WILLIAM HAGGARD – Powder Barrel. Cassell & Co., UK, hardcover, 1965. Ives Washburn, US, hc, 1965. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, January 1966. Paperback reprints: Signet D2991, US, 1966; Penguin, UK, 1967.

   William Haggard is, for my money the best of the later British thriller writers in the Buchan tradition, and one who wrote rings around Le Carre. Most of his books feature Sir Charles Russell of the Security Executive in the most civilized and ruthless thrillers you will ever read (roughly covering 1958 to 1991).

   Haggard’s a conservative — damn near a Tory — and he’s no doubt a bit of a snob, but it’s that civilized snobbery that marked Buchan and the best of the Buchan school.

   Indeed Russell is close to Buchan’s Edward Leithen, and like Leithen and Richard Hannay’s adventures the books are as likely to have a sympathetic or even heroic enemy — not to mention a charming Italian Madam (The Hard Sell), second story man (Slow Burn), blowzy but sympathetic courtesan (The Antagonists), or even Soviet agent (The Powder Barrel).

   None of the books run over 60,000 words, but they are masterpieces of economy, the characters well drawn, the plots intricate (but never overly so), and the suspense and action well choreographed.

   Among the non-series books his first novel The Telemann Touch and The Kinsmen are both exceptional entries, the latter having many of the qualities of a Hitchcock thriller. The Telemann Touch, about an apologetic assassin, ends on a wonderfully choreographed duel with bayonets.

   There are fine set pieces in the books too. The SF touch at the end of Slow Burn and a second story man’s seduction of a high priced call girl, an assassination on a gondola in The Venetian Blind, and a tense shootout on a ski lift in The High Wire. Haggard most resembles Victor Canning in that mastery of the clean simple and — there’s no other word for it — civilized style of thriller that seems so veddy British.

   In Powder Barrel, Ernst, aka Ernest, a likable, handsome, if none too bright, East German Soviet agent stationed in a vital Arab principality as the driver of playboy Shaikh (sic) Ali bin Hassan bin Ibrahim sets off a series explosive events when he takes it on himself, while in England for a Rolls Royce mechanic course, to try and kill British Foreign Secretary Vincent Gale.

   Vincent Gale is the man Her Majesty’s government has chosen to negotiate the new oil concessions in the shaikhdom (sic) known as the Oil Terminal along the Arab oil coast, a negotiation complicated by the fact that he had a discrete and passionate affair with the Shaikh’s sister Princess Nahid, known as ‘Madame.’ Just how he will be received by his ex-lover, an intelligent and willful woman, may be key to the powder keg growing in the shaikh’s country.

   It’s just the sort of explosive situation Russell (“He’s English of course, you have to watch them.”) handles with cool aplomb, so he sends his second in command Robert Mortimer along with Gale for security, and then is surprised when his opposite number in the Soviet government, the General, shows up to let him know that Ernst is a wild card determined to kill Gale without orders.

   Riots in the street, a hunt for the Soviet agent by the Shaikh’s handpicked Greek chief spy Stradvis, a playboy shaikh who takes his money and runs for the Riviera with Ernst’s help, and the renewal of a long term affair are some of the events that lead to Gale and a wounded Ernst alone in a villa with Madame in a taut confrontation at gunpoint between the diplomat and the oddly honorable assassin.

   As might be expected Russell pulls all the irons out the fire without anyone getting appreciably singed, and manages to get those oil concessions from the progressive Princess when she replaces her abdicating brother, but it’s a near run thing as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, and the suspense runs down to the wire.

   Haggard was a civilized and intelligent writer of tautly wound thrillers that found a balance between the fantasy of Ian Fleming and the drab ordinary world of Le Carre. The Russell novels are exciting, literate, sexy, and understated in the best British tradition.

   His people are believable human beings whether good guy or villain, and Russell a likable protagonist of the old school who would have been equally at home in Buchan’s Rungates Club or Kipling’s India. Compared to today’s overblown, overwritten, and overlong thrillers they are perfect models of the form.