent Quiller was as dewy-eyed as a sophomore in love, as courtly as the finest English gentleman stepped straight from the pages of Jane Austen.

     Trevor's self-taught writing style included numerous incisive innovations which betrayed a touch of genius. He brushed away all such "literary" praise, though, taking pride in his professionalism as a writer. His attitude to readers was, "Hey, kids, I think I've just cooked you a nice meal here. What do you think?" Trevor also wielded that rarest of the novelist's talents, and the one without which the others pale: he created characters who lived in the mind.

     And they will continue to live, though he will not. Trevor died last week, following an operation for stomach cancer. His death was a shock. Though well into his 70s, Trevor remained fit through daily exercise, as thin and supple as a whip.

     A prized discovery of my early teenage years, Trevor remained one of my favorite writers, and an inspiration. His work was a major influence on my decision to make writing my career. Meeting and becoming friends with him as an adult, I learned he was more than a great writer. He was kind and witty and generous, with a capacity for life as large as his considerable talent. He searched seriously for the joy of life, and found it often—in stargazing, in horseback riding, in good food and wine, in fine cars, in meticulously built model aircraft, in the rigor of the martial arts, in friends and fans, in J.P., Jonquil and Chaille and at his well-worn typewriter.

     And beyond life? Trevor knew that all we are began as part of the same undifferentiated energy source within the Big Bang, and reasoned that we are all therefore a part of the same mysterious and profound cosmic process, and each other.

     It's a cold comfort, at this moment. His death is one of those events that leave you wincing afterward, at odd moments—as if something had been at you with a baseball bat, and you were expecting it to try again.

     A hero is a rare thing — rarer than love, as rare as genius, as a piercingly lovely song or one perfect spring day or happiness without a shadow. I knew a hero. He has passed away from me, leaving a cold ache behind, and yet strangely he somehow remains with me, as well.

     A moment of silence, then, from the different drummer, please.