The Marston Baines Series for young adults took inspiration from James Bond novels and films, replacing gratuitous sex with innocent romance. Saville in his latter years was ever hopeful that the Marston Baines series would come into paperback for wider distribution, but they did not do so then. He intended them to be stories of good versus evil, never ambiguous or nuanced. White Fire, the fourth story (Heinemann, 1966, 180 pages) was the result of a family holiday on Mallorca in April 1964. The title uses the name of a large smuggled raw diamond. It loosely followed the theme of Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever (1956) about ‘blood diamonds’ smuggled from Africa in a trade littered with bloodshed and criminality. Fleming also wrote a factual account The Diamond Smugglers in 1957 which as an interesting background of its own and Saville had clearly read. The Bond film of the book was still in future (1971) and stimulated the writing of the sixth Buckingham story Diamonds in the Sky (1974) set in Amsterdam. White Fire has always been a hard-to-find title since there was no CBC (book club) edition. There were no serious reviews in the media.
The Foreword reveals another Saville bête noir: “Industrial diamonds are used for machine tools, and are essential for the manufacture of armaments. Recently China has been in the market for them” (p.viii). According to his late son Robin, Saville never ceased to be agitated about China’s global ambitions. Mao’s declared objective was to overtake Britain in steel production by 1968 through a programme called ‘the great leap forward’. At the time of writing, 1965, this is what Saville is referring to. He need not have worried: taking people away from farming to produce steel inefficiently led to mass starvation, resulting in millions of deaths. Between 1966-8 came the purge of critics and potential critics (the intelligentsia) in the repression known as Mao’s cultural revolution. China was considerably knocked back by both these.
Marston Baines is a thriller writer, but also a secret service operative, living in Sussex, handled by ‘XB’ out of frequently changing secret offices. His appearance is not Bondesque, but “stoutish and loosely built” with thinning hair and horn-rimmed spectacles, wearing a tweed suit and hat, reminiscent perhaps of Sherlock Holmes. He “shambled”.... The story also features Marston's nephew Simon and a tough girl of romantic interest Rosina. Simon and Rosina appeared in French translations of the stories where they are less happily named Stanley and Carol.
To read on, and the story itself, order from the publisher's website. Details of the previous title, Dark Danger can be found here
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