By Steven Nester
Johnny Fedora sounds like a guy Mickey Spillane might’ve punched to life on his manual Underwood using both fists, rather than a suave Brit employed by Her Majesty’s Secret Service. As we join him in Desmond Cory’s Undertow (1962), it’s the 1950s and Fedora’s sunny holiday in Spain’s beautiful Costa del Sol region is rudely interrupted by international intrigue. Although World War II and the earlier Spanish Civil War have both been over for years, the passions and machinations
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they released continue to simmer beneath the surface of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Spain. In the inviting waters of the western Mediterranean, there are still many mysteries to solve and scores to settle.(Right) Undertow, New English Library edition, 1968; cover art by Portada Noiquet.
Moreno is a notorious KGB assassin who has just escaped from one of Franco’s prisons, after being locked up years ago for “knowing too much.” It’s obvious the flight of this well-documented psychopath was enabled by the authorities, who want to know what that “too much” is and where it might be found. Moreno’s love of killing (“he must discipline himself, ration out the deaths, for that was the only way to keep it pleasurable”) resembles that of Donovan “Red” Grant, an executioner with the Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH, who was James Bond’s sociopathic adversary in From Russia with Love. Readers who pay attention will see a single striking similarity between Undertow and the Bond franchise that contains too much detail to be happenstance, but more on that later.
As readers follow Moreno’s trail of corpses to the Costa del Sol, so too do Acuna and Valera, operatives highly placed in the Spanish security apparatus. It’s obvious those two hardened survivors of war were involved in Moreno’s breakout, and that they are aware of Johnny Fedora being likewise in the vicinity. For our benefit, they also act as a Greek chorus of sorts throughout this tale, connecting the dots of Moreno’s getaway and discussing how his personality differs from that of Sean “Johnny” O’Neill Fedora, a half-Irish, half-Spanish patriot who kills because it’s just a job. Yet they remain silent on where Moreno is leading them and what he’s leading them to.
That the fleeing Moreno doesn’t go to ground but is instead picked up by a yacht cruising the Straits of Gibraltar gets readers a little closer to the mystery of what he knows and who else might be involved. Once aboard, the purpose for Moreno’s release and the identities of those who possessed the power to engineer it begin to emerge.
The yacht, we learn, is home base to a putative biological research expedition led by the elderly Professor Heinemann, a man too busy investigating the mysterious lives of jellyfish to catch on to his shipmates’ clandestine recovery operation. Interest of a less scientific nature is provided by Elsa, the professor’s comely but damaged German assistant. She also happens to be the underling of a ruthless Soviet spymaster named Feramontov, who’s running the covert operation (and will go on in this series’ next four installments to establish himself in the role of Fedora’s chief nemesis). As Feramontov’s people are all well-equipped with scuba gear, it’s clear that whatever the Communist spook hopes to find is underwater.
Meanwhile, Fedora is bored. Practically retired by this point in his career, he’s itching for action. Lounging around on the Spanish coastline just doesn’t suit his temperament—and his longtime espionage associate, Sebastian Trout, with whom he is traveling, knows it. When they get word that Moreno is on the loose nearby, Fedora’s mood changes. He becomes temperamental and testy. He complains that he’s gone soft. Fedora is ready to take up a fresh challenge. Trout, who’s equal parts commentator, conscience, and critic for Fedora, sees clearly what is happening. “It’s this chap Moreno,” he remarks to his old friend. “As soon as a fellow in your own line of business hops out of jail and opens up shop with two or three juicy knifings, damned if you don’t start absolutely champing at the bit.”
To add yet more engagement to these circumstances, Feramontov is well aware that Fedora is in residence nearby. He withholds the information from Moreno, however, out of concern that the hired killer’s desire to eliminate a rival would only distract him from the mission on which he’s being sent. With no hard intel pointing to
Fedora’s presence on the Andalusian coast as anything beyond coincidental, Feramontov sees no option other than to proceed with his nefarious plans.(Left) Undertow, Frederick Muller hardcover edition, UK 1962.
The ensuing game of cat and mouse (and murder, of course) brings the fight straight to Fedora’s vacation villa, and later to Feramontov’s yacht—culminating in an underwater death match worthy of Ian Fleming’s Thunderball. This connection to the 007 franchise is a tenuous one, but it plants a seed of suspicion in the reader’s mind that something intentional is going on beneath the covers of Undertow—and they might be correct.
Those familiar with the Bond franchise won’t fail to notice a still more prominent commonality between Undertow and From Russia with Love. On page one of Fleming’s 1957 Bond thriller (his fifth entry in that series), SMERSH assassin Donovan Grant lounges by the ocean, his personal possessions close at hand. Those include “the typical membership badges of the rich man’s club—a money clip, made of a Mexican fifty-dollar piece and holding a substantial wad of banknotes, a well-used gold Dunhill lighter, an oval gold cigarette case with the wavy ridges and discreet turquoise button that means Faberge, and the sort of novella a rich man pulls out of the bookcase to take into the garden—The Little Nugget—an old P.G. Wodehouse.” This could just as easily have been a pocket-dump by the upper-class James Bond following a brilliant night’s tour through Monaco’s casinos. It’s the sort of ostentatious inventory that would have caught Desmond Cory’s notice ... and perhaps contributed to the alleged feud between him and his fellow spy-fictionist.
The cause of said feud may strike some as surprising.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy was quoted in Life magazine as saying From Russia with Love was one of his 10 favorite novels. That provided a much-needed kick-start to what had been the moribund sales of Fleming’s Bond novels in the United States. Suddenly, “shaken, not stirred” was on the tongues of wannabe debonair males everywhere; the Walther PPK became the handgun of Bondian “license to kill” chic; and 007 became immortal (with Sean Connery eventually being typecast in the part). Not unexpectedly, these developments came to the attention of Cory, who’d been writing his Fedora series since 1951 when Secret Ministry saw print—two years before the publication of Bond’s debut, in Casino Royale. It’s said Cory bristled at all the applause 007 and his creator were receiving.
Perhaps by way of response, in Undertow Cory serves up a counterpoint to Donovan’s “glittering pile.” Itemizing the contents of Sebastian Trout’s own pockets, he lists “his Ronson, his tooled leather cigarette case, his pigskin wallet and his copy of Guilty Detective Stories.” These humbler effects seem more fitting for the doorman at James Bond’s club than those of an international spy’s right-hand-man, which leaves readers to make a simple deduction: there’s no way the contrast between Trout’s belongings and Grant’s can be seen as anything but Desmond Cory mocking the pretensions of the Bond franchise. No pistols at dawn here, just a sly tweaking of Fleming’s nose.
And he doesn’t stop there. The 1965 Signet/New American Library softcover edition of Undertow that I read features, atop its cover, an encomium to Cory’s protagonist from distinguished New York Times critic Anthony Boucher: “Johnny Fedora, professional killer for British Intelligence, more than deserves to take over James Bond’s avid audience.” In addition, Cory leaves the cool-as-a-cucumber Trout to take another swipe at Agent 007 (and well-bred fictional spies, in general) when, in response to Fedora’s complaints about his luxurious coastal surroundings, he admonishes, “Oh, don’t be a creep. It’s the proper thing. I mean you don’t get to be any old secret agent these days, you got to have social cachet.”
And thanks to wealthy Fleming’s wartime intelligence cred, Bond had plenty of that.(Right) Author Desmond Cory.
The same could not be said for Shaun Lloyd McCarthy (1928-2001), the real storyteller behind the Cory pseudonym. Born in Lansing, West Sussex, he served a stint as a commando during World War II, then relocated to Spain, where he made a career as a teacher, translator, and prolific author, writing articles, screenplays, and more than 45 novels, several of which were adapted for films or television. Undertow was the 12th of Cory/McCarthy’s 16 Johnny Fedora novels, and the first in his Feramontov Quintet, a sub-series that concluded with Sunburst (1971), the final Fedora outing.
It isn’t uncommon to find the Fedora yarns cited as a possible inspiration for Fleming’s subsequent Bond series, with one critic describing Cory’s man as “a much more violent, sexy, and lucky agent than James Bond.” At the least, Cory provided a link between the urbane, gentleman spy and what has come to be known as “Brit grit,” stories featuring a rougher class of operatives. a bit thuggish and coarse, such as Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer thrillers (The IPCRESS File, etc.). The espionage-fiction Web site Spybrary ranks Desmond Cory 79th in a rundown of “The 125 Best Spy Writers of All Time.”
As for documenting the purported competition between Cory and Fleming, well, that’s not so easy. No evidence can be found in any of the four most popular biographies of James Bond’s creator or the scant accounting that exists of Cory’s life. In fact, for an author who seems so deserving of props, Cory receives no mention at all in the Fleming bios; not even in their bibliographies. Bruce Merry’s Anatomy of the Spy Thriller (1977), an otherwise fairly astute guide to the genre, offers Cory the same fate of anonymity. Readers wishing to learn more about the British author and his long-running undercover agent can always turn to this competent Web site. But reading Cory’s slim, compelling thrillers remains the best way to investigate this master of the genre, through his own words and imagination.
