Writers of spy fiction are often colourful personalities and many have been actual spies or intelligence officers (Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Ian Fleming). The most colourful of them all was perhaps Alexander Wilson (1893-1963). Wilson wrote nine very successful spy novels during the 1920s and 1930s. Wilson was married four times but the problem was that he had four wives all at the same time. He served two terms of imprisonment for fraud. He was also a British spy, either for a brief period or a very long period depending on whether one believes Wilson’s own account or the account of others.
He certainly worked for MI6 from 1939 to 1942 at which time he was dismissed for concocting false reports. Wilson claimed that in fact he was still working for MI6 under deep cover and that he continued to be an agent for many years. MI5’s files on Wilson are still classified.
Wilson’s spy thrillers recount the adventures of Sir Leonard Wallace, a war hero (he has an artificial arm as a result of a daring attempt to destroy a U-boat base in Dorset) and now head of the Secret Service. He’s not the kind of man to just stay in his office and send agents out on missions. He undertakes most of the missions himself.
Wallace of the Secret Service is actually a short story collection. 1933 was an interesting time for a spy thriller to be written. Nazi Germany was not yet a threat. Relations with fascist Italy were still friendly. The Soviet Union was definitely seen as a threat and Bolshevism as an extreme threat. To Wilson it was obvious that the British Labour Party was basically Bolshevik and socialist revolution might come at any moment.
There were also plenty of reasons to fear for the future of the British Empire. As a result these stories have a rather different feel from later spy stories focused on Nazis and Reds. In some ways they have more of a pre-WW1 feel (similar to the spy stories of the era written by people like E. Phillips Oppenheim and William le Queux).
Given the later sorry history of Soviet infiltration of MI6 (for who Wilson certainly worked at some stage) it’s a fascinating detail that in one of the stories Sir Leonard Wallace covers up evidence that one of his men is a traitor, to avoid a scandal.
Wilson definitely belongs more to the Bulldog Drummond tradition of spy fiction than to the psychologically complex morally ambiguous school of spy fiction that started to emerge in the 30s with Writers like Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Somerset Maugham. Wilson is content to have his heroes be noble and heroic and generally perfect and his bad guys be dastardly melodrama villains. Which is OK, I can enjoy both schools of spy fiction. There’s lots of jingoism which can be amusing. You can generally assume that the villains will be beastly foreigners but to his credit Wilson does pull off the occasional surprise.
It has to be admitted that the plots are pretty basic. Of course these are short stories but even so they lack the ingenious plot twists that you hope for in spy fiction. Wilson’s novels are stronger - in his novels such as The Mystery of Tunnel 51 and The Devil’s Cocktail he manages to sustain the outrageousness and the fun more successfully.
In the first story, Out of the Land of Egypt, Wallace is up against extreme Egyptian nationalists who want the British out of their country. Wallace has to get hold of their plans for a rising.
In Bound in Morocco an Italian prince is kidnapped and held captive in Morocco. Not for ransom but for political reasons. Wallace will have to rescue him but first he has to find him.
Sentiment and Suicide is the locked-room mystery. A British scientist is found shot to death in his laboratory. The only access to the laboratory is through two doors, one of them a hefty steel door. There are no windows. The steel door is locked from the inside and the only key is in the professor’s pocket. The scientist has developed a poison gas so lethal it could wipe out all living things. Naturally that’s no problem as long as the British Government controls it but what if it fell into the hands of foreigners? And now it appears that foreign agents have managed to get their hands on the formula. OK, it’s not one of the great locked-room mysteries but is is interesting to see how popular such mysteries were in the early 30. It’s an improvement on the first two stories, with a more ambitious plot.
Russian Hospitality involves a dastardly Bolshevik plot against the British army. Wallace has one of his men go undercover as a communist rabble-rouser but will he able to fool the Soviet masterspy Lavinsky? This one involves a battle of wits between Lavinsky and Wallace with both men believing they have the upper hand. It’s not too bad.
Things start to get really far-fetched and outrageous with A Soviet Dinner Party. Wallace tries to infiltrate a secret meeting in Moscow and ends up holding Lenin hostage! It’s all very silly but it’s exciting in its own way.
A Greek Tragedy is a rather curious tale of intrigue. Wallace discovers that the British Ambassador to Turkey has been murdered. He also discovers the reason why but what should he do about it? It could all be very embarrassing and unpleasant, for the British, the Greeks and the Turks. This is the first story in the collection which is not a straightforward good vs evil story which makes it an interesting departure.
In Brien Averts a War Major Brien (Wallace’s second-in-command at the Secret Service) obtains some letters exchanged between two French politicians, letters which could easily start a war. And there are desperate men determined to get hold of those letters, if necessary by striking at Wallace’s family.
In East is East Wallace has to infiltrate Gandhi’s ashram in India to find out what mischief the Congress party is plotting. The very idea of Indian independence was of course quite unthinkable to Wilson. This is by far the weakest story in the collection, a story which manages to be completely unbelievable and completely uninteresting because nothing really happens.
The Poisoned Plane is a much better story. An envoy has been despatched to Britain from the King of Afghanistan, bearing proposals for an alliance. There are reasons to believe that attempts will be made to prevent the envoy from reaching his destination. Major Brien is given the job of escorting him. There are aerial chases, poison gas attacks, sinister dwarves, a battle at sea and all kinds of skullduggery. It’s all delirious fun and a rather exciting story. In fact it’s the best story in the collection.
In It Happened in Capri plans for a new naval gun have been stolen by a master criminal. Wallace has to get them back but he has to do it without fuss. It’s a fairly routine story.
Overall Wallace of the Secret Service is a bit disappointing. I wouldn’t write Wilson off but I also wouldn’t recommend this short story collection as a starting point. This one is for Sir Leonard Wallace completists. But the novels are worth a look.
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