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Gavin Lyall (1932-2003) |
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British thriller writer and journalist, a former RAF pilot,
who
often took as his theme the world of flying. In the 1980s, Gavin Lyall
wrote
a series of spy thrillers, whose main character was Major Harry Maxim,
Special Services, assigned to the Prime Minister’s Office. Now mostly
forgotten, Lyall was among the top British thriller writers in the
1960s. "Old pilots, ones who first trained on slow propeller-engined aircraft, cannot watch the countryside flowing past a train or car window without subconsciously evaluating fields for an emergency landing: length, slope, obstructions on approach, surface . . . It is much the same for career soldiers: to Maxim, the low steep Cotswold hills with their clumps of woodland were close-combat country, difficult for tanks and air reconnaissace, needing tight control attack." (The Crocus List by Gavin Lyall, 1986, p. 84; first published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1985) Gavin Tudor Lyall was born in Birmingham, Warwickshire, the
son of
Joseph Tudor Lyall, an accountant, and Agnes Anne Hodgkiss,
a complete Quaker. The family had a small house in Bournville, near
Birmingham, where Lyall grew up. Because his family were pacifist
Quakers, Lyall wasn't allowed a toy gun until his parents realized that
it was "just making other's boys guns glamorous. If I went in for
self-analysis I could probably make something out of that." ('Lyall, Gavin (Tudor),' in World Authors 1980-1985, edited by
Vineta Colby, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1991, p. 556) Lyall was a successful student at school. He was educated at
King Edward VI
School, Birmingham, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he edited Varsity,
the university newspaper. Under the name Red Lyall he formed with his
friend Martin Davison a jazz band, initially called The Canal Street
Four after King Oliver's 'Canal Street Blues'. Lyall played drums, but
he later claimed he had a tin ear. He was passionately fond of jazz. Although Lyall was a Quaker, he was not a pacifist, or a
teetolarer. He served from 1951 to 1953 as a pilot in the Royal Air
Force, a very important time in his life. In 1956, Lyall earned his
B.A. with honors in English. After
graduating Lyall briefly employed as a reporter for Picture Post
and the Sunday Globe, and then as a producer on the Tonight
programme for
the BBC Television. The work did not go well and Lyall began writing
his first novel about a pilot of a small planein the BBC studios.
Between 1959 and 1962 Lyall was a reporter and aviation correspondent
at the Sunday Times,
London. He also covered the Queen's tour of India and Nepal in 1960. While at Picture Post, Lyall met he writer and journalist Katharine Whitehorn, who was working for Woman's Own as an assistant editor. They were married for forty-five years and had two sons. Whitehorn became the star columist on The Observer. She worked there almost 40 years. They used to read and commented on each other's work: ". . . he once said of something that was too loosely written 'It's knitted with too bif needles.' He could often take a thought one stage further, say when it got dull or turgid; or occasionally flatly disagree with my point of view, in which case we'd argue it till nearly deadline." (Selective Memory: An Autobiography by Katharine Whitehorn, London: Virago, 2007, p. 115) Lyall's debut as a thriller writer, The Wrong Side of the
Sky
(1961), was drawn from his experiences in the Greek islands and the
Libyan desert. (He played in Libya ping-pong with Sophia Loren.)
Published by Hodder & Stoughton, it gained an
immediate success and in 1963 Lyall gave up his day job to become a
full-time writer. Like in the work of Hammond
Innes
and Alistair MacLean, Lyall's thrillers reflect his love of outdoor
life and traveling – he did not want to set a book in a place he had's
visited. "One law is that you can't buy a bottle in Lapland anywhere
north of
Rovaniemi, and can't even buy a glass except in the half-dozen tourist
hotels. . . . The second law is that you cant's drink on airports. Not
a bad idea for stopping pilots from taking off drunk, but not much help
to a pilot who knows by long experience thet the only way to get a
hangover roped and back in its cage is a beer. Or two." (The Most Dangerous Game, London:
Pan Books, 1966, p. 9) The Most Dangerous Game
(1963), set in the Finnish Lapland, where Lyall had spent some time
with his wife, featured a cast of tourists and agents and offered
meticulously researched details and tidbits of local color and
character. The story was narrated in the first person with dry
Chandleresque humour. "His [Lyall's] first two books . . . were written with the zest of a writer putting down exciting scenes on paper without bothering too much about whys and wherefores." (Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History Julian Symons, New York: Viking, 1985, p. 231) The rights of Midnight Plus One (1965) were purchased by the American actor Steve McQueen, known for his fascination with sports cars. Set in post-World War II, it told of a pilot named Lewis Cane who drives a crooked millionaire to Liechtenstein. Cane is a former gunrunner for the French Resistance in World War II, he is tough but at the same time he questions the morality of his actions. Orson Welles was hired by BBS to adapt the novel; he considered Robert Mitchum, Yves Montand, and Jack Nicholson for the leading roles. Welles never finished the script, and due to McQueen's sudden death, the film was never made. Shooting Script (1966), about a former RAF pilot who
flies a
camera plain for a film company, took place in the Caribbean. "Gavin
Lyall is a master of his craft," said Hester Mageik in the Spectator, "which is the expert
setting of an adventure
rathet than a crime story. He has the gift of creating
reader-involvement in the vivid events he portrays." Moon Zero Two (1969), a Hammer/Warner Bros. film, for
which Lyall prepared the story
outline with Frank Hardman and Martin Davison, was produced at the same
time as the Apollo Moon landing. Against all hopes, the film was a
commercial and critical failure. The film producer and director Michael
Carreras wrote the script. "A self-acknowledged 'space-western' which
has a few bright
ideas but suffers from a childish script." (Halliwell's Film Guide by Leslie
Halliwell, London: Paladin, sixth edition 1988, p. 703) In the story the Moon was portrayed as
a Western frontier; there is even a bar-fight in zero gravity. Though
the budget was relatively small, the producers wanted the movie to be
as
polished as Stanley Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey,
which had premiered a year earlier. Roy Ward Baker, who directed the
film, complained that "so much time was spent on solving the production
problems that not enough attention was paid to the characters or the
story." (Roy Ward
Baker by Geoff Mayer, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2004, p. 44) The
novelization was written by
John Burke. Lyall tolerated alcohol well and he smoked too. Noteworthy, also the
author's heroes took a lot of Scotch-and-soda during the course of
the story. Following pain
in his leg, Lyall was told to stop drinking and smoking by a
neurologist. Drinking didn't matter in the 1960s, when Lyall was among the top British writers and was able meet the deadlines of his publishers. Kingsley Amis, famously heavy drinker, had a certain Father Lyall killed in The Alteration (1976), an alternate history novel, in retaliation for some jokey insult of Lyall's. After publishing Judas Country (1975), an aviation thriller set in the Middle East, Lyall suffered writer's block for five years. Abandoning his outsider heroes, Lyall started his
Maxim novels with The Secret Servant (1980),
originally developed for a BBC television series. Used to always write
in the first-person – an essential feature of a Gavin Lyall book –
Lyall found it difficult to change to third person narrative, and it
took him six months before he had developed an authorial voice of his
own. Major Harry Maxim, a
former SAS officer hired as a Whitehall troubleshooter, was also the
protagonist in The Conduct of Major Maxim (1982), The
Crocus List (1985), and Uncle Target
(1988). In spite of the quiet and solemn surroundings, Maxim
never turns into a mild-mannered Smiley, but aggressively tracks down
defectors, spies, and moles. Maxim's office is frequently visited by
PM's cat; Lyall loved
cats and owned several throughout her life. In addition, he created a
column
called 'Dear Auntie Mog', to which cats were supposed to bring their
problems. As
a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the spy fiction was
left adrift. In the changed political situation, after publishing Uncle
Target,
Lyall produced a new series, starting with Spy's Honour (1993), which took the
reader into
the early years of the British Secret Service before World War I.
Unfortunately, there was no wide advertising of Lyall's books and they
never gained the popularity of the Maxim novels. His TV script based on
the "Honour Quartet" was not produced. Lyall was a member of the Air Transport Users' Committee of
the Civil Aviation Authority. For The Most Dangerous Game
and Midnight Plus One
he received the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger Award. In
1967-68 he served as chairman of the British Crime Writers Association.
Lyall's works of non-fiction include The War in the Air 1939-1945
(1968) and Operation Warboard (1972). His articles were
published in such magazines as the Spectator, Lilliput,
and Everybody's.
Gavin Lyall died from cancer on January 18, 2003. "Although his characters were pretty thinly defined, his pacy plots had the kind of clear through-lines rarely found in modern thrillers. Lyall knew what to include and when to stop. Taken in the context of the times in which he wrote, he's an attractive addition to any library." ('Forgotten authors No. 25: Gavin Lyall' by Christopher Fowler, Independent, 1 March, 2009) Four of Lyall's novels have been translated into Finnish: The Wrong Side of the Sky (Taivaan nurja puoli, 1962), The Most Dangerous Game (Lento tuntemattomaan, 1964), Midnight Plus One (Minuutti yli puolenyön, 1966), Shooting Script (Lentävät palkkasoturit, 1967) – the last two appeared in Otava's Crime Club paperback series, which featured writers such as Suzanne Blanc, José Giovanni, Arthur Upfield, and Peter O'Donnell. For further reading: 'Lyall, Gavin (Tudor)' by J. Randolph Cox, in Twentieth-century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); 'Lyall, Gavin (Tudor),' in World Authors 1980-1985, edited by Vineta Colby (1991); 'Lyall, Gavin (Tudor),' in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa by William L. DeAndrea (1997); St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, ed. by Jay P. Pederson (1996); 'Lyall, Gavin (1932-),' in The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery by Bruce F. Murphy (1999); Selective Memory: An Autobiography by Katharine Whitehorn (2007); The Essential Writer's Guide: Spotlight on Gavin Lyall, ed. by Gaby Alez (2012); 'Lyall, Gavin (1932-2003),' in Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction by Alan Burton (2016) Selected works:
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