Yes, a corruptive drug. And there were other words too, the whole language of the junky and of those who tried to cope with him – jargon about the needle, withdrawal symptoms, stabilized addicts. To Russell the last was the most frightening of all. It meant a normal life except for reliance on a doctor’s weekly prescription. A normal life! Mecron was supposed to be something between a tranquillizer and a pep pill. You took it and went to sleep; you woke to a febrile activity. You woke to addiction.

An unquiet sleep indeed.

William Haggard’s Colonel Russell spy series is best-remembered today-when remembered at all-for its conservatism. At a time when John Le Carre was writing hand-wringing twaddle about how similar the USSR and the West had become, the good Colonel harbored no such doubts. As in the passage above, the enemies he, and the Security Executive he ran, took on were personal as well as political and there was no question about the morality of the cause. The battle here to prevent the sale and distribution of the addictive wonder drug Mecron is driven by the fact that addiction offends his sensibilities.

The other notable thing about these adventures - 24 in all - is that most of the “action” occurs in the corridors of power. As the author said himself, they are political books, befitting for the former civil servant who wrote them. The plot of Unquiet Sleep is largely driven by the attempt to protect a Cabinet member from scandal, as a Cypriot gang tries to blackmail him into obtaining more Mecron after Russell halts its production.

On the other hand, lest we imagine Haggard some kind of troglodyte, the operative who engages in the book’s actual derring do is a former French Resistance fighter with a false foot, Rachel Borrodaile. The Colonel makes no bones about his admiration for her and her capabilities, which allow him to focus more on lunching at the club with fellow bureaucrats.

It’s a peculiar but thoroughly enjoyable entry in the spy genre.

(Reviewed:06-Jul-26)

Grade: (B+) Orrin C. Judd

Tweet

William Haggard Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: William Haggard
    -FILMOGRAPHY: William Haggard (IMDB)
    -ENTRY: Summary Bibliography: William Haggard (ISFDB)
    -ENTRY: William Haggard (Stop you’re killing me)
    -ENTRY: William Haggard (EBSCO)
    -ENTRY: William Haggard (Good Reads)
    -ENTRY: William Haggard (Fantastic Fiction)
    -WIKIPEDIA: The Unquiet Sleep
    -ENTRY: The Unquiet Sleep (Good Reads)
    -FILMOGRAPHY: Detective: The Unquiet Sleep: Episode aired Jul 7, 1968 (IMDB)
    -ENTRY: Haggard, William (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction)
    -INDEX: William Haggard (Open Library)
    -INDEX: William Haggard (OceanPDF)
    -ENTRY: William Haggard (Fantastic Fiction)
    -INDEX: William Haggard (Internet Archive)
    -VIDEO: 'DETECTIVE' (1964) S2 EP 9 " The Unquiet Sleep" - starring Sarah Lawson and Wolfe Morris (Archive Media Vault)
    -ESSAY: Forgotten authors No.32: William Haggard (Christopher Fowler, 09 May 2009, The Independent)

Here was the problem. Born in Croydon in 1907, Clayton, a former Indian civil servant and British establishment figure, was middle-aged by the time he started producing novels. His experience gave him an appealing air of cynicism and some strongly held opinions about the British government, particularly in its relations with big business, but it also meant that he was heavily drawn to characters who spent their lives manoeuvring themselves around the political system. The public wanted Bond in a casino with a Martini. Gunplay and continental sex made for tartier adventures, but weren't really Haggard's field. His plots were first-rate, his world-weary characters were slyly intelligent and manipulative, but a great many scenes ultimately consisted of men arguing in offices.

In The Unquiet Sleep, a popular Valium-like drug is found to have devastatingly addictive qualities, and a parliamentary official is linked to its parent company. Colonel Russell finds each level of government involvement murkier than the next, in contrast to Fleming's approach, which leaves world domination to a few egotistical madmen. Haggard treats his women with more respect, too. They are investigators and heroines with lives of their own. As for exoticism, try Haggard's character Miss Borrodaile, the elegant, black-clad, former French Resistance fighter with a steel foot.

    -ESSAY: ‘As hearty as roast beef’: William Haggard (Alwyn Turner, 11/26/16, Lion & Unicorn)

Haggard, disliking what he called ‘the plotless novels of our modern longhairs’, set out to provide middle-brow entertainments, based on plot rather than literary style and was pretty successful at it. His work, said the New Statesman, was ‘not so flash as Fleming, not so sad as Chandler, not as improbable as either’.

Others detected an older tradition. ‘Mr Haggard writes Bulldog Drummond for the sophisticated,’ noted The Times, a comparison also made by Dominic Le Foe in the Illustrated London News: ‘As hearty as roast beef and Stilton, he is, in my view, a direct blood link with John Buchan and Sapper; he certainly owes nothing to Ian Fleming.’

Those assessments, though, don’t paint the whole picture. Certainly the political and social attitudes in Haggard are akin to those of Buchan and Sapper, rendered even more reactionary by being located in the 1960s rather than the 1920s. But there isn’t much in the way of action adventure – there are few chase sequences or armed standoffs. ‘For thirty years,’ Haggard writes of Colonel Russell, shortly after the man’s retirement, ‘he’d controlled the Executive and seen violence perhaps six times and gunplay twice.’ Indeed Russell has ‘a thoroughly English mistrust of guns’. As he explains: ‘Security is mostly good office work.’

    -ESSAY: An Un-Bond: William Haggard's Colonel Charles Russell (Raritania, December 20, 2016)
    -ESSAY: SUPER THRILLERS AND SUPER POWERS (Robert Leachman, Feb. 19, 1984, NY Times)
    -ESSAY: William Haggard and the Colonel Charles Russell Spy Thriller Series: an Introduction to the Author and a Bibliography (Nick Jones, 5 December 2011, Existential Ennui)

Colonel Russell is the head of a branch of British Intelligence known as the Security Executive, tasked with defending the realm from any and all foreign threats – many verging on the science fictional in nature. Initially working behind the scenes, by the time Russell is introduced in Slow Burner he has already been serving with the Executive for twenty years, and is in his late fifties and close to retirement. (He would actually retire midway through the series, but would continue to assist the Executive thereafter.)

Russell is very much a part of the Establishment, and a product of Haggard's own political views, which were firmly to the right of centre; in many ways the series was a precursor to Anthony Price's later David Audley spy novels: both series are set in Whitehall, and are as much political or detective thrillers as they are espionage fiction, although Haggard's books are characterized by an underlying preoccupation with decorum, with the correct way of doing things, whether it be in action or in conversation. Mind you, even compared to the avowedly conservative Price, Haggard was pretty far to the right; as Price himself put it during my interview with the writer in July, "he was more right wing than even me! He made me look like a liberal!"

Haggard's own view of his books, which he shared in a letter to Donald McCormick for McCormick's 1977 survey Who's Who in Spy Fiction, was that they were "basically political novels with more action than in the straight novel". Even so, much of the "action" takes place in offices and consists of clever types reasoning out sticky dilemmas (again, see Anthony Price). McCormick also notes in Haggard's entry in Who's Who in Spy Fiction that Haggard was "associated with Intelligence work during his career", so it seems that, in common with many spy novelists, Haggard knew of what he "spoke".

    -ESSAY: 10 Best Adventures of 1958 (Joshua Glenn, August 31, 2018, HiLoBrow)
    -ESSAY: Spies, Elites and Imperial Decline: Fleming, Haggard, and le Carré (Nader Elhefnawy, November 21, 2023, Independent)
    -
    -REVIEW INDEX: William Haggard (Kirkus)
    -REVIEW: of The Unquiet Sleep by William Haggard (Kirkus)
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of The High Wire by William Haggard (Battered, Tattered, Yellowed, & Creased)
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of Slow Burner (Colonel Charles Russell Series #1) by William Haggard (Nick Jones, Existential Ennui)
    -REVIEW: of Slow Burner (Raritania)
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of William Haggard's Yesterday's Enemy (Raritania)
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of The Power House, by William Haggard (Raritania)
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of The High Wire by William Haggard (Anthony Boucher, Aug. 11, 1963, NY Times)

Book-related and General Links: