It Won't Get You Anywhere

It Won't Get You Anywhere, published in 1966, is the first of three thrillers by the English novelist Desmond Skirrow about John Brock, an irreverent but very, very tough advertising executive who is also a sometime undercover agent. Published in England by The Bodley Head and in the United States by Lippincott, it is a little under 80,000 words in length and almost certainly the best of the Brock novels. (Skirrow came relatively late to writing, wrote only four novels, and died in his early fifties.) Published in today's market, it might be classified as a techno thriller, as it does employ a few elements of that genre. More likely, however, it simply falls into that category of spy thrillers which contains some elements of science fiction such as Moonraker and Thunderball, the near-contemporaneous but far more famous books by Ian Fleming, and going as far back as The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler's first novel of 1936, in which an atomic bomb is involved, nine years before it became reality.

Most of the appeal of the book comes from the quirky vigor of Skirrow's writing, its fast-paced action, and the light-hearted, first-person narrative of its protagonist, John Brock, and his many witty asides. The plot itself is extremely simple, with no sub-plots, complications, or side stories. A rich, powerful, titled, Welsh madman and industrialist, born Tudor Owen Glendower Llewellyn and now Lord Llewellyn and master of Allelec, the "single most powerful force in Britain's industry," believes himself to be the direct descendant of Henry VII and hence the legitimate ruler of Great Britain; he has therefore conceived, and carried out, a 20-year scheme to destroy, in a single climatic moment, the entire electrical grid of England, at which point, he and his minions, both Welsh and German, aided by science-fictional devices of his own manufacture, will take over the isles and he will establish himself upon the throne.