It Won't Get You Anywhere

It Won't Get You Anywhere, published in 1966, is the first of three thrillers by the English novelist Desmond Skirrow about John Brock, an irreverent but very, very tough advertising executive who is also a sometime undercover agent. Published in England by The Bodley Head and in the United States by Lippincott, it is a little under 80,000 words in length and almost certainly the best of the Brock novels. (Skirrow, about whom little is known, came relatively late to writing, wrote only four novels, and died in his early fifties.) Published in today's market, it might be classified as a techno thriller, as it does employ a few elements of that genre. More likely, however, it simply falls into the much broader category of spy thrillers that contain some elements of science fiction such as Moonraker and Thunderball, the near-contemporaneous but far more famous books by Ian Fleming, or others that go at least as far back among well-known writers as The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler's first novel of 1936, in which an atomic bomb is involved, nine years before it became reality.

Most of the appeal of this particular book comes from the quirky and Chandleresque vigor of Skirrow's writing ("she dealt me into Schneider's presence like a hand of aces"), its fast-paced action, and the light-hearted, first-person narrative of Brock, its protagonist, and his many witty asides and observations. The plot itself is extremely simple, with no sub-plots, complications, or side stories.

Three agents who work for the fat man have been killed in automobile accidents in the last few months, in Italy, Germany, and London. The fat man is concerned that his "lads" are dying. On a hunch, Brock is called in.

"All right," I said, "I'll look into Llewellyn." "That won't get you anywhere," he said.

But it takes Brock only a few pages, and several other people telling him that it won't get him anywhere, to determine that the dead agents had one thing in common at the moment of their deaths: they were, for no particularly compelling reasons, keeping a vague eye on a certain Lord Llewellyn, the most powerful industrialist in Britain.

A rich, powerful, titled, Welsh madman and industrialist, born Tudor Owen Glendower Llewellyn and now Lord Llewellyn and master of Allied Electrical Industries, called Allelec, the "single most powerful force in Britain's industry," he believes himself to be the direct descendant of Henry VII and hence the legitimate ruler of Great Britain; he has therefore conceived, and carried out, a 20-year scheme to destroy, in a single climactic moment, the entire electrical grid of England, at which point, he and his minions, both Welsh and German, aided by science-fictional devices of his own manufacture, will take over the isles and he will establish himself upon the throne.

The rest of the book blah blah blah....

Aside from Brock's sheer indestructibility, other improbabilities abound but are glossed over or ignored. How, for instance, have 5,000 German paramilitaries made their way into an industrial plant in the city of Cardiff without being noticed by either the local Welsh police or, more particularly, by Provis (first name unknown), the extremely capable local agent of the fat man's secret department? And how is it that no one really knows what is being manufactured within Allelec's plant in Cardiff, which is described as being an astounding "four miles" in length? Four miles long? A single building in Wales? And no one knows that it is housing a secret army of 5,000 Germans?