In the past year I’ve become a big fan of the Quiller novels of Adam Hall, a pseudonym of English novelist Elleston Trevor (most famous for The Flight of the Phoenix).
Quiller is unusual for a fictional spy. He’s extremely taciturn, with no personal relationships outside of work, and no real friends in it – only people he respects. Despite this, he frequently shows compassion to those wounded, physically or emotionally. When in the field he’s all business. He never engages in casual conversation, he probes for information. He seems to be an expert on just about every subject, especially martial arts, and has such a complete knowledge and mastery of his own physiology that he can, for example, make himself faint it required.
Now, none of that is really so unusual, but Quiller is also deeply neurotic. He loves living on the brink, but at the same time it wears away at his nerves so that he’s always at the breaking point. He frequently lies to himself or ignores his own better judgement to find the guts to continue. And there’s not a speck of humour to be found in these books, only grim irony.
Physically he’s left undefined but I always pictured him as slightly built but wiry, blonde, and generally nondescript.
Contrast that to Bond, the philandering clubman, always quick with a quip (moreso in the movies). Bond certainly sees to his business but, compared to the aescetic Quller, he certainly indulges his vices, with considerable relish.
While watching the cheesy early-80s Bond flick Octopussy the other day, it occurred to me that there’s a spy out there right now who matches up to my image of Quiller in just about every way: James Bond. The “rebooted” franchise, with its darker tone, its emphasis on skill instead of seduction, and, most of all, its Bond in Danial Craig, is just about exactly the way I’d pictured Quiller.
Go read the books, though, they’re really unique, and with the “Harry Palmer” novels of Len Deighton, really make up a sort of alternative universe of spies to the one we normally think of.
Quiller has always ‘beaten’ Bond – it’s just that so few people know about him !
Perhaps due to his lack of ‘toys’…. and refusal to carry weapons (not 100% accurate – once you read the 19 ‘Q’ novels).
Welcome to the ‘fold’…c220 of us lurking at/in Yahoogroups :>)
what tony said! (except about the lurking – i’m not sure about the lurking)
how do you feel about jude law as Quiller?
cheers and welcome
I think Jude Law would make an excellent Quiller. Quiller seems a bit emotionally remote, and I think Law can give that kind of detachment to a performance.
Quiller really should spawn a new movie because the whole technocratic spying of the “Mission: Impossible” and “Bourne Identity” movies is really what Quiller is all about. I’m not sure the claustrophobic atmosphere would translate well, though.
And FYI, when I said, “Quiller Beats Bond” what I really meant is that Bond has become Quiller. Not too surprising when you think that Bond was an anachronism as far back as the 70s.
Didn’t George Segal play Quiller in at least one movie?
Yeah, he sure did – The Quiller Memorandum. I haven’t seen it but the Wikipedia summary sounds as though it was pretty faithful to the book. Can’t really see Segal as Quiller, though. I may have to put that one on Netflix.
Not only do I find that he makes stupid decisions, I find Q to be a colossal whiner when he is given the DIF du jour rather than the one he wants, a constant complainer about the food in the caf and anyone who works at the Bureau and very childish when things don’t go his way. He has this “I’m going to take my ball and go home” attitude. Sometimes I feel like the Godfather talking to Johnny Tremaine and wanting to shout “Be a MAN!”.
ET’s steadfast refusal to visit any of his venues yet going so far in his research as to obtain a Berlin parking ticket. And, although he may capture some of the details, his sense of the atmosphere is abysmal, and, for me, takes a lot off.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy reading Quiller. Nice poolside stuff in the summer. But a quality read? I think not.
I like my protagonists to be brainy and fearless, like Renko. I like the venues to be authentic, like Furst. And, in a fight, I like my guy to be big, strong, fast and skilled and hold their own against all odds and for that I would have to choose Reacher who would eat Q’s lunch whenever and wherever.
But hey, let’s not carried away. After all, they are just characters out of book, not to be taken seriously.
To me, Quiller’s extreme neuroticism (i.e. whinyness) is one of the unique features of the series. Take that away, he’s no longer Quiller.
I personally have been to only a couple of the cities where the novels are set (I haven’t found the lost “Fort Worth Quiller” yet), so I can’t vouch for their authenticity, but to me, Trevor does a good job of making them FEEL real. At the same time he makes them feel like traps from which there is no escape, which is what I meant by my “claustrophobic” comment. And Quiller, despite his high level of competence, always comes across as desperate, never completely in charge. As Trevor himself indicated, Quiller generates a lot of this drama himself; he needs it to function.
What can I say? I just like ‘em as they are.
The rebooted Bond is much more like the original Bond. I suspect that you couldn’t have made a movie that followed the character in the 60′s, it just wouldn’t have been made. So Bond got lighter and quippier and sexier.
Craig’s Bond is much more like Fleming’s Bond, a stone-cold killer, and with only as much suavity as is naturally provided by having icewater in your veins.
Dean, I absolutely agree. Although the tone and style of the literary Bond and the literary Quiller are much different, the characters are very similar. But the Bond pretty much everyone knows is the Bond of the movies. Hence, by going back to Bond’s roots, they’ve made him more like Quiller.