Introduction.
Epigraph: Good and evil both travel like ripples from a stone tossed into a still pool (p.73)
This, the third Marston Baines story, is set first in Venice and later in Rome. Its Heinemann dust jacket illustrated by Michael Whittlesea spreads over front and back showing Francesca (a young woman from Venice) running in distress down the Spanish Steps in Rome. The Children’s Book Club jacket shows a black and white Venice silhouette. There are no internal maps or drawings. The detail of tourist spots suggests that research was carried out during Italian holidays although the main action takes place in fictional houses and alleys, as the Foreword emphasises. Mark O’Hanlon indicates (Beyond the Lone Pine: A Biography of Malcolm Saville, 2001) that the Venice holiday was in 1960 and Rome in 1962.
The story’s main theme is Black Magic/ Satanism, which has inspired an evil plot for world dominance. Saville’s Foreword stresses: “Satanism actually exists. It is practised secretly in many European countries including Britain, and each year many churches are desecrated. Satanism is hateful and evil ̶ the reverse image of religion and of Christianity in particular”. Saville took inspiration from contemporary James Bond books and films, and some plot details in this book draw on the newly released On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Saville the Anglican Christian would have been aware of press coverage of witchcraft and black magic in the 1960s and he considered it sacrilegious and threatening. His version of Satanism involved the black mass, the opposite to Christian Eucharist. His belief in the potency of the Eucharist seems to balance with the negative potency of the black mass. Satanism exists with evil motivations and consequences. This story warns young readers to steer well clear of it.
We have to look elsewhere for the main source of Saville’s depiction of Satanism, which we find in Dennis Wheatley’s The Satanist (1960). Wheatley’s Gregory Sallust second world war thrillers prompted Fleming to write the James Bond books. The Wheatley family, father and children, were active in MI5 (military intelligence) in wartime. Wheatley showed an early interest in the occult which featured in several stories - The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil a Daughter. He said in his ‛authobiography’ (The Time Has Come: The Memoirs of Dennis Wheatley (Vol 3) 1919-1977 p. 131) “The fact that I had read extensively about ancient religions gave me some useful background, but I required up-to-date information about occult circles in this country. My friend, Tom Driberg, who then lived in a mews flat just behind us in Queen’s Gate, proved most helpful. He introduced me to Aleister Crowley, the Reverend Montague Summers and Rollo Ahmed”. These were a weird bunch. Driberg was aristocratic with communist sympathies: those of my generation knew him better as William Hickey the Daily Express gossip monger. Ahmed lost his teeth in a Satanic ritual that backfired, Summers (never ordained) was a paedophile who liked devout Catholic boys. Crowley was the brain behind modern Satanism seeing himself as a prophet of the new religion Thelema which ushered in the Æon of Horus declaring that its followers should adhere to the hedonistic self-centred code of “Do what thou wilt”, a phrase which appears often in The Satanist.
Wheatley was ideologically conservative, sitting in his smoking jacket in his London Club. His main characters supported the monarchy, empire and social class distinctions. Many of his villains are villainous simply because they attack the establishment. His preface illustrates this: he says: “should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject and thus come into contact with a man or woman of Power, I feel it is only right to urge them, most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into any practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of very real and concrete nature.” This is hugely ambiguous ̶ in the story, satanic powers are real, can change the weather, can seal doorways to keep people prisoner, and can ward off bullets. His story assumes telepathy and occult powers are real. A crucifix is a potent charm against dark arts that might find a place in Hogwarts. The preface suggests that Wheatley believed all this. Saville prefers rather to blame trickery, drugs and hypnosis.
The Satanist (1960) was Saville’s likely source. This is the story of a woman whose husband, an MI5 agent, was killed as a human sacrifice when unmasked by a Satanic temple in London: she secretly infiltrated the temple to extract revenge. Her Irish colleague, Barney Sullivan, had two tasks, one to be a communist/anarchist agent provocateur in labour relations, and secondly to infiltrate the Satanist Temple to find communist links. Barney’s relationship with Mary is in many ways parallel to Patrick’s with Francesca, and both end with romance. Patrick (also Irish) rescues Francesca from Satanists much as Barney rescues Mary. Barney’s undercover anarchy work is reflected in Three Towers in Tuscany, the first Marston Baines story. A Black Mass is described in chapter 5, and another takes place at the end of the story. Saville paints a picture of Christian parody, with an upside-down cross, black candles, the Mass recited backwards by an unfrocked priest. These also feature in Wheatley. Hypnosis and drugs were used in both stories. Both refer to Satan as ‛the Master’, Wheatley’s dressed as a ram, Saville’s a goat. In both, becoming a neophyte requires undertaking some service to Satan (i.e. supporting the evil plans of the leadership). Both stories use blackmail through photographs. A human sacrifice occurs in Wheatley and is planned in Dark Danger to persuade the victims. In both, the crucifix was used as a weapon.
The story of Dark Danger has three locations, in Venice, England and Rome. In Venice Simon Baines’ university friend, Patrick Cartwright, age 20 takes a job tutoring Count Brindisi’s son, Piedro who had missed time in school after hospitalization. Piedro had a beautiful 18 year old sister, Francesca. Patrick and his pupil take the waterbus or vaporetto on the Grand Canal to Rialto Bridge, the cheapest and most crowded form of transport. They walked through the side alleys to find the down-at-heel palazzo (“Not much of a palace now...Rather a sad place really”, p.2) which will be home for a while. Piedro mused pragmatically that “There are plenty of poor people in Venice” which is “a ghastly place in the winter”. He added that many incomes relied on tourists, so winter was a very slack time. They moved down side alleys, over bridges with gondolas going underneath, one propelled by “a tough-looking villain”. Coming to a small square called a campo, originally meaning ‛field’ Piedro explains, Patrick intervenes in a fight in which one man was trying to knife another. Piedro refuses to translate the resulting conversation and after this, the tensions of the story unfold.
Brindisi Palace, fictional but typical, was five storeys high, a balcony, a state room, and had painted mooring posts onto the Grand Canal, a boathouse, and a small courtyard garden. From the balcony, the “great waterway ̶ curved like a bow, or perhaps like a loop in a necklace set with jewels ̶ lay below him. The lights from the houses were reflected in the dark, sparking water which was busy with traffic”. With such vivid descriptions, the first few pages of chapter one paints an atmospheric landscape.
Venice has a long history over which buildings, including churches, were built on foundations of wooden piles sunk into the clay. 117 islands were built on. The river formed the Grande Canal with over a hundred side canals and many alleys called calli ̶ three thousand, says Piedro ̶ to accommodate buildings. From time to time you come to small squares called campo. There are six sectors, San Marco, Castello, Cannaregio (all to the NE), and San Polo, San Croce and Dorsoduro (all to the SW). Arriving at San Marco (St. Marks Basilica) on the broad San Marco canal, Patrick would have needed to take a boat up the Grand Canal past San Polo (St Pauls) to the Rialto Bridge. On San Marco Piazza, Saville says in the Foreword, Caffe Florians is a real famous eating house, actually advertising its origins from 1720; and the Quadri on Saint Mark Square is an acclaimed Michelin Guide restaurant . Francesca hints that they are expensive (p.23). St Mark’s Cathedral has its roots in the time when the bones of St Mark the Evangelist (that is, the Gospel writer) were stolen from Alexandria. St Marks Basilica was therefore a pilgrimage centre. The four bronze ‛Roman’ horses are mentioned: looted from Constantinople in 1204AD, they were looted again by Napoleon, and returned in 1815. The horses on the facade are now replicas, the originals are inside under cover. They also took the lift up the campanile (bell tower) to see the view as a watery patchwork, naming the various features and islands (p.28) for the readers’ benefit.
The historic buildings have today been refurbished for the wealthy. Unfortunately, the weight of buildings (often 4-6 storeys high) causes a little sinkage and rising sea levels can mean flooding. In 1966, the year after Dark Danger was written, flooding caused such major damage that flood prevention schemes were brought forward and eventually a flood barrage built. One topographical puzzle comes when Patrick looked out of his window down the canal “across the rooftops to the dome of the famous church of St. Giorgio Maggiore on its island between the city and the Lido” (p.17). The Lido was the outlying reef offering some protection from the sea. There are two puzzles. A view of San Giorgio is dominated by the bell-tower, or campanile, which is not mentioned. The dome is small in comparison. Also, from where Patrick was supposed to be looking, San Giorgio would not visible but masked by San Marco’s domes with its own campanile. Saville conflated different views from memory. The youngsters swam and sunbathed on ‘The Lido’: this original Lido protecting the Lagoon had been developed into a glamorous island resort with 12 km of beach and many hotels, made famous through Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice.
Switching the scene to England, a refugee is picked up by the British Secret Service and is sent to stay with the vicar at Barfield in the Cotswolds, who was a renowned expert on black magic. Marston Baines visits and learns that this refugee had been mixed up with black magic in Italy, but escaped with information vital to the secret services. Marston lunched en route “beyond Oxford”, certainly The Evenlode, Eynsham (built 1935) on the A40 to Burford. “Barfield”, we are told, had a church with a tower, a lych-gate and a cricket ground, down a little lane to the north of the A40. The pub is named The Three Horseshoes. The best fit is Swinbrook, population 140, on the outskirts of Burford, with the church of St Mary (with a tower) and a substantial cricket pitch and club. Its pub is The Swan. The Three Horseshoes is a not uncommon pub name, one being close to Saville’s homes in Sussex. Barfield is an adaptation of Burford closeby. Swinbrook church is a gem, with monuments, misericords and the graves of four Mitford siblings. There is no lych-gate here or locally so this is an embellishment. The fictional refugee is found dead on the church altar as a Satanic sacrifice, a fate he was terrified of. Marston nevertheless found out that a Venetian scientist is being pressured to reveal a secret, and that the Black Magic syndicate has a female leader. The Satanic executioners are a couple, man and woman, on a motor cycle, and Marston is mugged on the way home (having forgotten his SOE commando training again), his red Mini Cooper (see book 2 in the series) being terminally damaged and sadly dumped in a quarry.
The action moves to Rome where Count Brindisi received a phone call to visit his former assistant. The instructions were: go to number 7, Via Del Umberto near the top of the Spanish Steps and close by the church of Trinita dei Monti. The Catholic church with this name, pictured on the Heinemann dust jacket, is located at the top of the Steps . He would stay in a small hotel he often used, Hotel Popolo. His route to the Spanish steps is described as Imperial Forum, the white Victor Emmanuel monument, the Corso and the Via Condotti. Other places featured are the Trevi Fountain, amid street cafes; the La Barcaccia fountain; the house where Keats died, and the Coliseum, with emphasis on the memorial to Christian martyrs. What happened to the Count is substance of this story. It involved a Black Mass in catacombs accessible from a lonely villa south of Rome. A criminal committee of twelve plus the female leader mimicked Jesus and the twelve disciples. The Count countered the bullying through audible prayers and psalms. His forced journey to the Black Mass is saturated by images of Christian martyrdom.
Like in the first two stories, there is a balance between action and innocent romance since Saville wanted his stories to appeal to both young men and women. The three young men were present without the girls from the earlier stories. Patrick and Francesca were romantically connected, though the others were flirtatious. Francesca was a victim throughout, a double-negative plot-scape, victim and girl-interest combined. She has little autonomy but is acted on throughout, beautiful but passive. Francesca was however a strong swimmer, mirroring Petronella/Peter before her in the Lone Pine stories.
My epigraph above shows the potential consequences of good and evil. Both are real in a black and white world. Christ and Satan, Christianity and Satanism both have power and are at war. This power in Saville is not paranormal as in Wheatley, but the consequences of deliberate choices, which can be changed and provide redemption. Although prayers and crucifixes are weaponised as talismans, this is in a psychological not paranormal way. The good life, the Christian life, Saville is saying, should be a battle against evil using everything available and not thinking about the dangers and personal cost. I agree in general and disagree in detail. As a High Church of England Tory, his concept of good was tied into conservatism, the monarchy and the status quo. His concept of evil was black and white, extreme, a deliberate challenge to Christian values. However we live in a world of grey ethics, where it is hard to tell who is good and who is evil, where opinion is polarised, playing out on social media and polarised media. But nil desperandum if effort is made, through education and literature, we can develop critical skills in the young. Reviews were mixed, the Church Times liking it, and Books and Bookmen finding it unsubtle. Today in 2018, Saville’s themes of racism, spies, terrorism, drugs and murder are all in evidence and increasing. Unfortunately, reality has now become more extreme than fiction.
This, the third Marston Baines story, is set first in Venice and later in Rome. Its Heinemann dust jacket illustrated by Michael Whittlesea spreads over front and back showing Francesca (a young woman from Venice) running in distress down the Spanish Steps in Rome. The Children’s Book Club jacket shows a black and white Venice silhouette. There are no internal maps or drawings. The detail of tourist spots suggests that research was carried out during Italian holidays although the main action takes place in fictional houses and alleys, as the Foreword emphasises. Mark O’Hanlon indicates (Beyond the Lone Pine: A Biography of Malcolm Saville, 2001) that the Venice holiday was in 1960 and Rome in 1962.
The story’s main theme is Black Magic/ Satanism, which has inspired an evil plot for world dominance. Saville’s Foreword stresses: “Satanism actually exists. It is practised secretly in many European countries including Britain, and each year many churches are desecrated. Satanism is hateful and evil ̶ the reverse image of religion and of Christianity in particular”. Saville took inspiration from contemporary James Bond books and films, and some plot details in this book draw on the newly released On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Saville the Anglican Christian would have been aware of press coverage of witchcraft and black magic in the 1960s and he considered it sacrilegious and threatening. His version of Satanism involved the black mass, the opposite to Christian Eucharist. His belief in the potency of the Eucharist seems to balance with the negative potency of the black mass. Satanism exists with evil motivations and consequences. This story warns young readers to steer well clear of it.
We have to look elsewhere for the main source of Saville’s depiction of Satanism, which we find in Dennis Wheatley’s The Satanist (1960). Wheatley’s Gregory Sallust second world war thrillers prompted Fleming to write the James Bond books. The Wheatley family, father and children, were active in MI5 (military intelligence) in wartime. Wheatley showed an early interest in the occult which featured in several stories - The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil a Daughter. He said in his ‛authobiography’ (The Time Has Come: The Memoirs of Dennis Wheatley (Vol 3) 1919-1977 p. 131) “The fact that I had read extensively about ancient religions gave me some useful background, but I required up-to-date information about occult circles in this country. My friend, Tom Driberg, who then lived in a mews flat just behind us in Queen’s Gate, proved most helpful. He introduced me to Aleister Crowley, the Reverend Montague Summers and Rollo Ahmed”. These were a weird bunch. Driberg was aristocratic with communist sympathies: those of my generation knew him better as William Hickey the Daily Express gossip monger. Ahmed lost his teeth in a Satanic ritual that backfired, Summers (never ordained) was a paedophile who liked devout Catholic boys. Crowley was the brain behind modern Satanism seeing himself as a prophet of the new religion Thelema which ushered in the Æon of Horus declaring that its followers should adhere to the hedonistic self-centred code of “Do what thou wilt”, a phrase which appears often in The Satanist.
Wheatley was ideologically conservative, sitting in his smoking jacket in his London Club. His main characters supported the monarchy, empire and social class distinctions. Many of his villains are villainous simply because they attack the establishment. His preface illustrates this: he says: “should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject and thus come into contact with a man or woman of Power, I feel it is only right to urge them, most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into any practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of very real and concrete nature.” This is hugely ambiguous ̶ in the story, satanic powers are real, can change the weather, can seal doorways to keep people prisoner, and can ward off bullets. His story assumes telepathy and occult powers are real. A crucifix is a potent charm against dark arts that might find a place in Hogwarts. The preface suggests that Wheatley believed all this. Saville prefers rather to blame trickery, drugs and hypnosis.
The Satanist (1960) was Saville’s likely source. This is the story of a woman whose husband, an MI5 agent, was killed as a human sacrifice when unmasked by a Satanic temple in London: she secretly infiltrated the temple to extract revenge. Her Irish colleague, Barney Sullivan, had two tasks, one to be a communist/anarchist agent provocateur in labour relations, and secondly to infiltrate the Satanist Temple to find communist links. Barney’s relationship with Mary is in many ways parallel to Patrick’s with Francesca, and both end with romance. Patrick (also Irish) rescues Francesca from Satanists much as Barney rescues Mary. Barney’s undercover anarchy work is reflected in Three Towers in Tuscany, the first Marston Baines story. A Black Mass is described in chapter 5, and another takes place at the end of the story. Saville paints a picture of Christian parody, with an upside-down cross, black candles, the Mass recited backwards by an unfrocked priest. These also feature in Wheatley. Hypnosis and drugs were used in both stories. Both refer to Satan as ‛the Master’, Wheatley’s dressed as a ram, Saville’s a goat. In both, becoming a neophyte requires undertaking some service to Satan (i.e. supporting the evil plans of the leadership). Both stories use blackmail through photographs. A human sacrifice occurs in Wheatley and is planned in Dark Danger to persuade the victims. In both, the crucifix was used as a weapon.
The story of Dark Danger has three locations, in Venice, England and Rome. In Venice Simon Baines’ university friend, Patrick Cartwright, age 20 takes a job tutoring Count Brindisi’s son, Piedro who had missed time in school after hospitalization. Piedro had a beautiful 18 year old sister, Francesca. Patrick and his pupil take the waterbus or vaporetto on the Grand Canal to Rialto Bridge, the cheapest and most crowded form of transport. They walked through the side alleys to find the down-at-heel palazzo (“Not much of a palace now...Rather a sad place really”, p.2) which will be home for a while. Piedro mused pragmatically that “There are plenty of poor people in Venice” which is “a ghastly place in the winter”. He added that many incomes relied on tourists, so winter was a very slack time. They moved down side alleys, over bridges with gondolas going underneath, one propelled by “a tough-looking villain”. Coming to a small square called a campo, originally meaning ‛field’ Piedro explains, Patrick intervenes in a fight in which one man was trying to knife another. Piedro refuses to translate the resulting conversation and after this, the tensions of the story unfold.
Brindisi Palace, fictional but typical, was five storeys high, a balcony, a state room, and had painted mooring posts onto the Grand Canal, a boathouse, and a small courtyard garden. From the balcony, the “great waterway ̶ curved like a bow, or perhaps like a loop in a necklace set with jewels ̶ lay below him. The lights from the houses were reflected in the dark, sparking water which was busy with traffic”. With such vivid descriptions, the first few pages of chapter one paints an atmospheric landscape.
Venice has a long history over which buildings, including churches, were built on foundations of wooden piles sunk into the clay. 117 islands were built on. The river formed the Grande Canal with over a hundred side canals and many alleys called calli ̶ three thousand, says Piedro ̶ to accommodate buildings. From time to time you come to small squares called campo. There are six sectors, San Marco, Castello, Cannaregio (all to the NE), and San Polo, San Croce and Dorsoduro (all to the SW). Arriving at San Marco (St. Marks Basilica) on the broad San Marco canal, Patrick would have needed to take a boat up the Grand Canal past San Polo (St Pauls) to the Rialto Bridge. On San Marco Piazza, Saville says in the Foreword, Caffe Florians is a real famous eating house, actually advertising its origins from 1720; and the Quadri on Saint Mark Square is an acclaimed Michelin Guide restaurant . Francesca hints that they are expensive (p.23). St Mark’s Cathedral has its roots in the time when the bones of St Mark the Evangelist (that is, the Gospel writer) were stolen from Alexandria. St Marks Basilica was therefore a pilgrimage centre. The four bronze ‛Roman’ horses are mentioned: looted from Constantinople in 1204AD, they were looted again by Napoleon, and returned in 1815. The horses on the facade are now replicas, the originals are inside under cover. They also took the lift up the campanile (bell tower) to see the view as a watery patchwork, naming the various features and islands (p.28) for the readers’ benefit.
The historic buildings have today been refurbished for the wealthy. Unfortunately, the weight of buildings (often 4-6 storeys high) causes a little sinkage and rising sea levels can mean flooding. In 1966, the year after Dark Danger was written, flooding caused such major damage that flood prevention schemes were brought forward and eventually a flood barrage built. One topographical puzzle comes when Patrick looked out of his window down the canal “across the rooftops to the dome of the famous church of St. Giorgio Maggiore on its island between the city and the Lido” (p.17). The Lido was the outlying reef offering some protection from the sea. There are two puzzles. A view of San Giorgio is dominated by the bell-tower, or campanile, which is not mentioned. The dome is small in comparison. Also, from where Patrick was supposed to be looking, San Giorgio would not visible but masked by San Marco’s domes with its own campanile. Saville conflated different views from memory. The youngsters swam and sunbathed on ‘The Lido’: this original Lido protecting the Lagoon had been developed into a glamorous island resort with 12 km of beach and many hotels, made famous through Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice.
Switching the scene to England, a refugee is picked up by the British Secret Service and is sent to stay with the vicar at Barfield in the Cotswolds, who was a renowned expert on black magic. Marston Baines visits and learns that this refugee had been mixed up with black magic in Italy, but escaped with information vital to the secret services. Marston lunched en route “beyond Oxford”, certainly The Evenlode, Eynsham (built 1935) on the A40 to Burford. “Barfield”, we are told, had a church with a tower, a lych-gate and a cricket ground, down a little lane to the north of the A40. The pub is named The Three Horseshoes. The best fit is Swinbrook, population 140, on the outskirts of Burford, with the church of St Mary (with a tower) and a substantial cricket pitch and club. Its pub is The Swan. The Three Horseshoes is a not uncommon pub name, one being close to Saville’s homes in Sussex. Barfield is an adaptation of Burford closeby. Swinbrook church is a gem, with monuments, misericords and the graves of four Mitford siblings. There is no lych-gate here or locally so this is an embellishment. The fictional refugee is found dead on the church altar as a Satanic sacrifice, a fate he was terrified of. Marston nevertheless found out that a Venetian scientist is being pressured to reveal a secret, and that the Black Magic syndicate has a female leader. The Satanic executioners are a couple, man and woman, on a motor cycle, and Marston is mugged on the way home (having forgotten his SOE commando training again), his red Mini Cooper (see book 2 in the series) being terminally damaged and sadly dumped in a quarry.
The action moves to Rome where Count Brindisi received a phone call to visit his former assistant. The instructions were: go to number 7, Via Del Umberto near the top of the Spanish Steps and close by the church of Trinita dei Monti. The Catholic church with this name, pictured on the Heinemann dust jacket, is located at the top of the Steps . He would stay in a small hotel he often used, Hotel Popolo. His route to the Spanish steps is described as Imperial Forum, the white Victor Emmanuel monument, the Corso and the Via Condotti. Other places featured are the Trevi Fountain, amid street cafes; the La Barcaccia fountain; the house where Keats died, and the Coliseum, with emphasis on the memorial to Christian martyrs. What happened to the Count is substance of this story. It involved a Black Mass in catacombs accessible from a lonely villa south of Rome. A criminal committee of twelve plus the female leader mimicked Jesus and the twelve disciples. The Count countered the bullying through audible prayers and psalms. His forced journey to the Black Mass is saturated by images of Christian martyrdom.
Like in the first two stories, there is a balance between action and innocent romance since Saville wanted his stories to appeal to both young men and women. The three young men were present without the girls from the earlier stories. Patrick and Francesca were romantically connected, though the others were flirtatious. Francesca was a victim throughout, a double-negative plot-scape, victim and girl-interest combined. She has little autonomy but is acted on throughout, beautiful but passive. Francesca was however a strong swimmer, mirroring Petronella/Peter before her in the Lone Pine stories.
My epigraph above shows the potential consequences of good and evil. Both are real in a black and white world. Christ and Satan, Christianity and Satanism both have power and are at war. This power in Saville is not paranormal as in Wheatley, but the consequences of deliberate choices, which can be changed and provide redemption. Although prayers and crucifixes are weaponised as talismans, this is in a psychological not paranormal way. The good life, the Christian life, Saville is saying, should be a battle against evil using everything available and not thinking about the dangers and personal cost. I agree in general and disagree in detail. As a High Church of England Tory, his concept of good was tied into conservatism, the monarchy and the status quo. His concept of evil was black and white, extreme, a deliberate challenge to Christian values. However we live in a world of grey ethics, where it is hard to tell who is good and who is evil, where opinion is polarised, playing out on social media and polarised media. But nil desperandum if effort is made, through education and literature, we can develop critical skills in the young. Reviews were mixed, the Church Times liking it, and Books and Bookmen finding it unsubtle. Today in 2018, Saville’s themes of racism, spies, terrorism, drugs and murder are all in evidence and increasing. Unfortunately, reality has now become more extreme than fiction.
