WHO IS QUILLER?
Introduced in Adam Hall’s The Quiller Memorandum, Quiller is a “shadow executive” employed by a British governmental bureau so secret that it does not even officially exist. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, or the bespectacled hero of Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File and its sequels, he is forever anonymous. Known only by his codename, even to his colleagues in “the Bureau,” he epitomizes the faceless spy, adopting a variety of cover names in the course of his adventures. Yet this laconic, infinitely resourceful agent became one of fiction’s best-known spies, as distinctive and enduring as James Bond or George Smiley.
Hailed by Harper’s as “one of the best spy novels ever,” Quiller’s first adventure won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel and the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. He has been portrayed onscreen by George Segal in The Quiller Memorandum (1966), with a script by Harold Pinter and a supporting cast including Alec Guinness and Max Von Sydow, and by Michael Jayston in a 1975 BBC-TV series.
In contrast to the glamorous, gadget-laden, girl-chasing image popularized by the Bond films, Quiller does not even carry a gun, believing that an over-reliance on weaponry leads to over-confidence. Ascetic but hardly celibate, he treats women as equals rather than playthings, and bequeaths his few possessions to a shelter for battered wives before embarking on a mission. His creator spoke of his “respect, close on occasion to reverence, for women. He has killed many times in self-defense, but only once in malice—to avenge a woman betrayed.”
Quiller is routinely chosen for the most pivotal missions, which have taken him from Moscow and Peking to Washington and Miami, from Berlin and Warsaw to Hong Kong and Bangkok, from Tibet and the Arctic Circle to Southeast Asia and the Sino-Soviet border, from the Riviera to the Libyan desert. Deliberately deprived by his Control of detailed knowledge about his mission’s background, to avoid the risk of his “blowing” it under hostile interrogation, he sees himself as a ferret, forced down a hole by the Bureau to scurry in the dark until he surfaces, bloodied but victorious, with the rabbit—“mission accomplished.”
For Quiller, danger is a discipline, and one to which he devotes himself single-mindedly. His life on “the brink” requires the constant honing of mind and body to the cutting edge of preparedness, and he has proven his reliability under torture. Yet he is human, and thus no stranger to fear, though this is revealed only in a running dialogue between Quiller and his unconscious mind. Hall’s terse, elliptical first-person narration, one of the stories’ most distinctive features, has been called (in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers) “as chilling a voice of disembodied rationality as contemporary espionage fiction affords.”
Quiller has earned his creator a loyal readership and generous critical accolades in the years since his debut. Fellow practitioner Eric Van Lustbader raves that, “When it comes to espionage fiction, Adam Hall has no peer!” Reviewing Quiller Bamboo, The Houston Chronicle noted that “Quiller stories are always miles above most spy thriller series, and the 15th is the best since…1985,” while according to The Chicago Tribune, “this latest episode in the career of an impossibly capable agent often is electric with suspense.” Succinctly put by The New York Times, “Quiller is the greatest…Nobody writes better espionage than Adam Hall.”
THE QUILLER NOVELS
The Quiller Memorandum (aka The Berlin Memorandum, 1965)
The Ninth Directive (1966)
The Striker Portfolio (1968)
The Warsaw Document (1971)
The Tango Briefing (1973)
The Mandarin Cypher (1975)
The Kobra Manifesto (1976)
The Sinkiang Executive (1978)
The Scorpion Signal (1979)
The Peking Target (aka The Pekin Target, 1981)
Quiller (aka Northlight, 1985)
Quiller’s Run (1988)
Quiller KGB (1989)
Quiller Barracuda (1990)
Quiller Bamboo (1991)
Quiller Solitaire (1992)
Quiller Meridian (1993)
Quiller Salamander (1994)
Quiller Balalaika (1996)
ABOUT ELLESTON TREVOR (AKA ADAM HALL)
A prolific, critically acclaimed British expatriate, Elleston Trevor wrote more than fifty novels under his own name, including The Flight of the Phoenix, Bury Him Among Kings, The Damocles Sword, Deathwatch, The Sibling, The Sister, and Flycatcher, as well as for the big screen and the London stage. His work has been favorably compared with that of Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, and Erich Maria Remarque, translated into nineteen languages, and reprinted by thirty-two book clubs.
Under the pseudonym of Adam Hall, Trevor wrote a successful series of novels featuring the spy known only by his codename of Quiller, leading Life magazine to label Trevor “the most successful literary double agent in the business.” Several of Trevor’s novels have been made into films, most notably the Oscar-nominated The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), directed by Robert Aldrich with an all-star cast headed by James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, and Peter Finch.
Born in Bromley, Kent, Trevor began writing to fill in the off-duty hours at an English airfield while serving as a flight engineer in the R.A.F. from 1939 to 1945. He lived on the French Riviera from 1958 to 1973, when he relocated to America. A black belt in Shotokan karate, Trevor resided with his wife, Chaille, a painter and equestrienne, in the Arizona desert, which he first visited as technical director of The Flight of the Phoenix. He passed away at his home on July 21, 1995, at the age of 75, shortly after completing the nineteenth Quiller novel, Quiller Balalaika.
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR ADAM HALL AND QUILLER
“A model of breathless entertainment.” — The New Yorker
“Tense, intelligent, harsh, surprising.” — The New York Times Book Review
“Pure entertainment espionage at its best.” — The Times (London)
“Hall is indeed a master of the contemporary espionage novel.” — The Denver Post
“Spare, chilling, brilliant.” — The Spectator (London)
“Quiller is the greatest survival expert among contemporary secret agents.” — Newgate Callendar, The New York Times Book Review
“You go at an exhilarating hell of a pace…It is awe-inspiring.” —The Times (London)
“Almost cinematically hypnotic.” — The New Yorker
“Quiller is by now a primary reflex.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Skillful as ever at stretching suspense to the screaming point.” —Publishers Weekly
“Tension is difficult to maintain at a pitch that actually creates a physical impact on the reader. A few of the best writers can do it, and among them is Adam Hall.” —Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Stunningly well done, tense, elliptical, without a misplaced word.” —The New Republic
“Unusual plausibility…uncompromising tough-mindedness…fascinatingly complex characters…a grand exercise, tense and suspenseful at every moment.” —The New York Times
“Conspicuously fine…one of the most satisfying of its kind.” —The San Francisco Chronicle on The Quiller Memorandum
“Spare, taut…superb spy fiction.” —The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on The Striker Portfolio
“First-rate! Detailed, suspenseful, convincing.” —The Los Angeles Times on The Tango Briefing
“Hall’s new nonstop thriller is compelling…shocking suspense.” —Publishers Weekly on The Kobra Manifesto
“Furious, non-stop action…and an explosive climax.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer on The Scorpion Signal
“From beginning to end, The Peking Target has a white-hot intensity.” —The Washington Post
“Crisply written…fast and tense…one of suspense literature’s great secret agents.” —The Houston Chronicle on Quiller Barracuda
For further information, visit http://www.quiller.net/
Hi Matthew,
I am so glad you like my father’s QUILLER novels.
I’d like to share a recent interview on Q: http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/2010/11/quiller-interrogation.html
Best wishes.
JP
Thanks so much, JP; it’s an honor to have you visit the site. As you’ll see from today’s post, our hellish local weather has made me a little slow to respond. Much appreciate the alert regarding Jeremy’s nice interview. Actually, if you look at the comments section below it, you’ll see that he and I exchanged some thoughts regarding it back in November (mine are under the “bradleyonfilm” byline). Jeremy has been very complimentary regarding my Trevor/Quiller coverage here and elsewhere, and his site is an excellent one, which I recommend to all espionage fans. Keep in touch! Best, –Matthew