Best 1954 Adventures (7)

By: Joshua Glenn
September 11, 2019

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1954 adventure novels.

Agatha Christie’s espionage adventure Destination Unknown (US title: So Many Steps to Death.

Just before she overdoses on sleeping pills in a Moroccan hotel, Hilary Craven is approached by Jessop, a British secret agent who talks her out of killing herself… and persuades her to instead undertake a dangerous mission, impersonating the wife of a young boffin who’s invented ZE Fusion — and who may have defected to the Soviets. The scientist’s wife was apparently en route to a rendezvous with her husband when her plane to Casablanca crashed; she won’t live long. Hilary’s daughter has died, and her husband has left her — so why not, she figures. Heading to a secret scientific research facility in the Atlas Mountains, which is disguised as a medical research center, she meets a Hitchcockian-esque assortment of characters, none of whom can be trusted to actually be who they claim to be. (One of them, a handsome young American, is particularly compelling.) Hilary’s putative husband is indeed at the facility — which turns out not to be a Soviet operation, after all. With the help of clues that Hilary has left behind, Jessop pursues her to the facility. An ingenious escape plan is concocted, but is it too late? Destination Unknown asks us to grapple with questions — is pure scientific research immoral, if it could lead to death and destruction? should the younger generation use its energy to overthrow accumulated wealth and prestige? — less vexing, perhaps, to earlier and later readers. I prefer the absurdity of Michael Innes’s Operation Pax (1951), but this is fun stuff.

Fun facts: Christie was writing in the wake of the Fuchs/Pontecorvo affairs. In 1950, Klaus Fuchs, a German theoretical physicist who’d worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII, was arrested for espionage; it seems he’d been supplying information to the Soviet Union. Bruno Pontecorvo, an Italian nuclear physicist who’d worked with Fuchs after the war at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, England, defected to the Soviet Union that same year.

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Best 1954 Adventures (7)

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