Dr. Wesley Britton is the author of three books on fictional espionage for Praeger Publishers. His fourth, The Encyclopedia of TV Spies, will be published by Bear Manor Media later this year. Many of his interviews, articles, and reviews are posted at his website. Whilst you're there take a look at this page and this page. No particular reason, you just might find them interesting...
Espionage Around the Galaxy: The Spy-Fi of Harry Harrison
By Wesley Britton
"One person must go in alone. One super agent with superlative talent and experience. A lone wolf. He who slinks by night, lithe, handsome, unbeatable. The galaxy's best agent. And I can give you a hint about his name."
(Jim DiGriz in The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell , 1996)
If you haven't yet met Jim DiGriz, an intergalactic criminal turned secret agent known as "the Stainless Steel Rat," you've missed a treat. DiGriz is a literary character who both commits and foils schemes of planetary revolutions, finds himself an unwilling agent in alien wars, and is a master of grand theft all over the universe thirty-three thousand years in the future. While he's been around for five decades now, starring in nine books and several short stories, Jim diGriz preceded many TV and movie spies who were former criminals turned into secret agents like Alexander Monday in It Takes a Thief, the Modesty Blaze comics and novels, and La Femme Nikita .
Fortunately, you can still easily find the titles that made author Harry Harrison one of the most successful sci-fi/ spy writers of all time. Below are reasons why you too should join a very unique Special Corps in worlds far, far away.
"`James Bolivar DiGriz, I arrest you on the charge--'
I was waiting for the word `charge.' I thought it made a nice touch that way. As he said it, I pressed the button that set off the charge of black powder in the ceiling. The crossbeam buckled and a three-ton safe dropped through right on top of the cop's head. He squashed very nicely, thank you. The cloud of plaster dust settled and all I could see of him was one hand slightly rumpled. It twitched a bit and the index finger pointed at me accusingly. His voice was a little muffled by the safe and sounded a bit annoyed."
(First lines of original Stainless Steel Rat short story, 1957)
Author Harry Harrison (1925- ) created "Slippery Jim" diGriz, AKA "the "Stainless Steel Rat," who first appeared in two short stories in Astounding Science Fiction (1957). These tales were later developed into the first published novel, The Stainless Steel Rat (1961). Nine years later, the saga began anew with The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970) and continued until the apparent final full-length adventure, The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus( 1999).
Throughout the series, DiGriz's escapades were quirky action-adventure stories told with a wry, sardonic tone, largely seen in diGriz's disdainful, outsider attitudes told in the first person. Harrison expanded the settings of earth-bound undercover stories from global crises to intergalactic power plays. Moving from planet to planet, most settings are Earth-like worlds with primarily power hungry human adversaries instead of alien creatures. Most stories are an episodic series of captures, near captures, attacks, escapes, and judo fights as diGriz takes on galactic counterparts to Latin American dictators, future Nazis, and societies modeled on Cold War Communist states. In Harrison 's largely crimeless future with few professional criminals, diGriz's oddly anti-violent views are juxtaposed against the ruthless tyrants he opposes. As the books progress, in the opinion of some readers, the "Rat" becomes a moral criminal in an uncaring "stainless steel" galaxy.
However seriously readers take the "Rat" books, past critics have noted Harrison brought the picaresque adventures of eighteenth-century English and French novelists into the interplanetary scope of science fiction1. According to Harrison bibliographer Paul Tomlinson, Harrison was also a reader of the John Buchan novels that shaped the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the Bond books. Harrison was also directly influenced by Leslie Charteris's Simon Templar books and short stories.
While some reviewers have also seen comparisons between the Rat stories and the realm of 007, in Tomlinson's view, James Bond himself probably didn't have much to do with the "Stainless Steel Rat" books--at least, not right away. Tomlinson recalled Harrison once told him that the female villain Angelina, a major figure in most of the DiGriz stories, predated the femme fatales of the Bond novels. Harrison told Tomlinson, "I don't believe in the Bond thing, where pretty girls are killers, they're not."2 Later, Harrison wrote this author saying, “Bond was nowhere near my mind when I wrote RAT. The direct opposite; Bond on the side of the law. The Rat a picaresque character, the villain as hero.”
More significantly, in Tomlinson's view:
"I think an important thing to note about the Rat stories is that Harrison 's politics are left of centre, and that he is an atheist and a humanist. So although Slippery Jim reluctantly joins the Special Corps, he's not an agent who is necessarily defending the status quo in the same way that James Bond does. And the fact that the Corps itself is headed by an ex-thief, Harold Inskipp, may also be significant. It's almost as though the Corps, and certainly Jim himself, act as objective watchmen, keeping an eye on the crooked politicians and noblemen. I think Jim's moral code has him put people, and humanity, ahead of political beliefs and the dominant values of the ruling elite. This makes him an outsider in the Philip Marlow / Sam Spade sense, rather than an agent of the state. Bond's licence to kill in the name of the Queen makes him a very different character to Slippery Jim."
Still, readers can see echoes of James Bond and his ilk in the Rat books, most of which were published after 1970 when the Bond boom was waning. Many of Harrison's Jim DiGriz adventures, especially the later books, are tongue-in-cheek reworkings of terrestrial spy adventures in which Harrison likes to describe mechanical gadgets and the obstacles diGriz overcomes, parodying the special machines and weapons made famous by James Bond and his imitators. For example, Harrison 's 1999 The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus includes one passage that would have worked well in a Get Smart script. In this adventure, the sometime agent for the intergalactic Special Corps was shown a new protective device called a “Surveillance Detector Detector” which can, of course, detect what someone else is detecting. These devices can be countered with a “Surveillance Detector Detector Detector. Continuing down this road," the Rat observed, "only leads to madness.”
"I began to wish I'd stayed with crookery and away from the Special Corps. I was always uneasy on the right side of the law . . . A life of crime is not always profitable, particularly when I had some unwelcome assignments from the Special Corps. Certainly, my saving the universe had been exciting but not money making in the slightest."
( The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell, 1996)
As the epic is not recounted in chronological order in the books as they were published, it's easier to tell the tale based on events in the novels as they reveal his unsavory history from the beginning to his retirement3. (Note: this section contains spoilers--if you haven't yet read the books, you might wish to skip ahead to the concluding paragraphs providing background and context regarding Harrison , more spy-fi projects, and Harrison 's connections with "The Saint.")
In A Stainless Steel Rat is Born (1985) , the anti-social Jim diGriz deliberately bungled a robbery to go to prison and learn criminal techniques. He escapes and seeks the legendary burglar known as The Bishop who becomes his mentor. The law captures them, they escape, and stowaway on a spaceship. But Garth, the captain, double crosses them and delivers the pair to a slave master. The two escape again (see the pattern?) and join an army opposed to the slave master. The Bishop is killed in battle, and diGriz destroys the slaver. Then, Captain Varod of the Galactic League Navy captured diGriz to return him to prison.
Paul Tomlinson believes the next book, The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted (1987) , was written "to attack military organization and military thinking - something Harrison experienced first-hand . . . the society that is described there is meant to portray a fully functioning anarchy." (see note 5 below.) In the story, diGriz escapes prison and searches for Garth, the man the "Rat" blames for the Bishop's death. Asked by Captain Varod to spy on an army's invasion plans, diGriz learns Garth is now General Zennor, commander of the invasion. The "Rat" helps take over a passive. utopian city before Zennor discovered diGriz and imprisons him yet again. Local inhabitants free "Slippery Jim" who orchestrates a massive desertion from Zennor. After a number of fights, Varod's navy arrives and captures Zennor. As a reward, diGriz's criminal record is wiped clean4.
In the last of the "prequels," The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues (1994), the Rat is captured after a failed robbery and given a choice--death or a job for the Galactic League. They want Jim to go to the planet Liokukae and bring back a missing artifact, the first evidence that non-humans exist. He is given a slow-acting poison which gives him 30 days to complete the job. Liokuke is a prison colony where misfits and maniacs are sent, so Jim comes with three League agents disguised as a rock band which Jim dubs "The Stainless Steel Rats." They encounter various factions on a world where the sexes are kept apart and a feminist society quietly manipulates the brutish male enclaves. In the end, Jim learns the artifact is in fact a lost temporal device, that the cruel planet needs reform, and that one of the Rat musicians was an agent of the Special Corps.
In The Stainless Steel Rat (the first published book in 1961) , the spy business begins in earnest for our anti-hero. And he meets his match as well. Like Sir Hamilton Dorn in the "Saint" books, Inskippp, the leader of Special Corps, captures and recruits DiGriz as a reluctant agent. In his first assignment, diGriz discovered a plot to build an interplanetary battleship. When the battleship disappears, diGriz baits a trap to capture it. The trap succeeds, and diGriz nearly captures Angelina, the plot's murderous mastermind.
Our Hero followed Angelina to a distant planet where he discovered she is brewing a revolution. He saves her from an assassination attempt and the two fall in love. But Inskipp arrives and captures her, revealing she will be recruited for Special Corps as well. In future tales, the merciless, overly-possessive (to the extreme) Angelina will be both comic foil to and an equally inventive partner for "Slippery Jim" diGriz.
Their partnership begins when diGriz marries the pregnant Angelina in The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970) just before Inskipp sends him to investigate another warlike planet. There, diGriz explores the gray man's military forces and joins their invasion fleet before being captured and tortured. In the first of many such rescues, Angelina saves him and reveals diGriz is now father of twin sons, James and Bolivar.
Inskipp, Angelina, and Special Corps vanish in The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (1972) when diGriz learns time is being altered in the past on the now extinct Earth. The "Rat" travels to the Earth of 1975, meeting the red giant "He" plotting to destroy the future. In one turn of the usual formula, it is He who escapes from diGriz who builds a time helix to follow him to 1805. diGriz discovers time has been altered, and Napoleon Bonaparte has conquered London . diGriz finds He and Napoleon, and destroys the red giant. But the Rat discovers the real He is in Napoleon's body. "He" captures diGriz, and escapes in a time helix. Angelina rescues her man, and they travel in the helix to the future. They join soldiers planning to attack He's new stronghold. diGriz leads the assault, but "He" escapes into time a third time. Special Corps forces appear and reveal "He" is now trapped in a harmless time loop.
In The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You (1979) , the twins, James and Bolivar, are grown and are both in the family business. Inskipp assigns diGriz and his offspring to recover a missing satellite and find five missing admirals. In the story, after Jim and Bolivar impersonate aliens, the senior diGriz learns his old enemy, the Grey men, instigated the invasion. In this above-average humorous tale, after winning the war, a professor opens a portal to parallel universes, but the Morality Corps forbid sending the aliens into a universe where other humans exist. They consider sending the aliens into the future. The Time Police arrive and forbid this. Angelina suggests using the Grey men's mind-control equipment to alter the aliens' attitude. So a bit of social commentary slips in, and fans of The Prisoner might find this novel especially interesting.
More comic commentary is evident in The Stainless Steel Rat for President (1982) where diGriz goes to a corrupt planet to solve a murder. In a book using many motifs and concepts popular in spy fiction, the "Rat" learns the murdered man was a rebel agent sent to seek his help. After the planet's dictator deports him, diGriz returns with his family to overthrow the government. A rebel Marquis persuades diGriz to run for president disguised as a reclusive relative. diGriz plants campaign messages on restricted broadcasts, sabotages a communications satellite, and rigs the election in his favor. He fakes his own assassination, leaving the Marquis in charge.
Religion is the target (though not as overtly as in Sings the Blues ) in the 1996 The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell. Evil genius Justin Slakey has a machine allowing him to travel between universes which he uses to prey on religious believers, tricking them out of their money and then using them as slaves in his coal mines. Meanwhile, the very bored Jim and Angelina are on holiday on the paradise planet Lussuoso, where the rich can avail themselves of rejuvenating treatments and become young again. Angelina disappears, Jim calls in the twins--now living their own strange lives--and Special Corps sends a female agent, Sybil, to help infiltrate a religious order made up of women. Sybil and Jim travel to a hell-like planet before learning Slakey has a machine that can send people to at least 41 dimensions and that he's created multiple duplicates of himself. After Angelina is found on a world of Glass, Jim and his group return to hell armed with salami as weapons to fend off the cannibalistic natives and interrogate the one version of Slakey that can't leave the planet. After being captured, imprisoned, and escaping from a prison with a fellow inmate, DiGriz learns Slakey has indeed found the secret to eternal life and the madman is willing to give Jim the same in return for not ruining his operation. Jim declines and Special Corps begin a watch on over 50 Slakeys to ensure he cannot begin his plans anew. In the end, Sybil discovers she loves both the twins so duplicates herself to marry each of them.
The DiGriz family returned in The Stainless Steel Rat at the Circus (1999) in which Imperetrix Von Kaiser-Czarski is the richest man in the universe who needs a thief to find out who's robbing all his banks. James finds the common link between the robberies is a circus in town. Slippery Jim joins the circus, becoming master magician Mighty Marvell.
Perhaps the last chronological appearance of Jim and Angelina was in the disappointing 1993 short story, "The Golden Years of the Stainless Steel Rat." In the opening paragraphs, we see a gray-haired Jim DiGriz captured by the police, his body full of the disabilities of age. But soon a happy "Rusty Rat" reveals his infirmities are a fake and that he's allowed himself to be imprisoned in order to free the former partner of his wife. Inside "The Pergy"--short for Purgatory--DiGriz decides to break out all 65 inmates by disguising everyone as old women on a bus tour. Thus, with the use of a bungled robbery to go to jail and bail out the man who brought him to Angelina, the Rat has come full circle.
According to Paul Tomlinson, other Harrison books with espionage elements include the two Tony Hawkin novels - Montezuma's Revenge and Queen Victoria's Revenge "in which a Native American museum worker gets co-opted into the CIA and has adventures in other parts of the world. Tongue-in-cheek stuff, of course. Bill, the Galactic Hero has a chapter which spoofs the fact that Communist groups in the USA were infiltrated by the FBI - in Harrison 's version it turns out that the whole membership of the group is made up of agents and there are no actual enemies of the state5."
Tomlinson adds, "The To the Stars series which includes Wheelworld, Starworld and Homeworld is set in a police state which was intended to be Harrison 's version of 1984 and includes secret agents in various countries."
In Our Hands, The Stars (or The Daleth Effect) also involves espionage, with various factions trying to get hold of the secret for space travel that the hero invents.
As it happened, Harrison was able to take a turn at adding to the legend of one of his inspirations--The Saint. In 1964, Harrison worked with Charteris on the novel, Vendetta for the Saint, based on a 13-part newspaper comic strip Harrison had written. Charteris asked him to convert it into a novel. (According to Harrison , some of his previous newspaper strip stories had also been turned into novels in France , but not published in English.) The book was turned into a two-part TV adaptation starring Roger Moore. A straightforward adventure with The Saint taking on the Mafia in Italy, 94 minutes of the TV episodes were edited into a 1969 feature film version. Distinguished by the fact ex-Avengers Ian Hendry co-starred as the principal heavy, Vendetta was one of the Saint films that set the stage for Moore becoming the 1970s version of 0076.
Perhaps the best overview of Harrison 's career is in his 2003 short story collection, 50 in 50 . Discussing the humor in the anthology, John Teehan observed, "The Man From P.I.G.' features an unusual sort of galactic troubleshooter and his porcine sidekicks. `Space Rats of the CCC' takes every bad cliche from the very worst of the old SF pulps and turns them on their head in this scathingly funny lampoon. `Captain Honario Harpplayer, R.N.' sends-up the C.S. Forester Horatio Hornblower novels and mixes in an unexpected First Contact element7".
The "Rat" himself has enjoyed a long popularity among both young readers and lovers of short, escapist fiction. Beyond high sales of the "Rat" books--notably in Russia --a "Harry Harrison Appreciation Society" sprang up and Eagle Comics published the "Rodent Series" based on the books. The 1985 You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat was a send-up of gamebooks with readers playing the part of a new recruit to the Special Corps. According to Paul Tomlinson, the mission was "to travel to the planet Skraldespand to locate Prof. Geiteskrank and return with him in protective custody. The book features the usual collection of grotesque Harrison characters and impossible situations."
In short, then, "Slippery Jim" stories are easy reads and the later efforts are where to begin for the broadest smiles and laughs. The next time you're in a second-hand book store, check out a title or two. See if this Robin Hood of the future is someone worthy of joining your own Special Corps.
Notes
1. Jim DiGriz is, in large part, a continuation of earlier French and English eighteenth and nineteenth-century fictional and real-life characters who played both sides of the law. Examples include then famous colorful robber Eugene Francoise Vidocq (1775-1857), a model for Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe's August Dupin. Reportedly, Vidocq built the actual French Surete using ex-criminals as early French detectives. Fictional characters appeared in novels by Tobias Smollett, Edward Bulwer-Lycron, E.W. Hornung, Ronson du Terrail, and Honorie de Balzac . Balzac's serial character, Vaurin, claimed he was one of the few men above the law, a sentiment echoed by diGriz in The Stainless Steel Rat books . More on such characters can be found in my chapter on "The Saint" in my Spy Television (Praeger, 2004).
In Paul Tomlinson's interview with Harrison, the novelist said he was inspired by the character of Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda. "I think it' s a wonderful device to have the villain as hero, there's much more dimension to it. Raffles has this cricketer who, in the early ones, was a real criminal - stealing was okay. Then along came morality and he confessed and it all faded away. I wanted a real Rupert of Hentzau who got away in the end, and gives the finger to everybody! He's good at his job. Also a lot more character comes out - like this anti-violence thing: I thought it would be great to have a series where the hero doesn't believe in killing people. In eight books he's killed only one person - in the first book to save Angelina's life."
2. Observations from Paul Tomlinson came from the official Harry Harrison website and from responses he provided me privately and on the Harry Harrison list serve. For a list of notes on other Harrison books, see the Science Fiction Weekly website Maintained at compuserve.com. Other sources include "Harry Harrison: An Annotated Bibliography" at the very-comprehensive www.harryharrison.com
3. Much of this information came from my research for a review of the "Stainless Steel Rat Series" for Magill's Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1995).
4. Readers of "Saint" books will recall that this exact situation helped bail out Simon Templar years earlier. At one point, a Royal pardon exonerated him for all past crimes as a reward for the Saint's part in securing British trade. It was to keep The Saint out of legal trouble that Sir Hamilton Dorn had Templar join the British Secret Service in The Saint Meets His Match (AKA Angels of Doom) in 1930.
5. This situation sounds very much like G. K. Chesterson's surreal classic, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). From my 2005 Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film --
"In this case, one agent thinks he's investigating a group of anarchists disguising themselves as anarchists because their leader says that if anyone trumpets their beliefs out loud, no one will take them seriously. Chesterson's spy joined the inner circle of seven scheming bombers, six of whom all turn out to be police informants spying on each other. The evil leader was the mysterious Scotland Yard official who'd hired them in the first place. Clearly, this parable used spies as a means to comment on British social conditions, a humorous seed for future writers with similar purposes from Eric Ambler to John Le Carre."
As noted above, the subject of anarchy was addressed in The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted. According to Harrison :
"the evil guys invade the planet which had their own system of Government which is right out of the text book! It's anarchy. It has a bad name. But no one knows a thing about anarchism these days. That world is a world of hard working anarchy. Every single character there is right out of the Encyclopaedia Britannia. And not one person ever noticed. So much for saying you hate anarchy! This was just pure text book anarchism. So now you know more about anarchy."
6. Harrison 's own copy of Vendetta is signed by Charteris and carries the inscription "But for whom_ etc.." Harrison also wrote a number of short stories which were published under his own name in The Saint Mystery Magazine .
For more insights into the Saint, see ""The Saint" in Fact and Fiction: An Interview with Historian and Novelist Burl Barer" and “`A Saint I Ain't': An Interview with Ian Dickerson of The Saint Club” also posted at this website.
7. Teehan, John. "The Stainless Steel Rat Turns Fifty: A Review of Harry Harrison's 50 in 50. " 2/17/03 . strangehorizons.com
THE STAINLESS STEEL RAT BOOKS IN ORDER OF PUBLICATION
1. The Stainless Steel Rat (1961, Reissued, Ace, Sept. 1, 1980 )
2. The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970, reissue 1986 by Ace Books)
3. The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World (1972, Reissue Nov 1989)
4. The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You (1979, Bantam)
5. The Stainless Steel Rat for President (1982, reissued 1988)
6. The Stainless Steel Rat is Born (1985, Bantam)
7. The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted (1987, Bantam Reissue July 1988)
8. You Can Be the Stainless Steel Rat (Ace Reprint June 1988)
9. The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell (Tor Books. Nov 1996)
10. The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus(1999)"The Golden Years of the Stainless Steel Rat" was a short story published in Stainless Steel Visions (1993). The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat (1986) contains The Stainless Steel Rat , The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge, and The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World . a Stainless Steel Rat Trio ( June 2002) included The Stainless Steel Rat is Born, The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted, and The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues .