The Forgotten John Drake Novels: Danger Man’s Hidden Canon
By Justin Chapman
(Read a version of this article published by Spybrary.com here)
Many casual viewers of the 1960s “Danger Man/Secret Agent” TV show—excluding the diehard fans of course—may not realize that there were six John Drake novels published during the run of the show.
The books are concise, between just 125 to 190 pages, but each of them pack a serious punch. Each can pretty much be read in one sitting. But they’re well written—better than one would expect from a 1960s TV tie-in novelization series written by multiple authors—and loaded with as much suspense as any of the great “Danger Man” television episodes. What’s more, you can easily imagine Patrick McGoohan as Drake in any of these adventures (he even uses his “I’m obliged” catch phrase in one of them).
The six tightly packed, explosive stories are: Target for Tonight (1962, Richard Telfair), Departure Deferred (1965, W. Howard Baker), Storm Over Rockall (1965, W. Howard Baker), Hell for Tomorrow (1965, Peter Leslie), The Exterminator (1966, W. A. Ballinger), and No Way Out (1966, Wilfred McNeilly).
Irish writer Arthur Athwill William Baker penned two of the books under the name W. Howard Baker and one under W. A. Ballinger. The other three authors were American writer Richard Jessup (under the pen name Richard Telfair), British writer Peter Leslie, and Scottish writer Wilfred McNeilly.
Baker served as editor of the Sexton Blake Library. He wrote many novels and comics in a variety of genres under several pseudonyms which he apparently shared with other writers. According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (ESF), “It is impossible to distinguish much of what he wrote from what he commissioned and what he doctored, under his own name and others.”
Jessup has an interesting backstory. He grew up in an orphanage before running away to become a merchant seaman. He wrote more than 60 books, his most famous of which was The Cincinnati Kid, published in 1964 and made into a movie the following year starring Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson.
Leslie trained as a geologist before working as a newspaper columnist, BBC radio and TV interviewer, and show business publicist. He wrote more than 30 books, including several Mack Bolan and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels.
And according to the ESF, McNeilly, who wrote numerous novels under numerous pen names, “achieved some minor notoriety when he claimed in print to have written all the work published under the byline W. Howard Baker—[who was] actually McNeilly’s editor on stories written for the Sexton Blake Library and for Press Editorial Syndicate—and various other Baker pseudonyms, a claim since disproved.” Baker, you’ll recall, wrote three of the Danger Man novels.
Plot roundup
My favorite of the three is actually the very first book, Target for Tonight. Jessup/Telfair’s novel is special in that it’s the only one that was published during the first run of “Danger Man” episodes, when they were half an hour and Drake was an Irish-American who worked for NATO’s security arm. The other five came out during the hour-long episode era, when Drake morphed into a British agent in the fictional M9 agency. Target for Tonight is also unique in that it’s the only one of the six that’s written in the first person.
In Target for Tonight, Drake explains that there were 51 agents when NATO’s Security HQ was first set up, and at the time of the first novel there were only 17 left. That dwindles further still by novel’s end.
Target for Tonight is a really fun thriller, a real page-turner. Drake has to find out which NATO-affiliated diplomat in Portugal is a turncoat stealing top secret documents from Strategic Air Command. He targets one of the diplomat’s wives, a racecar-loving temptress who wraps him around her finger and drags him into a tangled web of international intrigue involving a secret Portuguese society called the Knights of Braganza. Everything Drake thought he knew about his fellow NATO compatriots gets turned upside down.
Departure Deferred finds Drake flung into Communist Albania to rescue the imprisoned daughter of a nuclear scientist who will be executed in mere hours if he doesn’t get her out. The best part of that book is the underlying background in which the story takes place: pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese forces are vying for control of Albania, and Drake’s rescue attempt gets caught up in the middle of it all. The Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s and 60s is endlessly fascinating to me. At the end—spoiler alert—he actually gets the Russians to help him get out of the country! That’s the kind of inventive nuance that I love in a Cold War book.
Storm Over Rockall is another highlight, with echoes of Ian Fleming’s Moonraker. Drake must infiltrate a pirate radio station moored half a mile outside the 12 nautical mile limit off the east coast of Britain in the North Sea, which is broadcasting a code hidden in music to Russian saboteurs who are attempting to disrupt a secret British rocket program. Like Moonraker, there’s a wealthy industrialist named Alain Charnley (à la Hugo Drax) at the top of the opposition, and the action takes place entirely in the UK and the North Sea (where the Moonraker rocket ends up). While it’s a great title, Storm Over Rockall unfortunately only includes a short scene near Rockall in the very beginning—it’s not central to the plot. But it bears a striking resemblance to the Danger Man episode “Not So Jolly Roger,” which also takes place on a pirate radio station—and aired a year after the book was published.
In Hell for Tomorrow, Drake has to take down a drug ring run by a fascist political party that’s attempting to corrupt Europe’s youth in order to make them dependent and thus future reliable “voters.”
In The Exterminator, Drake must determine if an American millionaire is methodically executing secret agents on behalf of the Soviets and stop him—or her.
And finally, in No Way Out, Drake is tasked with finding—and killing, if necessary—a secret agent who’s trying to come in from the cold in Macao.
Drake the man
The 86 television episodes of “Danger Man” tell us precious little about who Drake is and how he lives when he’s not gallivanting around the far corners of the world solving murders, rescuing agents from enemy embassies, exposing corrupt government officials, and the like.
But the books allow us to gain a deeper insight into Drake the man—while still providing action-packed adventures that we come to expect from the “Danger Man” franchise.
Drake is described as a tall man, in his early thirties, with a round, young-looking face, clean-shaven. His eyes are grey and his hair, “cut rather shorter than convention demanded,” is fair and rather unruly. There’s a slight cleft in his chin, only noticeable when he smiles.
In Departure Deferred, Drake’s flat is a mews house in London’s Mayfair. It features crimson carpets; long, rich, crimson curtains; a grey-brick, expensive fireplace; a lounge with a heavy-glazed window with toughened glass that would stand up to most small arms fire; a private gymnasium; a dark-room; and a private bar. Everything is clean, tidy, and “glossily expensive,” like “a hotel room on a larger scale.”
He holds a number of degrees, one of them in physics, including potentially a doctorate (he’s referred to as Dr. John Drake in at least one instance). He once studied sub-atomic particles. He also studied the Welsh language.
He regularly reads The Times and The Daily Mirror—including the comic strips, particularly Garth, an action-adventure comic that ran from 1943-1997 featuring a naval captain who traveled through time defeating villains. Like Bond, Drake drinks Blue Mountain coffee.
In Storm Over Rockall, we learn he has an Eskimo housekeeper named Ukluk, a big man with no vocal chords (because he mistook a bottle of caustic soda solution for gin) who cooks for him (and drinks bacon grease due to his “craving for oils and fats that derived from countless generations who had to eat fats to survive the Arctic cold”), prepares his clothes, cleans the flat, and wrestles Drake like his life depends on it—because out in the field, his life will and does depend on staying sharp.
Ukluk, who loves bourbon, has the physique of a heavyweight all-in wrestler, which was his trade until it became clear that Ukluk “had no control at all over his temper. He became a raging engine of destruction. Fighting with Ukluk was dicing with mutilation if not death. Which made him particularly suitable as a playmate or sparring partner for John Drake” because “Drake’s occupation required him to be exceptionally fit, to have reflexes as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel and to have a resilience under punishment like a racing motor tyre. Ukluk helped to keep him that way.” They spar in Drake’s private gymnasium at his home, a mews house that’s located this time in London’s Belgravia (perhaps he moved between books—or, as seems likely, he has multiple flats).
As for his tradecraft, Drake “rarely used an alias if he could avoid it” because” even the best-trained specialist can forget his cover name in times of stress.” That doesn’t stop him from assuming several covers during every one of these missions, of course. He carries a Beretta in a chamois shoulder holster in all six books.
As for gadgets, he uses a gob of chewing gum with a sub-miniaturized radio transmitter and microphone to bug an office (complete with heavy frame glasses with a built-in tiny radio receiver to listen to the bug), cigarettes that shoot blinding magnesium flares, a shoe equipped with a single shot .38 cartridge and a stubby barrel, and at least one of his missions included a car (a blue Vauxhall station wagon with a 4.5 litre Ferrari engine under the bonnet) outfitted with gadgets and weapons modifications (including a smoke-making device and a device that releases a half hundredweight of ball bearings behind the car to eliminate a following car).
He of course has other regular items, like telescopes, miniature cameras, lock-picking set, plastique, and the like.
The bosses
Like in the show (and unlike the Bond franchise), Drake’s boss frequently changes in the books. His NATO boss in Target for Tonight is named Tenny, a chess whiz who looks like a “humanized ape.” His boss in Departure Deferred is Fenner, a chain-smoker with “brittle, brownish-yellow, parchment-like skin, pouched eyes, mouth like a sewn-up purse, long, skeletal fingers” who reminds Drake of a “little shrivelled monkey behind his enormous desk. Presumably Fenner is the head of M9, but M9 is not mentioned at all in the book—or any of the books, for that matter. Drake meets him at Whitehall.
His boss in Storm Over Rockall is Sir Alwyn Fortescue, whose “exact function in the machinery of government was not defined by any paragraph in the establishment regulations,” and his predecessors didn’t exist “at all so far as anything appeared on paper. But he had had predecessors for many hundred years, predecessors whose purpose, in the simplest of terms, was the security of the State.” It’s also not stated whether he’s affiliated with M9, which likewise goes unmentioned. Drake meets him at Whitehall as well.
Sir Alwyn is a “realistic idealist” who considers Drake “one of his best men, perhaps the very best. Drake as the chameleon who acted. Now, neatly and soberly attired, thick-rimmed glasses lending his features an air of sober earnestness, Drake was the very picture of a keenly aspiring young civil servant in the executive grade. In the corridors of Whitehall he would attract no attention at all. And yet, given a few minutes to change, he could equally well be a drunken Irish navvy in a dockside pub or a Birmingham electronics salesman in London for a conference.”
Incredibly, Drake’s superior in Hell for Tomorrow is named Q! This was in 1965, mind, well after Bond’s Q had been popularized in several films by that point. In the “Danger Man” annuals, his boss is named X. (In two more echoes of Bond, a yacht from London that’s crucial to the plot is called the Tee Hee [Live and Let Die], and when Drake thinks he’s been abducted by the villain, “for a giddy moment, Drake entertained wild thoughts of being forced to to negotiate a superheated steam pipe [Dr. No], or of being towed across a reef lashed to a paravane [Live and Let Die].”) M9 is not mentioned in this book either, just that he works for the secret service.
M9 isn’t mentioned in The Exterminator, but the cover name seen in the show—World Travel—is. It’s “an elegant little office, glossy without and deeply carpeted within. There’s a model of a 300-ton tops’l schooner (which can be chartered for £300 a day) in the window and inside are tastefully exotic landscapes and deep armchairs, not too modern, and a small desk behind which sat “a small, enamelled brunette” who “was so beautiful that it was hard to believe that one way and another she had killed some six men.”
Drake has to feign interest in visiting Nepal in order to get past the public-facing facade and meet with his boss, Alain Percival (shades of Percy Alleline, the duplicitous head of the Circus, i.e. British secret service, in John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy). Percival, a bald man between 40 and 60 who enjoys an early Edwardian style office, asks Drake, “They got all the bullets out then?” adding that he heard (incorrectly) that Drake’s right arm might be impaired permanently.
Percival returns as Drake’s boss in No Way Out, where again World Travel is mentioned but not M9—it’s referred to simply as “the organization.” However, Drake doubts whether Alain Percival is the man’s real name.
Moral code
All of the books capture Drake’s essential character. Each of them easily could have been adapted into one of the hour-long TV episodes, and I wish they had been. But there are some differences. For example, Drake is more of a lady’s man in the books than he is in the show. McGoohan, who played and helped shape Drake, famously insisted on a kind of anti-James Bond dynamic. Drake doesn’t shoot people unless in self-defense and he doesn’t womanize. He’s the Moral Spy.
In Target for Tonight, however, when Drake’s NATO boss Tenny pulls him back from vacationing in Vermont to work on the Portugal case, he asks Drake, “How was Vermont?”
Drake replies, “Great.”
“Fishing?”
“Not much. Mostly sleeping and eating and sleeping—” Drake grins.
“Blonde or redhead?” Tenny asks.
“Shsssh!” Drake raises one finger to his lips.
He later sleeps with a diplomat’s wife. And Storm Over Rockall ends with Drake bedding his latest conquest, the daughter of a multi-millionaire.
In The Exterminator, while in dreary London, Drake wishes he were on a beach somewhere where “the sight of nubile maidenhood would soothe the spirit and the nerves.” His boss asks if Drake would like a trip on a luxury yacht, “a real champagne palace” with “beautiful, eager girls… romantic ports?” Drake replies, “Very much.”
Drake considers that the “eager-eyed blonde” receptionist of World Travel in No Way Out (a different receptionist than was encountered in The Exterminator) has hips that sway “entrancingly,” making her “the ideal Christmas present for the man who had everything,” but who “was certainly as deadly as a basket of angry cobras.” Lucky for him, “the organization did not approve of fraternization amongst its staff.”
In Hong Kong, Drake admires the “slender intent Chinese office girls in cheongsams which showed such a splendid length of thigh.” In Macao, a hotel receptionist has “a bosom as capacious as, Drake was sure, the hotel’s own pillows.”
Drake kills in the books, too, which is rare in the TV show. In fact, he kills someone in every single book.
In Target for Tonight, Drake pilots a plane while using a Luger to shoot and kill a couple of thugs—including a fellow NATO agent-turned-traitor—chasing him in a car. He previously killed two other toughs in a roadside shootout. He also—spoiler alert—shoots a Danish vice consul’s wife with whom he has an affair, right “between the twin peaks of her bosom.”
In Departure Deferred, Drake shoots the head of the Albanian secret service (naturally), Colonel Anton Spiro, during an intense life-or-death scuffle: “Deafeningly, midway between the two men, the revolver exploded. It belched flame straight into Spiro’s jubilant face. For one moment more Spiro looked out of that face—looked out through a veil of blood and a mass of jagged bone—and tried to speak. No words would come. His eyes glared. They rolled. Then he pitched forward and Drake could see what was left of the back of his head. The heavy four-five bullet had passed through it, mushrooming on the way.”
These are not lighthearted romps written for tweens as one might expect from a 60s TV tie-in. They are full-fledged adult spy novels, albeit rather short ones—novellas, anyway.
In Storm Over Rockall, he strangles a Russian agent with a garrote and blows up a traitor scientist with a watch bomb, leaving him “faceless” and “threshing on the ground until he ran out of blood.” He kills an Irish sailor by kicking him in the head, after which he dumps the body in the North Sea. And he blows up a ship in the same sea, presumably killing a grip of Russians.
In Hell for Tomorrow, he shoots an armed chauffeur (who fired at Drake first) directly in his coupon: “A crimson flower bloom[ed] horribly in the centre of his face, like a slow motion clown bursting languidly through a paper hoop.” He shoots two thugs on a yacht, sending one over into the sea, and kills the helmsman and the steersman with a grenade (that was first thrown at him, to be fair).
He stabs a mafioso in the heart in The Exterminator. He reckons that “if he had been a knife fighter of this island he would have turned [the blade] sideways, cut with one quick slash across the bottom of the rib cage to spill the coiling mass of guts across the cobbles. But to disembowel is not to kill. Men have lived and killed while they stumbled through the snares of their own sagging colons.”
And in No Way Out, he shoots an enormous thug in the forehead (and tries to kill a tiger that’s trying to kill him).
Outro
Of course, these six books aren’t the only written “Danger Man” stories. Two annuals were released, in 1965 and 1966, that feature 21 short stories featuring our man Drake. If you include the comic books as well, which I do, there’s an impressive—and underrated and underappreciated—”Danger Man” canon.
I, for one, can’t get enough of “Danger Man.” I watched all the episodes and read the comics, the bubblegum cards, the show guides, the annuals, and now the books. I wish there were 50 continuation novels like Bond’s got. Now someone needs to do a “Danger Man” revival, à la the recent “The Ipcress File” TV show remake. But could anyone truly replace Patrick McGoohan?
