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. Published in today's market, it might be classified as a techno thriller, as it does contain a few elements of that genre. More likely, however, it simply falls into that 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, and going as far back as The Dark Frontier, the 1936, first novel by Eric Ambler, in which an atomic bomb is involved.

Most of the appeal of the book comes from the vigor of Skirrow's writing, its fast-paced action, and the light-hearted first-person narrative of the hero, John Brock, with its many witty asides. The plot itself is extremely simple, with no sub-plots, complications, or side stories. A rich, powerful, titled, Welsh madman and industrialist, Lord Llewellyn, 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 moment, the entire electrical grid of England.