by Mike Ripley
JOHN BRAINE
Born in Bradford, John Gerard Braine (1922–86) was a Royal Navy wireless operator during WWII but his service was cut short by TB and he was invalided to a sanatorium. He became one of English literature’s ‘angry young men’ of the Fifties, most famous for his 1957 novel Room at the Top. In 1976 and 1977 he experimented with two spy thrillers, The Pious Agent and Finger of Fire, featuring the devoutly Catholic, Silk Cut-smoking Xavier Flynn.
JOHN MICHAEL BRETT
Pen-name adopted by Miles Barton Tripp (1923–2000). After active service with RAF Bomber Command during WWII, Miles Tripp trained as a solicitor and began to write crime and suspense fiction in 1952. He became Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association in 1968 and is probably best known for his series of ‘John Samson’ private eye novels. In 1964, as John Michael Brett, he created ‘Man About Danger’ Hugo Baron, a sophisticated, risk-taking barrister who is recruited by a newspaper magnate to work for an international organisation which believes in peace-through-violence. This antidote to SPECTRE was known as DIECAST, standing for the Destruction of International Espionage and Counter Activities for Stability and Trust. Although described by the Daily Express as ‘How like Bond and just as good’, Hugo Baron’s career was short-lived, in just three novels: Diecast, A Plague of Dragons (1965) and A Cargo of Spent Evil (1966).
DAVID BRIERLEY
Born in 1936 in South Africa, David Brierley has lived in Canada, Greece, and France as well as England where he worked in advertising before becoming a full time writer. His first novel Cold War, although published in 1979, was very much a product of the thriller boom, introducing ‘Cody’, a tough, female agent living in Paris, as tautly-strung as a Quiller and as ruthless as a Bond. In 1981 Brierley departed from his Cody series to write Big Bear, Little Bear set in 1948 Berlin, which many spy-fiction connoisseurs regard as his best book. Later he was to corner the market in contemporary spy stories set in Eastern Europe.
ANTHONY BURGESS
The writer and literary critic John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917–93) was educated at Manchester University and worked as an education officer in Brunei in the 1950s, which provided the background for his early fiction though he would later become famous as the author of A Clockwork Orange (1962). Said to have been depressed by the downbeat spy stories of John Le Carré and the humourlessness of the James Bond books (he thought Bond ‘an imperialist relic’), he published Tremor of Intent (1966), sub-titled ‘An Eschatological Spy Novel’, in which he mixed comic satire with metaphysical philosophy. Burgess was also commissioned to write a screenplay for the film The Spy Who Loved Me in 1975 but his version was not used.
JOHN BURKE
Born in Rye, Sussex, John Frederick Burke (1922–2011) served in the RAF, the Royal Engineers, and the Royal Marines during WWII. He worked in publishing and public relations for Shell until 1963, and as a story editor for 20th Century Fox before becoming a full-time author under numerous pen-names, including Jonathan George, Martin Sands, Owen Burke, Sara Morris and Joanna Jones. He specialised in suspense thrillers, horror stories, and science-fiction but is best remembered for his ‘novelizations’ of films, plays, and television shows, including Maroc 7 and The Jokers in 1967.
JON BURMEISTER
Born in Cape Province, South Africa in 1932, Jon Burmeister became a solicitor and notary public before turning to thrillers usually set in African countries in civil turmoil, with The Edge of the Coast (1968) and A Hot and Copper Sky (1969). His best known novel was Running Scared (1972) which was filmed as Tigers Don’t Cry (also known as Target of an Assassin) starring Anthony Quinn and directed by Peter (The Italian Job) Collinson. Burmeister wrote around a dozen thrillers in the Seventies and later returned to his legal practice. He died following a shooting accident in 2001.
LESLIE BUTLER
Little is known about author Leslie Butler or the three novels he wrote featuring Philip Jordan, the first being Night and the Judgement in 1964, which had Jordan working as a reluctant agent for MIx, a shadier-than-usual department which did the jobs that MI5 and MI6 passed on.
ALAN CAILLOU
Pen- (and stage) name of Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe (1914–2006) who joined the Palestine Police in 1936, where he learned Arabic. During WWII he served in the Intelligence Corps in the Western Desert, was captured and sent as a POW to Italy. He escaped to join the invading Allied forces at Salerno and was later seconded to work with partisans in Yugoslavia. After the war he became Police Commissioner of British-occupied Somaliland until 1952 when he moved to Canada and then the USA, to work in film and television as both a screenwriter and an actor. He was to write episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (in which he also acted), The Fugitive and The Six Million Dollar Man. His first thriller, Rogue’s Gambit, appeared in 1955, and several dozen more adventure/spy stories followed over the next two decades, notably Alien Virus (1957), A Journey to Orassia (1965) – described by one American reviewer as ‘standard masculine fare’ – and Dead Sea Submarine (1971).
BRIAN CALLISON
Brian Callison (born 1934) joined the merchant navy aged 16, sailing on cargo ships with the Blue Funnel line to the Far East and Australia, including the real M.V. Cyclops which inspired A Flock of Ships in 1970, the first of more than twenty bestselling thrillers, almost all involving the sea and ships. On leaving the sea he studied at Dundee College of Art before entering the world of business, whilst also serving in the Territorial Army with the 51st Highland Division Provost Company of the Royal Military Police, an experience which inspired his last published novel Redcap in 2006. He held a three-year tenure as Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Dundee and in retirement ran an author guidance and mentoring consultancy.
VICTOR CANNING
Born in Plymouth, Victor Canning (1911–86) began writing stories at the age of 17 and never stopped. His first novels were published before WWII, during which he served in the Royal Artillery, alongside his friend Eric Ambler. After the war he turned to the thriller and the period 1948–52 was perhaps his most productive period. In all he wrote some 60 novels and dozens of short stories, including historical novels for children, and as John Higgins, who maintains a Canning appreciation website, has said: ‘He could have been as famous as Ian Fleming if only he’d managed to write a little less’. Canning’s output certainly varied in quality, but in the Sixties his career blossomed with mass market paperback sales of two stand-alone thrillers, The Limbo Line (1963) and The Scorpio Letters (1964), and his creation of a (rare) British private eye character, Rex Carver. His later ‘Birdcage’ series of interlinked thrillers involving a ruthless government counter-espionage department (in Birdcage Walk) still have enthusiastic fans, although Canning himself said: ‘I do not write spy fiction as such, I just write stories.’
ELLIOTT CANNON
The primary pen-name of author Arthur Elliott-Cannon (1919–89) who also wrote crime novels as Nicholas Forde. He created three spy heroes (Guy Fosse, Jeffery Steele and Shaw Whitaker) in overlapping adventures starting with Breakaway and A Sense of Danger (both 1973) and The Dumbo Dossier (1975). His fictional head of British Intelligence was called Sir Richard Ordith, who was known to his agents, perhaps ironically, as ‘Tricky Dickie’.
YOUNGMAN CARTER
Philip (‘Pip’) Youngman Carter (1904–69) was the widower of crime writer Margery Allingham, one of the ‘Queens of the Golden Age’. After her death in 1966, Carter completed his wife’s novel Cargo of Eagles (very much a thriller about buried treasure rather than a detective story) and then continued the adventures of her famous sleuth Albert Campion in a thriller Allingham herself had planned about a defecting Russian scientist under the working title The Kopek Enigma. The novel was published in 1969 as Mr Campion’s Farthing.
ROBERT CHARLES
A pen-name (as was ‘Charles Leader’) for Robert Charles Smith, born in Cambridge in 1938, the author of more than three dozen novels including a nine-book series starring counter-espionage agent (and pretty r
uthless killer) Simon Larren, starting with Nothing to Lose in 1963. Larren’s exploits took him far afield, investigating a British submarine sunk in Chinese waters in Dark Vendetta (1964), the death of a fellow agent on an Arctic Russian island in Arctic Assignment (1966), and civil unrest in Cyprus in Stamboul Intrigue (1968). In the 1970s, Charles created a new hero, Mark Nicholson, an agent for Counter Terror – an organisation which, unsurprisingly, counters terrorism in Europe and America and, in The Hour of the Wolf (1974), the growing export trade of terrorism from Libya. Smith’s latest crime novel, Blood and Sangria, was published in 2010.
JON CLEARY
At his peak, certainly the most popular Australian novelist, Jon Stephen Cleary (1917–2010) left school aged 14 and served in the Australian army throughout WWII in the Middle East and New Guinea. After the war he became a journalist and worked in London and New York before his novel The Sundowners became an international bestseller in 1952 (and a film in 1960). As an author, he ranged over the genres, from his famous war story The Climate of Courage (1954) to thrillers including A Flight of Chariots (1963), The Pulse of Danger (1966), and Peter’s Pence (1974) to historical adventures such as High Road to China (1977). He is probably best remembered today for a long series of crime novels starring his policeman hero Scobie Malone.
BRIAN CLEEVE
Born in Essex to an Irish father and an English mother, Brian Brendon Talbot Cleeve (1921–2003) ran away to sea aged 17 as a waiter on the RMS Queen Mary. During WWII he was commissioned in the British army and posted to Kenya with the King’s African Rifles. A dispute over the treatment of native prisoners led to him being court-martialled and returned to England to serve a three-year sentence in Wakefield Prison. He was released early, having agreed to work undercover for MI5 but after the war took Irish citizenship and emigrated to South Africa, only to be expelled in 1954 after constantly criticising the Apartheid regime. He settled in Ireland to write novels and short stories and become a television presenter. Many of his novels were thrillers, including a short series starring Sean Ryan, an Irish bank robber released from prison to work for British Intelligence, which began with Vote X for Treason in 1964.
DESMOND CORY
The pen-name of Shaun Lloyd McCarthy (1928–2001), who was born in Sussex and after National service in the Royal Marines, read English Literature at Oxford. It was as a 19-year-old undergraduate that he wrote his first thriller, Secret Ministry, which introduced his Irish–Spanish secret agent Johnny Fedora, often claimed to be the first ‘licensed to kill’ fictional British spy, pre-dating the 1953 debut of James Bond in Casino Royale by almost two years. McCarthy combined the careers of academic and teacher with that of novelist, mostly in the crime and thriller genres. A third of his fiction featured Johnny Fedora in 16 books between 1951 and 1971, the last five of them – starting with Undertow in 1962 – forming ‘the Feramontov Quintet’ chronicling the duel between Fedora and his KGB arch enemy. American critic Anthony Boucher dubbed Fedora ‘the thinking man’s James Bond’.
PATRICK COSGRAVE
Patrick John Francis Cosgrave (1941–2001) was born in Dublin where he attended University College before studying for a doctorate in history at Cambridge. He became political editor of The Spectator then a political advisor to Margaret Thatcher, wrote a biography of her (as well as one of Enoch Powell) and. In Cheyney’s Law in 1977 he created Colonel Allen Cheyney, a spymaster firmly of the old school and staunch supporter of the old boy network, who had, with true British modesty, refused both a Victoria Cross and a knighthood during his career.
STEPHEN COULTER
Surprisingly little is known about Stephen Coulter and even his date of birth (likely 1914) has been disputed. He is said to have been educated in Paris and entered journalism in England in the Thirties, joining Reuters as a Parliamentary correspondent in 1937. During WWII he served in Royal Naval Intelligence (along with Ian Fleming) and was one of Eisenhower’s staff officers at Supreme Allied Headquarters. After the war he became the chief Paris correspondent for the Sunday Times and a special correspondent covering India, Africa, Russia, and Greece (under ‘The Colonels’). His first novel as Stephen Coulter, The Loved Enemy, appeared in 1952 as did his first crime thriller, The Quickness of the Hand under the pen-name James Mayo, but he was to hit his stride – as both Coulter and Mayo – in the Sixties. His 1964 thriller Threshold, about a British nuclear submarine disabled and stranded in Russian territorial waters whilst on a spying mission that not even the crew were aware of, was serialised in the Sunday Express and became a bestseller. It was followed in 1965 by Offshore, another popular adventure set on a gigantic North Sea oil rig. At the same time and with the same publisher, but under his James Mayo pen-name, he added to the growing number of fictional secret agents by introducing Charles Hood in Hammerhead (1964). As one critic has said with hindsight, Charles Hood was ‘James Bond with the volume turned up to eleven’ – the locations even more exotic, the girls more plentiful (and sometimes taken unwillingly) and the violence even tougher, as displayed in Hammerhead in a chapter-long fight scene which ends with some nastiness involving acid. In theory an urbane art-dealer, Hood was pitched as an upmarket Bond and the paperback editions, always promising ‘red-blooded action’, were skilfully marketed in the Sixties with a unique hand-holding-revolver logo. There was one film, of Hammerhead, but no Hood ‘franchise’ as with Bond. By 1972, after six books, Charles Hood had slipped into obscurity as did, more or less, James Mayo, but Stephen Coulter continued to write and produced an outstanding spy thriller, The Soyuz Affair, in 1977.
DAVID CRAIG
One of four pen-names – the best known being Bill James – used by Welsh writer James Tucker (born 1929). After serving in the RAF, Tucker became a reporter with the Daily Mirror until he turned to fiction. His early books were spy thrillers, notably The Alias Man in 1968, which introduced Roy Rickman, an agent reporting to a Parliamentary Investigatory Committee, but he found his true calling in highly-respected crime novels – around fifty of them to date – under the name Bill James.
GEOFFREY DAVISON
Born in Newcastle in 1927, Geoffrey Davison wrote war stories and at least nine spy thrillers, 1967–78, three featuring British agent Stephen Fletcher (sometimes known as Stefan Fettes) operating out of Athens, starting with The Spy Who Swapped Shoes (1967). Several of his thrillers, most of which had ‘spy’ in the title – such as The Chessboard Spies (1969) and Spy Puppets (1973) – were translated and published in Italy.
ADAM DIMENT
Frederick Adam Diment was born in Weymouth, Dorset in 1943 into a farming family. After public school he dropped out of agricultural college and moved to Chelsea, quickly becoming immersed in the whole ‘Swinging Sixties’ scene. His debut novel featuring the fashionably well-dressed, hash-smoking secret agent Philip McAlpine, The Dolly, Dolly Spy, appeared in 1967 and was rapidly followed by The Bang Bang Birds and The Great Spy Race, bringing the young author fame and fortune. A fourth book, Think Inc., appeared in 1971 and then Diment suddenly and completely dropped from public sight. Rumours abounded and press and then Internet speculation was rife as to why and what had happened, but Diment remains stubbornly out of the public eye, despite attempts to get his novels, which have a cult following, back into print. More outlandish theories suggest he succumbed to drugs, was guilty of financial misdemeanours, or had moved to an ashram in India. The most likely explanation is that he got fed up with the publicity circus which followed him around and returned to the family business of farming, most probably in Kent or Sussex.
MICHAEL DINES
Thought to be the same Michael Dines (1916–92) who wrote plays, scripts for early episodes of Coronation Street and Z-Cars, crime novels, and three spy stories featuring John Manning. An ‘everyman’ character, though with faster than average reflexes and a high IQ (of 164), Manning reported to ‘The Chief’ – sometimes known as ‘Sir George’ – of the Bureau of Special Investigations. His first adventure, Operation – Deadline (1967)
involved ex-Nazis, and Operation – To Kill a Man (1969) was set on a Soviet island prison in the Baltic.
IVOR DRUMMOND