I began reading Helen MacInnes when I was a teenager — many happy hours curled up in a leather armchair in my school’s library with one HM book or another. Recently, she’s made a resurgence in our household, and I am having enormous fun rediscovering her work and remembering why I have enjoyed it so much over the years.
Her books are suspense/spy thrillers, many of them set during WWII, so there’s lots of action and people running down dark alleys and such. They’re brilliantly written, with characters who are interesting and believable people even in unbelievable situations — although MacInnes was an astute observer of political conflict on both the macro and micro-level, and her plotting shows it. Her work focuses always on the human consequences of politics. And, like John D. MacDonald, she had many things to say about being human in general, and she wasn’t afraid to let her characters say them every once in a while.
He ought to have come alone. But it had been easy to be persuaded, for the selfish reason, quite apart from the more practical one that this mission must seem a holiday as usual, that he would have been miserable without her. He lay and thought of the way in which two people, each with their own definite personality, could build up a third personality, a greater and more exciting one, to share between them.
— from Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes, 1942
If you don’t know MacInnes’ work, seriously, go get some. (Edited to add: Thanks, Mark, for this additional link to information about MacInnes as a person and a writer.) Libraries everywhere are bound to have her — she was enormously popular in her day, and I agree with Julia Buckley that it’s a damn shame HM doesn’t get more love now. She’s ten thousand times a better writer than Robert Ludlum or Alistair MacLean.
They all made such businesslike gestures, thought Richard irritably. Did it really prove greater efficiency to walk with a resounding tread, to open doors by practically throwing them off their hinges, to shut an insignificant notebook with an imitation thunder clap? Probably not at all, but — and here was the value of it — it made you look, and therefore feel, more efficient. The appearance of efficiency could terrify others into thinking you were dynamic and powerful. But strip you of all the melodrama of uniforms and gestures, of detailed régime worked out to the nth degree, of supervision and parrot phrases and party clichés, and then real efficiency could be properly judged. It would be judged by your self-discipline, your individual intelligence, your mental and emotional balance, your grasp of the true essentials based on your breadth of mind and depth of thought.
— from Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes, 1942
The grasp, the breadth, the depth, are things that I aspire to as a writer and a person. Helen MacInnes certainly had them as a writer, and I imagine she was a fantastic person to drink and eat and talk with. Another person on the long list of if only.
