Has anyone else read or got memories of this short series of novels by Peter Townend?
I aquired and read them last year. Quest isn't exactly a spy but the adventures are quite diverting.
Out of Focus
(1971)
Philip Quest is a photo-journalist, half way rich due to an inheritance and half way a playboy due to his good looks, good breeding and remarkably easy way with women. He’s a sort of David Bailey character mixed in with doses of Sam Spade’s cynicism, George Best’s athleticism and Charles Hood’s devil-may-care attitude. He certainly isn’t any kind of spy, although national service has taught him how to fight and shoot guns. Mind he isn’t very good at either. The character Quest most resembles is Raymond Chandler’s weary private investigator Philip Marlowe and I wonder if his creator, Peter Townend, had this in mind when he developed the story Out of Focus.
This is essentially a mystery novel set in the early and still swinging seventies, where free love, or at least free sex, still abounds and Venice and Marbella are still considered exotic unobtainable locations. What Townend does though is offset the exotica by having Quest’s adventure take place in dismal autumn, when the palaces and grand canals are sickly, gloomy cousins of their summer effigies. He may stay in a luxury hotel, make love to a beautiful model and drink in the famous Harry’s bar, but this is no luxury trip for Philip Quest. He’s racked with emotional guilt, bored and, unable to complete his photographic assignment, he passes his days smoking, drinking and making mad love. He’s an out of sorts lotus eater, too wrapped up in his world to understand everyone else’s.
Back in grimy London, with his soul mate Sue Faversham, Quest begins to wonder if a photograph he snapped in Venice has secret significance, not just to one of the three men it features, but to himself and Sue. Intrigued by the Argentinian playboy Jay Herrera, Quest travels to Spain and the huge villa La Clavel. Over the course of a few days he attends a party, meets a beautiful American, Anna, gets beaten up, tortured, cross-dressed, takes part in a bizarre kinky gay sex game, steals cars and speedboats and generally makes a nuisance of himself for very little reason. The McGuffin of the piece is the photograph, an insignificant detail to the general plot which actually revolves around Anna Kertecz’s hunt for an escaped Nazi. International blackmail – Herrera’s business of choice – hardly features and the photo hardly matters.
For all that, Townend conjures a believable world of cross and double cross. The eventual revelation was a surprise and the twists and turns to get the reader there are rewarding. There is some sporadic violence, but Townend seems more concerned with sexual matters, much like his creation whose whole world seems to revolve around his libido. By the climax [ahem!] he’s learnt his lessons and life has become more brutal and less sensuous.
Quest does feel like a real person [Townend himself, perhaps?] and his foibles are easily displayed; for instance, Anna has marked him for seduction from the off and a counter intelligence policeman, Rayas, recognises his nervous desperation. Meanwhile the supporting cast remains too shallow to bear close examination. Once again Townend relies on sexual mores to add character and that doesn’t add up to memorable personalities; all the women seem the same and all the men seem intent on damaging other men where it hurts.
Some people might find Out of Focus a little unpleasant, particularly as the lead protagonist seems such an amorist, but I think the wisps of sadism, the casual sex and the sudden swift outbursts of action aid the story, keeping the reader slightly titillated and off balance, unsure exactly what slice of physical arousal will be served next. There is too a certain pornography to the violence, its vivid colour, its searing pain, its horrific aftermath, which I found startling. This is not unlike Ian Fleming’s writing, and indeed a quote from The Sunday Times refers to Peter Townend as ‘the true inheritor of the mantle’, which maybe stretches the compliment a bit far. Of course there is no grand scheme for the hero to dissolve, but it is perhaps in Philip Quest’s soul searching that Townend most resembles Fleming and Chandler, the passages where he reflects on society and on his place in it keep the story grounded and contemporary, even if free love has finally passed us all by.