This novel by Robin Maugham was first published by Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd. in 1958. My paperback edition was published by Four Square in 1967. It runs for 124 pages, including the Author’s Note. The back cover has a quote from The Observer: “Mr Maugham has written a new ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’”, which may be a clue why Hammer were interested. One may speculate that, with The Ugly Duckling in 1959 and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll in 1960, the company found itself all Jekyll’d out.
According to The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films this was on the company’s books in 1960 with Michael Carreras producing and Val Guest lined up to direct on location in Tangiers. Complete scripts exist in the Hammer archive.
Cairo, 1946, Peter Grant is suffering from blackouts, the result of a shrapnel wound to the head sustained in the desert war and the shock of his friend’s death, which is unfortunate as he has accepted a job as a spy. He is afraid to admit to his blackouts as he wants to keep his job. Emerging from a fugue, he discovers that he is in bed with an underage girl whom he appears to have agreed to have helped before but of whom he has no memory. She has been tortured by another brothel customer but before he can do anything Grant is beaten and dumped. On awakening he seeks police help but they know nothing of the brothel or the girl. He remembers that the girl called him “Tommy Grant” and we get a lengthy (about 1/6th of the book’s length) flashback to his childhood when he had had an earlier head injury and hero-worshipped an imaginary character who could do all the brave and naughty things he could not do himself … Two years later, in Tangier, Grant, who has not had a blackout in those two years, is tasked with spying on, and possibly turning, a man, Jim Burge, who is working on a ship that is suspected of smuggling passengers behind the Iron Curtain. And, no sooner has he started on that task, than his blackouts resume. He wakes up with no memory of questioning Burge but he does have the address of a political fugitive on a scrap of paper. He then learns that Burge has been badly beaten, to the point that he may not survive. As he dies, Burge calls Grant “Tommy”, leading Grant to realise that he does, in fact, have a dissociation of personality disorder. Grant quits the Secret Service and returns to London. After a time, he discovers both that his flat is being watched and that he is going out at night as “Tommy”… Grant becomes conscious that he is in a room with strange men who are plotting to blackmail a politician after having a rent boy seduce him. The men know Grant as “Tommy” and Tommy has been working with them, providing them with information about the Secret Service’s set up in Cairo. A friend warns Grant that M.I.5. plan to arrest him and advises that he write down everything as he remembers it - the account we are reading … And now we get “Tommy’s” story … He had always lurked in the background of Peter’s personality, helping him when summoned but able to form his own agency from time to time after the shrapnel injury. Tommy had Communist leanings, being disapproving of Peter’s wishy-washy liberal views. Tommy had enlisted the Moslem Brotherhood to help the young prostitute escape from her captors, selling secrets to raise the money to pay for this. He fills in details of the murder of Burge and the plan to blackmail the politician … The final word, as Grant awaits the arrival of either M.I.5. to arrest him or Communist agents to murder him, is from neither “Tommy” not “Peter” but from the whole man that he has become after reading over the preceding accounts.
Maugham’s Author’s Note reveals that he himself had suffered a head wound in the war and experienced blackouts as a result.
I liked the idea of a double agent who doesn’t know he’s a double agent because of a split personality but I can’t say I was impressed by the novel. It’s too episodic to be really gripping and rather clumsily structured. “Tommy’s” story is hurriedly dashed off in about the same number of pages as were devoted to a flashback about Grant’s father being beastly to him about a tune he had written for a hymn, while the earlier flashback to his childhood is both ludicrously long, considering how little it has to do with the rest of the narrative, and decidedly creepy as it involves a sort of pre-pubescent sexual awakening which doesn’t sit well alongside the subplot about the affair with the underage prostitute. On top of that, the espionage stuff just isn’t interesting. It would be interesting to see whether Hammer’s screenplay managed to adapt this into a satisfying story because the novel certainly doesn’t pull that off.
At this rate there'll be more unmade films from Hammer than those they did make.