The thrillers of Jack Higgins, the rise of Dorothy Thompson, plus some March literary madness: newsletter, March 6, 2020

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Jack Higgins, aka Harry Patterson, finally gets a break

When The Eagle Has Landed was published in 1975, it was an immediate and huge hit for its author Harry Patterson, who was writing under the pen name of Jack Higgins.

The fast-paced and gripping narrative captured the imagination of readers and the attention of filmmakers, who quickly purchased the movie rights and almost as quickly produced a film starring Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, and Donald Sutherland. The movie, of course, spurred sales of the book and for decades thereafter, Higgins’ name was rarely absent from the bestsellers lists.

The Eagle Has Landed has been described as a break-through novel for Patterson, and it was certainly that — but that descriptor is somewhat misleading.

In 1975, Patterson was no novice to the writing game. In fact, The Eagle Has Landed was his 35th novel. Some of his novels had sold very well, and two of them — A Candle for the Enemy and The Wrath of God — had already been made into movies. (The movie title for the former was The Violent Enemy.)

Patterson was born in 1929 in Newcastle Upon Tyne, but his mother moved the family back to her native Belfast, Northern Ireland, when the father abandoned the family. In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, he said:

“We were very poor and there was great tension between the Catholics and the Protestants . . . . As a Protestant, I’d get beaten up by Catholics, and there was one occasion when shots were fired at the tram we were travelling in and my mother pushed me on to the floor and lay on top of me. On another, a Catholic priest patted me on the head and said: ‘Poor wee boy; his black Orange soul will go straight to hell.’ Strangely, though, these experiences made me less rather more than sectarian. I came to see both religions as both morally compromised and oppressed, and have written that ambiguity into two of my main characters [Liam Devlin and Sean Dillon, who have appeared in 17 novels]. Many Catholics even assume I must be Catholic from the way I write.” Source: A life in writing: Jack Higgins | Books | The Guardian

After two years in the Army, Patterson attended the London School of Economics and eventually achieved his teaching certificate. He took a position lecturing at Leeds Polytechnic and in 1959, at the age of 30, he began writing novels. He has been at it ever since.

His first novel, A Sad Wind from the Sea, sold well enough, but his publishers told him not to write more than one novel a year because that’s all that readers would want. So Patterson began using pen names and could produce two or three in a year. They were all in the thriller genre with exciting plots and tough heroes.

Patterson now lives on the island of Jersey. He has passed his 90th birthday, and his last novel, The Midnight Bell, was published in 2016.

March literary madness: Hilary Mantel and Erik Larson

Two major literary events of the season are occurring this month: the release of new books by Hilary Mantel (The Mirror and the Light, due out March 10) and Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile, available now).

Mantel caused a sensation with her Wolf Hall, the first of a trilogy of historical novels that centered on the life of Thomas Cromwell, close adviser to Henry VIII (until he wasn’t) and one of the most important characters in English history. Wolf Hall won the Man Booker prize, Britain’s top book award, and became a successful stage play and ultimately television series (starring Mark Rylance).

The second novel in the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies, also won the Man Booker prize, an unprecedented coup for Mantel.

Now, The Mirror and the Light, in its pre-publication state is gathering more rave reviews. Writes Alexandra Harris for The Guardian:

So the trilogy is complete, and it is magnificent. The portrait of Thomas Cromwell that began with Wolf Hall (2009) and continued with Bring Up the Bodies (2012) now concludes with a novel of epic proportions, every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors. “Concludes” is perhaps not the word, for there is no tone of finality. Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal, deputy head of the church in England, chief minister, second man of the realm, Cremuel to the imperial ambassador, Crumb to friends, has a great deal of business to do, through 900 pages, before we contemplate endings. The heights of his power are all before us, and though he likes ladders and cranes of construction sites, for his own progress he prefers to think of wings. Source: The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel review – Cromwell’s end | Books | The Guardian

You can read an excerpt of the book in The Guardian here.

Erik Larson always stays on the nonfictional side of history, and in doing so, he has placed himself among the best of today’s practitioners of narrative history (which include David McCullough and Nathaniel Philbrick). Larson’s mode is to take a well-known story or character in history and dig deeply into it to find another story, or dozens of other stories, that give us new insights into how we got to where we are today.

In The Splendid and the Vile, Larson magnifies the story of Winston Churchill’s first year as prime minister and the family and advisers who surrounded him. Churchill not only had to defend Great Britain from the horrors of defeat at Dunkirk and The Blitz of London, but he also had to shore up the courage of his family and the British people.

Critics are already hailing the book as another of Larson’s triumphs, and LitHub.com has a short and enlightening interview with Larson, which you can read here.

Mantel and Larson are heavyweights in their particular classes of writing, and it’s always rewarding to see what they produce.

Illustration: Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the television production of Wolf Hall.

Dorothy Thompson’s spectacular rise to the top of European journalism

Dorothy Thompson knew from a fairly early age that she wanted to do something significant. In her early twenties, she realized that journalism was the tool to do just that.

Born in 1893 to a Methodist minister and his wife in upstate New York, Thompson’s mother died at a fairly early age, and her father would take her along as he made his ministerial rounds. When he remarried, Dorothy and her stepmother did not get along (“She had an allergy to children.”), and she was shipped off to Chicago to live with an aunt.

Her time in Chicago freed her from the strictures of small-town life and introduced her to art, music, theater, and a way of thinking that fit with her natural spunk. When she returned to New York, it was to attend Syracuse University where she earned a degree in 1914. She then took to the streets as an organizer for the New York suffrage movement and learned how vicious the world could be toward a woman who was asserting her rights. Suffrage was defeated in the New York State Legislature in 1915, and the movement in that state was deflated.

Dorothy, however, was not. She continued to develop her social conscience and was drawn to the promises of Bolshevism — something her cold-eyed realism led her to abandon after Lenin took power in Russia. Still, Europe seemed to be where the action was and Dorothy wanted to be there, so she decided to launch herself into journalism. Along with a female friend, an invitation to a Zionist conference in London, and $150, Dorothy set said for Europe in 1920. Her plan was to write about the emerging Zionist movement and present an article to the International News Service.

The INS rejected the article, but Dorothy talked her way into the service’s freelance realm. Her first break came when she traveled to Ireland and interviewed Terrance MacSweeney, one of the leaders of the Sinn Fein movement. It was the last interview MacSweeny gave before being hauled off to prison and dying there two months later.

The money she earned from the INS allowed her to travel to Italy where she covered the general strike that led to Benito Mussolini taking power, gaining more respect and more money from the INS. She had also joined the Red Cross, and she went from Italy to Vienna where monarchists were planning to reinstate the King of Hungary. Her position in the Red Cross gained her entry into the King’s entourage, and her interview with him was a sensational journalistic coup. It also brought her to the attention of the Curtis Publishing Company, which hired her as the Vienna and Balkan correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

During her time in Vienna and Budapest, Dorothy met Marcel Fodor, Eastern European correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, who mentored her with great kindness and generosity. She also learned German and became fluent in the language.

In 1923 she married Joseph Bard, a Hungarian intellectual, but their marriage had few happy moments. They were divorced in 1927. During that time, however, she continued her upward spiral in journalistic circles, adding Germany to herlist of countries that she had covered. In 1925 she became chief correspondent for central Europe for the Public Ledger, and in 1927, she took over as head of the bureau in Berlin for the New York Post.

Thus, in less than a decade, Dorothy Thompson became the unchallenged queen of foreign correspondents in Europe. That reign was interrupted in 1928 when she met and married novelist Sinclair Lewis. They moved to Lewis’ home in Vermont, but Thompson was too well known and too well connected to remain in isolation for long. By 1930 she was back in Europe working on freelance assignments and watching Germany spiral into more political chaos.

In 1931 she was granted an interview with the rising star of the National Socialist Party, Adolph Hitler. She was less than impressed and wrote as much. She did not think Hitler would amount to much, an assessment she later regretted.