W F Morris - His Other Novels

That Bretherton was no accidental achievement is evident from two at least of Morris’s subsequent novels, both with settings involving the Great War. Just as in Bretherton, they are concerned with questions of identity, allegiance, chance, concealment and self-discovery. His second book, Behind the Lines (1930), is almost a match for Bretherton, and a commentator noted that “in spite of the flood of war books”, Morris was able to achieve “a quite different viewpoint from all the others”, and his book was “an outstanding success”. A subaltern is forced to flee when he accidentally kills an overbearing, taunting fellow officer: appearances are all against him and he does not trust to trench justice. He becomes a fugitive and has to make alliance with other deserters, lost soldiers and outlaws in a hand to mouth existence in the no man’s land that the opposing forces aren’t occupying. A clever, and just plausible, plot twist sets matter right.

His third novel, Pagan (1931), though set in peace time, unravels a macabre mystery that derives from the war, and again is founded upon the themes of lost identity, the outsider and tested loyalties. It is almost as powerful as the first two. Again, it has a sound mystery element, engaging characters, and well-described settings in the French countryside, still torn from the war. It is somewhat harder to find than the first two. All three books have at their heart a Jekyll & Hyde type theme, where both Jekyll and Hyde are understandable and may win our sympathy: a very difficult feat to pull off.

After these, Morris wrote four more novels that are more conventional adventure thrillers, but with his trademark flair for keen action, lively characters and unusual plotting. They followed at a pace of one every two years, until the last in 1939.

In the first of these, The Hold-Up (1933), the setting is the Auvergne in France, whose mountains, gorges and forests Morris evokes with a fine warmth. An Englishman, a war veteran, is a passenger on a country bus careering along the steep cliffside roads, when it is held up by a masked bandit and hostages taken. Yet there was an odd familiarity about the voice and the manner of the disguised villain – something which takes him back to the war. And the deportment and bearing of the young peasant woman who was one of his captives was not quite in character. As in his earlier books, Morris sustains a compelling mystery using concealed identities and characters who are more than they seem, though the plot is perhaps rather more in the run of the thrillers of the day. The book was still well-received, though. The Evening News thought it was “A first rate tale of adventure, romance and danger.”

The title of his next book, Something to His Advantage (1935), is from the wording of adverts placed by solicitors to trace missing legatees named in wills, asking them to make contact to learn about their good fortune. A young solicitor and his detective-novelist friend journey to a remote Norfolk village to give just such news to a reclusive beneficiary – who does not survive to hear it. The pair launch their own investigation. It’s a breezily-written, engaging enough yarn, but missing the strangeness and originality of his earlier work.

In No Turning Back (1937), two ex-soldiers with a flippant wit and devil-may-care attitude are drawn into a treasure hunt for Spanish gold. Unfortunately, they are not the only ones after it and find themselves chased – or chasing – halfway around the world. Both characters are enjoyably drawn and are a cut above the Sapper type of heroes, not least because they don’t take themselves too seriously.

They return in Morris’ last book, The Channel Mystery (1939), in a plot which takes its lead from Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands. Only here, the enemy is lurking in the minor rocks and islets of the Channel Isles. It was perhaps fitting that the author who wrote so compellingly of the First World War should end with a warning of what was to come in the Second. After that, it is not clear whether Morris stopped writing or could no longer find a publisher.

Yet there was one more ringing tribute. When in 1952 a master of the spy thriller form, Eric Ambler, identified his top five spy stories, four of them were very well known: The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers; The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad; The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan; and Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham. The fifth must even by then have seemed more obscure to Ambler’s readers. It was Bretherton by W. F. Morris.