Elly Conway explains that the inspiration for her novel Argylle was a “beautiful photograph of a mountain range in southern Poland”. The soon-to-be-released film, also named, Argylle is marketed as “the most incredible spy franchise since Ian Fleming”.
In the movie the “introverted” novelist, Elly Conway, is a character whose espionage story has come true in the real world. In the book, Conway is nowhere to be seen except in the citations.
Instead, the reader is cast deep into a world in which CIA operatives, heroically, if incompetently, battle historic Nazi wrongs, alongside the all-too-immediate danger of deadly Russian agents working for an immensely rich master villain.
It’s a fast narrative ride, located in photogenic areas such as the Golden Triangle in South East Asia and, yes, the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland. Ride is the key word as ‘the team’, sometimes led by the eponymous Argylle (in this world of equal opportunities members share the leadership role) mount motorbikes, speedboats, buses and trains, whilst airborne transport buzzes around the skies, including small planes and helicopters, which, periodically, crash.
With these exquisite backdrops and plenty of flames and gunfire it is all very filmic and could have been written for transmutation into a screenplay. Characterisation, on the other hand, is sparse. Argylle, himself, has a complex backstory but this has served to traumatise him so that he is unable to trust anyone. His preference for isolation ensures that, just as no one knows him, so he knows no one.
Like much of the 007 franchise, Argylle’s operational boss is a woman, Frances Coffey. She, a former librarian and archivist, regards her young protégé in a maternal manner although this is mitigated by her ruthless attitude to all her recruits. They have been selected to face suicidal missions and thus her relationship with them is, perforce, truncated.
Coffey, who, as boss, is not on the front line, survives and will, presumably, re-emerge in the next book and she has some personality. We know that she has a husband and a lover and is fighting her addiction to cigarettes. Sometimes Coffey takes the role of focaliser, as does Dabrowski, a senior agent who is holed up in Montana, but most of the time Argylle is centre stage.
There is an episode on Mount Athos in which ‘the team’ manage to achieve their aims without, mercifully, killing any monks. Another set piece takes place at a ceremony in Monaco with a choreographed son et lumière providing lights and soundtrack for all the action.
Argylle is suspicious that there is a double agent amongst his comrades, but will he be able to identify the culprit before he, they or everyone is killed?
Conway seems to have worked hard, researching the genre from way back when, perhaps finding inspiration from such post-war thrillers as Eric Ambler’s Background to Danger and Lawrence Durrell’s White Eagles Over Serbia. Much more recent franchises like Lee Child’s Reacher and Mission Impossible as well as James Bond might also be in the mix.
There has been speculation about Elly Conway – including the bizarre allegation that she is Taylor Swift. Conway states that having been felled by a terrible accident the creative process became part of her recovery therapy and that she wrote the novel whilst waitressing in a diner.
But it does not matter a jot even if, after being fed the entirety of the genre, AI churned out the prose. Argylle is fun to read and its roller-coaster plot keeps the mystery intact until the final pages.
Works cited
Conway, E. Argylle. Bantam Press. 2024.
A version of this review was first published on page 16 of the Irish Examiner on 27th January 2024. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.
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