Grove Koger
Prolific British novelist Compton Mackenzie, who died on November 30, 1972, wrote two novels set in an unidentified “city in southeast Europe,” Extremes Meet (1928) and The Three Couriers (1929). The city is obviously Greek and is based on Athens, where Mackenzie directed counter-espionage operations for the Aegean Sea region during World War I.
According to David Stafford in The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies (University of Georgia Press, 1988), Mackenzie “served unorthodoxly but with distinction,” although his cavalier methods and nonchalant attitude irritated his more conventional colleagues. After taking control of counter-intelligence, he transferred its office to the British School of Archaeology, and charged the school’s librarian with maintaining its rapidly burgeoning records of German agents and sympathizers. (The number of subjects eventually grew to an astonishing 23,000 “suspicious” individuals.) He gave his three dozen or so agents the operational names of British poets, and he himself, required to choose a letter of the alphabet by which he’d be known officially, selected “Z.” He sometimes wrote his reports in blank verse.
Mackenzie worked within a befuddling array of British intelligence agencies that were often at near-war with each other: MI1C, which dealt with intelligence and counter-intelligence outside the British Empire and which would later become MI6; MI5, which operated within the empire; MI2, military intelligence; and NID, the Naval Intelligence Division. His own operation was known, naturally, as the “Z Bureau.” Then there were the intelligence services of France, Italy, Russia, and Germany itself. As Mackenzie’s protagonist remarks in The Three Couriers, “This is a Charlie Chaplin war.”
To confound the situation, Greece remained neutral during the early years of the war, although its monarch, King Constantine, was the brother-in-law of the Kaiser and favored Germany. The Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, favored the allies, and had territorial ambitions as well, which the philhellenic Mackenzie enthusiastically supported. As a result, Mackenzie was able to take effective control for a time of the country’s Cyclades Islands, nudging their local rulers into alignment with the prime minister’s policies. On one particularly memorable occasion, he even commandeered a Greek royal yacht on Syra in order to make a triumphant tour of the entire group.
Of course this comic-opera situation had a dead-serious side, and both aspects are conveyed in Extremes Meet and its sequel. Their protagonist is Lieutenant Commander Roger Waterlow, who has botched his chances of promotion in the Royal Navy and is now involved in thwarting the designs of enemy agents and King Constantine himself—lampooned as “Tom Tiddler,” from the name of a then-popular children’s game. In Extremes Meet, it’s a question of delaying an enemy submarine long enough near the coast to allow the Royal Navy to sink it. In The Three Couriers, it’s a question of attempting to keep crucial military documents from being smuggled out of the country. Thwarting Waterlow’s efforts are debilitating heat, verminous insect life, the vagaries of sexual attraction, and the ineptitude of officialdom.
Two factors have contributed to Mackenzie’s neglect in espionage fiction circles. The first is that the novels are hard to categorize. While they reflect the reality of his experience of the war, they’re a bit too absurd to pass as realistic fiction, but not quite absurd enough to qualify as farce. They aren’t exposes of spycraft, although they include more than a few elements of Mackenzie’s actual practice, including his naming his agents after poets. They aren’t bitter, although Mackenzie’s own experiences caused him more than a little frustration.
Another factor was the publication of W. Somerset Maugham’s collection of related stories Ashenden: or, The British Agent in 1927. Maugham’s book is generally hailed as the first work of realistic spy fiction, although I think that Maugham handles its episodic form somewhat unsatisfactorily. Nevertheless, he had a greater awareness of human frailty, which in turn contributed to his mastery of characterization, and in that aspect, Mackenzie can’t compare, at least in these two novels.
Mackenzie’s experience in Greece proved more than frustrating in the postwar years as he began publication of his memoirs, one of which, Greek Memories (Cassell, 1932) contained details of the British espionage operations in that country. Most damagingly, the book revealed the initial—“C”—used by the head of Britain’s Secret Information Services! The result was that Mackenzie was tried (in closed and truly farcical legal proceedings) under Britain’s Official Secrets Act and fined £100 plus another £100 in costs. But the former spymaster had already run up far more substantial legal bills, and was forced to sell the manuscripts of his books as well as a number of volumes from his personal library. In addition, his publisher was forced to withdraw all copies of the offending volume from publication. A censored version was released by Cassell in 1939, but the original text didn’t see the light of day until 2011, thanks to Biteback Publishing of London.
Mackenzie’s revenge was to publish a novel about espionage that was truly farcical, Water on the Brain (Cassell, 1933), but that’s another story for another day.
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For more information about Mackenzie, see D.J. Dooley, Compton Mackenzie (Twayne, 1974); Andro Linklater, Compton Mackenzie: A Life (Chatto & Windus, 1987); and Leo Robertson, Compton Mackenzie: An Appraisal of His Literary Work (Richards Press, 1954). The writer’s career in espionage is discussed in Anthony Masters, Literary Agents: The Novelist as Spy (Blackwell, 1987).
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The image at the top of today’s post is the jacket of the Chatto / Landmark Library edition of Extremes Meet, and the second image shows Mackenzie in uniform. The third image is an antique postcard of the harbor of Hermoupolis on the island of Syra (Syros), where Mackenzie commandeered the royal yacht.
World Enough 