I was inspired to this by the Alistair Mclean thread. While I liked Mclean and devoured just about all his books as a kid, the thrillers I really loved were the Quiller novels by Hall.
Quiller was a great character. He was an embittered man with a towering ego who knew it and knew how much trouble it could get him into. There was nothing glamorous, nothing Bond-like about him. He would hole up in abandoned warehouses or caves if necessary when on the run. He never used a gun, because he thought a gun made one overly confident. Instead, he used his hands. Among his more unusual traits, he was an expert in fainting, and he sometimes fainted as a tactic.
And I very much liked the writing style, a wry self-deprecating first person narrative. He always had second thoughts – sometimes it seemed that what he lacked were first thoughts. He would stumble into these suddenly deadly desperate situations with no time for thought, but his instincts, training and reactions always (of course) pulled him through.
Adam Hall was one of half a dozen writing pseudonyms of Ellston Trevor, who is perhaps best known for writing another favorite of mine, The Flight of the Phoenix. I sometimes wonder why more Quiller books weren’t made into movies, but AFAIK only the first, The Quiller Memorandum, was. And it butchered the book, unfortunately.
Anyway, I searched the boards for other references to Hall, and found mostly my own comments in other threads about spies or thrillers. And I wonder how alone I am in my fanwankdom of Quiller.
