Gerald Seymour
Harry’s Game
To William Kean Seymour
Introduction To The Twentieth Anniversary Edition
by Robert Harris
Thrillers exist for one purpose only — to entertain, to ‘thrill’ — and for that reason are among the most ephemeral of literary forms. Bought, read, discarded and forgotten inside a fortnight: such is the life-cycle of the average thriller.
But every so often the genre throws up a novel of such remarkable quality, the cycle is broken. Having finished it you don’t want to throw it out: on the contrary, you press it on your friends. You don’t forget it: its characters and atmosphere linger in your mind for years. John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is a superlative example. So is Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, and Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park. These are thrillers that have justly become classics of popular entertainment — novels that are likely to endure well into the next century — and this is the pantheon to which Harry’s Game belongs.
Published in 1975, it was Gerald Seymour’s first novel and has never been out of print since. Time (‘that old common arbitrator’ as Shakespeare called it) has judged it a classic — and for three good reasons.
First, and most obviously, it is a masterpiece of story-telling. From the opening scenes in which a nameless IRA assassin hurries across London to commit a murder, to the final, bloody confrontation on Ypres Avenue, Belfast, the plot uncoils with perfect logic and precision, and with remorseless speed.
Secondly, the character of Harry Brown — brave and patriotic, vulnerable and suspicious — is vastly superior to the standard thriller caricature of an undercover agent. Harry is no cardboard hero. He is a believable, flesh-and-blood figure. So, too, is his terrorist quarry, Billy Downs — his ‘game’. It is this depth and subtlety of characterization that help make the book so believable.
Indeed, I can think of no contemporary British novelist who has drawn a more convincing picture of the terrorist war in Northern Ireland than Gerald Seymour (readers who enjoy this novel should make sure they read The Journeyman Tailor). This is the third and decisive factor which makes Harry’s Game a classic. The crumbling streets of Catholic Belfast, with their warren of men’s hostels, boarding houses and bars, have seldom been better evoked. The smells and sounds of the city rise off the page, so that Belfast becomes almost a character in its own right, all the more frightening for being so familiar. This, after all, is not Berlin under the Nazis or Communist Moscow: this terrifying urban landscape into which Harry Brown descends, with its bomb sites and safe houses and street ambushes, is a British town.
It is twenty years since Harry’s Game was published. As I write, it seems for the first time possible — just possible — that the violent struggle it so brilliantly depicts may be drawing to a close. If that proves to be the case, and if a new generation of readers ever wishes to know what it was like, long ago, when marksmen and armoured cars had to maintain order in a major European city, they will find no better place to start than in the pages which follow.
Chapter 1
The man was panting slightly, not from the exertion of pushing his way through the shapeless, ungiving mass of the crowd but from the frustration of the delay.
He drove himself at the knot of people that had formed a defensive wall round the Underground ticket machine, reaching out through their bodies with his money for the slot, only to be swept back as the crowd formed its own queue out of the rabble. It took him fifteen seconds more than two minutes to insert his ten-pence piece and draw out a ticket, but that was still quick set against the endless, shuffling line approaching the ticket kiosk.
He moved on to the next piece of gadgetry, the automatic barrier. He inserted his ticket into the machine, which reacted and bent upwards to admit him. There was space around him now. His stride lengthened. Bottled up amongst the mass on the far side of the barrier, with the clock moving, he’d felt the constriction, his inability to get away.
Now, in the open at last, he cannoned off an elderly man, deep in his paper, making him stumble. As he tried to sidestep his way out of the collision he knocked into a girl loaded for the launderette, hitting her hard with his left elbow. She looked startled, half focusing on him, half concentrating on holding her balance, her arms out of action clinging to the plastic bag pressed into her breasts. He saw the look of surprise fill her face, watched her as she waited for the explanation, the mumbled apology and helping hand — the usual etiquette of Oxford Circus Station, top hall, at 8.45 in the morning.
He froze the words in his mouth, the discipline of his briefing winning through. They’d told him not to speak en route to the target. Act dumb, rude, anything, but don’t open your big mouth, they’d said. It had been drilled into him — not to let anyone hear the hard, nasal accent of West Belfast.
As the man sped from the fracas, leaving the elderly man to grope amongst a mass of shoes for his paper, the girl to regain her feet with the help of a clutch of hands, he could sense the eyes of the witnesses boring into him; it was enough of an incident to be remembered. The briefing had said ‘Don’t speak…’ but while the crowd acknowledged people’s need to hurry it demanded at the least some slight apology for breaking the etiquette of the rush hour. The failure to conform was noted by the half-dozen or so close enough to examine the man, who now ran away towards the tunnel and the escalator leading to the Victoria Line. They’d had at least three seconds to see his face, to take in his clothes and, above all, to note the fear and tension in his face as their stares built up round him.
When he reached the escalator he swerved left to the walking side of the moving stairs and ducked down behind the moving line, past the stationary paper-readers and the bikini-advertisement watchers. Here the eyes were away from him, on the financial pages, the sports pics, or the hoardings floating tantalizingly by.
He was aware of his stupidity in the hall area, conscious that he’d antagonized people who would recognize him, and he felt the slight trembling again in his hands and feet that he’d noticed several times since he’d come across the water. With his right hand, awkwardly and across his body, he gripped the rubber escalator rail to steady himself. His fingers tightened on the hard rubber, holding on till he reached the bottom and skipped clear of the sieve where the stair drove its way under the floor. The movement and the push of a young man behind him made him stumble a little, and with his right hand he reached out for the shoulder of a woman in front of him. She smiled warmly and openly at him as he found his feet again, and a little hesitantly he smiled back, and was away. Better that time, he thought, no tension, no incident, no recognition. Cool it, sunshine. Take it easy. He walked through, carried forward by the crowd onto the platform. They’d timed the frequency of the trains; at worst he’d wait less than a minute.
His left arm, pressed against his chest, disappeared into the gap between the buttons of his raincoat. His left hand held tightly onto the barrel of the Kalashnikov automatic rifle he’d strapped to his body before leaving the North London boarding house two hours and twenty minutes earlier. In that time the hand had never left the cold metal and the skin under his thumb was numb with the indentation of the master sight. The barrel and weapon mechanism were little more than twenty inches long, with the shoulder stock of tubular steel folded back alongside it. The magazine was in his hip pocket. The train blurted its way out of the darkened tunnel, braked, and the doors slid back. As he wormed his way into a seat and the doors closed, he edged his weight off the magazine, and the thirty live rounds inside it.