This blogpost is an expanded piece drawn from a thread I posted on Bluesky (@brennigjones.com)
English writer (though latterly he lived in Arizona) Adam Hall had tremendous success with a series of gritty, fast-paced cold-war spy novels. They featured an antihero named Quiller and usually featured that name somewhere in the title.
The BBC even made a Quiller television series (not as good as the books, obviously). Adam’s second real name (it’s a long story) was Elleston Trevor.
Under his second real name of Elleston Trevor he wrote a book called Flight Of The Phoenix, published in 1964. The novel did moderately well in book sales but Hollywood picked it up and made it into a film with an outstanding cast. The film was remade (didn’t need it!) in 2004.
I was a fan of the Quiller books. Bought then all, read each one several times. The author’s style captivated (and captured) me and as I was, at that time, something of a cold war warrior myself, I felt the books gave me some sort of a grounding.
In the early 1980s Adam/Elleston and I began corresponding. It started when I wrote to him asking how he researched European scenes given he rarely left the US (it was well-publicised at the time).
His wife, Jonquil, wrote back and we struck up a friendly relationship via snailmail (because email hadn’t yet been invented). Soon we had a three-way correspondence going between Jonquil, Adam/Elleston and me. That continued until his wife’s passing in the mid 1980s.
In our letters he taught me a great deal about how he felt about writing, how he dealt with writing, and how he structured his WsIP. He was a terrific person (you get a feel for that quicker through letters than email), always thoughtful and thought-provoking and helpful (to someone who had aspirations to write but didn’t know how to begin).
Last summer we went to Hay-on-Wye. We visited various bookshops (it’s the law) and I couldn’t resist the best of them all: The Old Cinema. Nestled away in a corner on the 2nd floor I found two Adam Hall/Quiller books which, obviously, I bought even though I’d read them both dozens of times.
When I got back to the caravan (yes, you heard), I opened the first book and out dropped an A5-sized piece of paper. It was a typed (ask your parents, kids) letter on Daily Telegraph headed paper. The letter was from the Literary Editor of the Telegraph and was addressed to a book reviewer. It asked him to turn around a review of the Quiller book I was holding!
I felt as if I’d discovered something of significant historical value in an ‘Indiana Jones does books’, kind of way. Now, a year later, I still feel like this.
Anyway, to my point. Adam/Elleston didn’t need to write back to me. He could have ignored my letter. But he didn’t. He was a nice man and (in my view) a cracking and (in the world’s view) a very successful writer of over a hundred books.
Cold War novels are anachronistic, but his style of writing is well worth revisiting. If you have aspirations to write gripping, edgy tales, I’d suggest you try to find his work. As examples of how breaking writing rules can achieve great results, the Quiller books are first class.
I’m not going anywhere else with this, I’m just telling you about a guy who wrote over a hundred books, and about the letters we wrote to each other, and about an author’s engagement with someone who wrote him a letter.
