Can you believe it is fifty years since the publication of The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins? Penguin have just issued a new edition to celebrate the he anniversary.
Very few thrillers have a place in the heart of readers like this novel does, maybe only The Day of the Jackal. By the time it came along Henry Patterson, who published under the name Harry Patterson, had been having some success with pulpy novels since 1959. In the decade that followed, under a couple of pseudonyms, he became a very popular thriller writer.
Patterson first used the penname Jack Higgins in 1966 and by 1972 he published The Savage Day, which became a set text for ‘O’ level exams in Northern Ireland at one time. That was followed up with A Prayer for the Dying in 1973, which was later made into a Mickey O’Rourke film. He could have lived comfortably on his earnings but things dramatically ramped up with The Eagle Has Landed, which propelled Higgins into into the mega-seller category.

So what is Tim like re-reading now? This is still an exhilarating read. It introduced IRA man Liam Devlin, who went on to appear in later books. Then there is the main protagonist, Kurt Steiner, the German officer sent to Britain to carry out a dastardly, potentially devastating, mission that could swing the war to the Nazi cause. Yet was liked well enough by readers to warrant a resurrection in 1991 in The Eagle Has Flown. The premise of the novel is dashing and simple, a German plan to kidnap Churchill, failing that to kill him. The trick Higgins pulled off is in making a German sabotage mission something readers could almost be behind. First, Steiner was no Nazi and the kidnapping was probably a suicide mission. The novel opens in 1943 with Steiner and his team trying to rescue Jewish prisoners from the SS and earning themselves a court martial. This winding up on a punishment detail in the channel islands. Gradually the men are dying, acting as human torpedoes in the channel.

Then Hitler asks for a plan to kidnap Churchill, a whim, it might have died there but Abwehr head, Admiral Canaris, receives credible intelligence that Churchill will be spending a quiet weekend at a country house in Studley Constable, Norfolk. Local Afrikaans woman Joanna Grey and Liam Devlin prepare the way for the German invaders. Steiner and his men arrive posing as a Polish outfit but when one of them saves a young girl from a water mill, which gets him killed, his body reveals his German uniform under the Polish tunic. Now they have to hold the village to cart out the mission. In a final scene Steiner gets to Churchill but the man he is facing is in fact a double. Churchill was never here.

From the opening scene where the author trawls a cemetery and discovers Steiner’s story this is a riveting thriller, fast paced and emotionally engaging. Like Jackal, even though we know the end it is still an exciting story.

Penguin