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, about whom little is known, came relatively late to writing, published only five novels in a three-year span, 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 the much broader category of spy thrillers that contain some elements of science fiction such as Moonraker and Thunderball, the near-contemporaneous but far more famous books by Ian Fleming, or others that go at least as far back among well-known writers as The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler's 1936 novel in which an atomic bomb is involved, nine years before it became reality.

Most of the appeal of It Won't Get You Anywhere comes from the quirky and Chandleresque vigor of Skirrow's writing ("she dealt me into Schneider's presence like a hand of aces"), its fast-paced and inventive action, and the light-hearted, first-person narrative of its protagonist, Brock, and his many witty asides and observations. The plot itself, however, is extremely simple, with no sub-plots, complications, or side stories: a madman is about to take over the British Isles; it is Brock's job to thwart him.

Plot

Three agents who work for the fat man, the head of a secretive and deadly undercover agency whose headquarters are on the Addison Road in London just across from Holland Park, have been killed in automobile accidents in the last few months, in Italy, Germany, and London. After the third death, in London, of the agent who is shadowing a certain Lord Llewellyn as he dines in a Soho restaurant with his mistress, the fat man becomes concerned that his "lads" are dying in disproportionate numbers. On a hunch, Brock, a reluctant agent who only works for the fat man when he is compelled to, is coerced into coming to the Addison Road and is given a sketch of the situation.

"All right," I said, "I'll look into Llewellyn."
"That won't get you anywhere," he said.

But it takes Brock only a few pages, a beating by black-uniformed Welshmen, a near-fatal attempt on his life by a Land Rover in Hyde Park, and several other people telling him that "it won't get [him] anywhere," to determine that the fat man's dead lads all had one thing in common at the moment of their deaths: they were, for nothing more than bureaucratic principles, keeping a vague eye on a certain Lord Llewellyn, the most powerful industrialist in Britain.

Born Tudor Owen Glendower Llewellyn and the creator of Allied Electrical Industries, called Allelec, the "single most powerful force in Britain's industry," Lord Llewellyn is a fabulously rich, powerful Welsh industrialist and madman who believes himself to be the direct descendant of Henry VII and hence the legitimate ruler of Great Britain. He has, therefore, for two decades conceived and begun to carry out an elaborate scheme to destroy, in a single climactic moment, the entire national 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 install himself upon the throne. As well as being politically and financially powerful, Llewellyn is also an enormously charasmatic, physically powerful man of middle age who is a compulsive womanizer, using and then discarding one beautiful woman after another.

As the book opens, Llewellyn is only days away from turning the British Isles dark and seizing absolute power.

The rest of the book blah blah blah....

A tin ear

Even by the notably low British standards of realism in fictional rendering of dialog by American characters, Skirrow is exceptionally deficient, either intentionally or not. "High," says Al Schneider, an advertising man who works for Allelec and "an eagle from the eyries of Madison Avenue, USA," to Brock upon their first meeting. "It's great, real great to meet you at last, John.... It would be great if we can work out some scheme to pipe you aboard." And later, after Brock has beaten up two of Lord Llewellyn's Welsh Allelec goons in the London office building where Schneider works,

"You're a big boy all right, Brock. What you say, let's file it behind a squeeze of the sauce bottle, eh, man?"
Perhaps he got more American after sunset.

Observations

Aside from Brock's sheer indestructibility, other improbabilities abound but are glossed over or ignored. How, for instance, have 5,000 German paramilitaries made their way into an industrial plant in the city of Cardiff without being noticed by either the local Welsh police or, more particularly, by Provis (first name unknown), the extremely capable local agent of the fat man's secret department? And how is it that no one really knows what is being manufactured within Allelec's plant in Cardiff, which is described as being an astounding "four miles" in length? Four miles long? A single building in Wales? And no one knows that it is housing a secret army of 5,000 Germans?