Tue 27 Mar 2018
PAT FRANK – Forbidden Area. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1956. Bantam A1553, paperback, January 1957. Harper Perennial, trade paperback, December 2016. Published in the UK as Seven Days to Never (Constable, hardcover, 1957).
If Pat Frank is remembered at all today by modern readers it is likely for two mainstream bestselling science fiction works, the satiric Mr. Adam, about the last fertile man in the world, and the post-nuclear holocaust novel Alas, Babylon.
That is only a small part of his output though, that included the Korean war novel (also a film with John Payne) Hold Back the Dawn, and this Cold War novel of spies, sabotage, detection, and nuclear brinksmanship.
The Cold War novel had its real precedents in the popular future war genre from the late 19th Century in which writers like William Le Queux wrote speculative, but ground in somewhat realistic terms, novels “warning†British readers of the threat from outside invasion, often the Germans, sometimes the French (Napoleon was a not so distant memory), the Russians, or the “yellow perils†of Asia.
Writers like M. P. Shiel, Le Queux, H. G. Wells, and even Arthur Conan Doyle (Danger!) contributed to the genre, and eventually it would produce one prophetic classic, Erskine Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands.
In the period between the wars the subject was mostly reserved for the pulps, with heroes like the Spider, Operator #5, and G-Man Dan Fowler repelling wave after wave of foreign and domestic threats, and surely the inspiration for John Creasey’s Dr. Palfrey series. Thrillers indulged as well with books like Oppenheim’s Matorini’s Vineyard (which I reviewed here) and The Spy Paramount.
With the advent of the atomic bomb in 1945 the genre got a big boost. National paranoia (some of it wholly justified) combined with the very real fear of nuclear war inspired a new wave of writers, and while some were well within genre boundaries like Will Jenkins (Murray Leinster’s) Murder of the U.S.A. and Sterling Noel’s I Killed Stalin, more mainstream writers took up the gauntlet, adding the fear of accidental nuclear war to the mix as well.
These include novels such as Philip Wylie’s Triumph, Eugene Burdick’s Fail Safe, Paul Stanton’s Village of Stars, Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, The Bedford Incident, Ice Station Zebra, and Peter Bryant’s (nee Peter George) Red Alert, which became the basis for Dr. Strangelove.
The genre had once again leaped from the pulps and pages of thrillers to the bestseller list.
Forbidden Area falls into the latter category and opens off the (then) lonely Florida coast where two wooing teens see a Russian submarine disgorge a landing craft containing a small car and a team of men in black.
Afraid of the girl’s father, the two keep silent, and thereby as the saying goes, hangs the tale. When a B29 is stolen shortly after a team of seven people are drawn together as the investigation proceeds and more B29’s, all part of the Strategic Air Command, are lost or sabotaged. The seven people come to realize the Soviet Union is preparing for a first strike against the U.S., but can they find evidence and prove it before it is too late?
The book shows its age today, but it still manages to generate suspense and considering the growing new Cold War it is more relevant than it might have been even a year ago although the threat is different and the methods today less primitive.
How the Soviet Union is foiled and nuclear war averted makes for some excitement even today, and if the characters all fit a bit too neatly into certain clichés, it isn’t to the detriment of the story. Frank was a fairly clearheaded writer not given to distracting from the plot at hand by going off on tangents.
Forbidden Area is a relic of another era, but not without some virtues in terms of story and plot. It offers nothing new to the genre, but it does it with a compactness and straight forward line of suspense worth noting, and is a reminder the more things change the more they stay the sam
March 27th, 2018 at 9:45 pm
I’ve read the two books by Frank that you mention early on in this review, David, but this one I don’t recall at all. Not my favorite sub genre, either, but your historical overview I found very interesting. Thanks!
March 27th, 2018 at 11:27 pm
I forgot to give William J. Lederer co-credit for FAIL SAFE, or to mention this genre got a big boost in the Reagan era with a fictionalized history of WW III by a British general and then was a major theme in the Techno-thriller craze with writers like Tom Clancy, Ralph Peters, and Larry Bond (surely the best of that sub genre), and more recently the Terrorist sub genre.
With a new Cold War brewing we can look for this genre to jump start again likely in a new direction still. It seems to fulfill a desire by many to face very real threats with fictional approximations, and either survive or experience the chills of apocalypse from an easy chair in comfort physically if not mentally.
With all but a few the broad title that would probably fit best is the War Averted Genre since most such books end with the threat of war either ended or temporarily avoided.
It’s an oddity since it has been equally Conservative and Liberal in politics depending on the nature of the enemy and his politics. Doubly odd since, save for the pulps in the between the wars era, this has always been the most political of genres, with writers from Le Queux, to Wylie, to Clancy using it as a political forum as well as an escapist one.
THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS is the only such book to serve its purpose twice, at the beginning of both World Wars, reissued in early 1939 in England to warn about a new German naval threat in the exact same spot as the first one.
March 28th, 2018 at 9:39 pm
The “War Averted Genre.” It’s a little clunky but I like it. I couldn’t come up with anything I liked on my own. It will do until/unless you or someone else comes up with something better.
March 28th, 2018 at 11:18 pm
International Crisis also fits, but since the crisis is almost always World War in these and since they predate the nuclear age, War Averted is probably closer, though the earliest form and pulp incarnation were about wars that weren’t averted.
Any number of countries have provided the threat to peace in these (a few more science fictional ones even have the U.S. as aggressor against England, particularly some by George Griffith), with France and Italy popular for a while, and of course China and Japan, but the most common villains since the inception have been the Germans and Russians long before Fascism or the Red Menace, reflecting the militancy of post unification Germany under Bismark and the Kaiser and the paranoia about the Russian Secret Police under the Tzar and fear of the anarchist movement and the racist nonsense about Zionism and the phony Protocols of Zion that bled into the Red Scare.
As with today popular fiction usually plays on the paranoia of the day (sometimes justified, other times exaggerated, more often a bit of both), and reading these books you can track not only the writer’s bias and concern, but what was in the headlines and being discussed often in the corridors of power.
There is a whole sub-genre in the 20’s and 30’s dealing with the League of Nations trying to avert war, and more rarely prophetic works like Childers, Wells, Buchan (THE POWER-HOUSE), Doyle (DANGER! again)and some lesser known including one that accurately predicted Pearl Harbor back in the 20’s. To this day that ripped from the headlines and behind the closed door aspect is part of the appeal of the genre.
Even SEVEN DAYS IN MAY loosely fits the bill since it is about an extremist military coup that wants to be tougher on the Russians and is willing to over-throw the government to do it.
For an interesting back history on the origins of modern paranoia and conspiracy theory that is highly entertaining to boot, try Umberto Eco’s darkly comic novel PRAGUE CEMETARY, a memoir about the anarchist and conspiracist Eco brilliantly imagines as the author of infamous Protocols of Zion. You will never look at conspiracists the same way again.
As for the genre’s originator, though there were a few attempts before him, I think honors have to go to William Le Queux whose success not only popularized the genre, but who also added the immediacy and the behind the curtain glimpse at power at work aspects so important to it still.
March 29th, 2018 at 8:04 am
Damn fine review! I remember those Threat-of-
Nuclear-War Thrillers of the 60s quite well. As with other fad-lit, it produced some gripping reads and many many coat-tail riders.
March 30th, 2018 at 6:18 am
I didn’t know of this one at all (part of it sounds a little like THE AMERICANS), but I did like ALAS BABYLON and my library has an ebook copy available, so what the heck, right? Downloaded it.
April 5th, 2018 at 4:44 pm
Episode of “Playhouse 90”: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0675570/
April 5th, 2018 at 5:14 pm
This is the first I knew about this. Thanks, Johny!
More details:
Playhouse 90 (TV Series) Forbidden Area
1h 30min Comedy, Crime 04 Oct 1956 Season 1 Episode 1
Director:
John Frankenheimer
Writers:
Pat Frank, Rod Serling
Stars:
Charlton Heston, Tab Hunter, Diana Lynn
September 23rd, 2021 at 10:44 am
Rod Serling teleplay from a Pat Frank novel-thete’s nothing like that being written today!
I was born in 1949 and the stuff the kids are watching now is lots of special effects and pretty much plotless…