The Mischief Makers (novel)

(CC) Photo: Clayton Evans
William Haggard on the back cover of The Conspirators, 1967

The Mischief Makers is a 1982 suspense novel by the British author William Haggard published in England by Cassell and in the United States by Walker and Company. It was Haggard's 21st novel involving his protagonist Colonel Charles Russell, who had been head of the unobtrusive but lethal Security Executive, a government counterintelligence agency clearly based on the actual MI5 or Security Service, for the first 11 books in the series and then is frequently consulted by his various successors during his retirement. Like most of the other works by Haggard and some by his near contemporaries Victor Canning and Michael Gilbert, it is both a standard novel of suspense and a semi-political thriller about the reactions of those in high government positions who scent potential danger to their own political standing from the on-going events of the novel.

Plot

Protagonist is perhaps too strong a word to describe Colonel Russell. As Haggard himself wrote about his fiction:

My novels are chiefly novels of suspense with a background of international politics. A Colonel Charles Russell of the Security Executive, a not entirely imaginary British counter-espionage organization, while not a protagonist in the technical sense, holds the story line together in the background by his operations, while the characters in the foreground carry the action."

This is certainly the case with The Mischief Makers. Written with the spare, dry, and understated style that Haggard had evolved from his earlier more introspective, character-driven novels, it is told through the viewpoints of a number of diverse characters and only infrequently do we see Colonel Russell directly. The elderly Berber president of an unnamed North African country—not Arab, for he despises Arabs—has concocted a hair-brained scheme to avenge a decades-old rape of one of his daughters by a long-since dead Englishman serving in the French Foreign Legion. He entrusts the scheme—the instigation of armed and violent race riots by supposedly oppressed blacks in British cities—to Abdelaziz, one of his numerous sons, who is both an accredited diplomat and the head of the country's secret service. Reluctantly but obediently, Abdel duly smuggles various arms into England via the diplomatic bag while simultaneously seeking to find enough disaffected blacks throughout the country to use in urban uprisings. But the Security Executive is tipped off to the scheme and its present head soon seeks the counsel of Colonel Russell. There are frequent referrals both by Abdel, Colonel Russell, and the other characters in the book, most of whom are working at cross purposes to each other, to the real-life Bristol riot of 1980, which had happened the previous year. The hidden arms are moved, and then moved again. Angry blacks are recruited by various characters to beat and kill other characters. But the Security Executive, and Charles Russell, have their own highly resourceful black, William Wilberforce Smith, as a counter-weapon. Smith, whom Russell, a devout Establishment conservative but far from being a racist, hopes will eventually become head of the Security Executive, sees through several dangerous missions, and Russell and Abdel have a fruitful meeting for the first time in 37 years, not since Russell, a British Army major in Italy during World War II, had saved the youthful Abdel from being summarily executed by an angry French officer. By the end of the book, Abdel has returned to his native land, an uneasy peace reigns in England, and Russell is contentedly sipping brandy while listening to the current head of the Security Executive predict that "The rats are going to win in the end."