by Mike Ripley
One of the many pen names of advertising-executive-turned-prolific-novelist Roger Erskine Longrigg (1929–2000) who, as ‘Frank Parrish’, so legend has it, won the Crime Writers’ John Creasey award for best debut novel (it being the first of his Dan Mallett series starring a country poacher turned detective), but had to give it back when it was discovered he had been a published author for more than twenty years.
Born in Edinburgh, Longrigg read history at Oxford and went into advertising in what is now known as the ‘Mad Men’ era. He took to writing fiction in 1956 and his first novels were satires on the advertising industry but he was to work across many genres, producing 55 books in total, including the infamous erotic comedy The Passion Flower Hotel, writing as ‘Rosalind Erskine’ in 1962. In an interview with The Scotsman in 2012, his widow Jane Chichester said ‘Roger is quite forgotten now, which is rather sad, but he had tremendous fun in his writing life – all of them.’
As Ivor Drummond, he wrote nine spy novels between 1969 and 1980, beginning with The Man With the Tiny Head, featuring a trio of rich, globe-trotting adventurers lead by Lady Jennifer Norrington who seemed destined to combat bizarre international conspiracies and secret organisations. In The Frog in the Moonflower (1972), Lady Jenny and her chums come up against SIPHEN – a society ‘for the preservation of the heritage of nature’ which has a violent wing and has taken to the mass murder of anyone participating in pheasant shoots, fox hunts, African safaris and the like. Naturally, Lady Jenny and her companions (an American millionaire and an Italian Count) tackle the problem by going on a safari in Kenya, where an attempt to kill them is made using a herd of stampeding elephants! The Drummond books certainly found favour with some critics, one of whom described them as ‘in the James Bond tradition and at their best are not far behind Fleming’. In truth they were an attempt, perhaps with tongue in cheek, to update the adventure thrillers of Dennis Wheatley’s ‘Those Modern Musketeers’ series dating from the Thirties and the status of James Bond was never really threatened.
JAMES EASTWOOD
Born in Manchester (probably in 1914), James Eastwood was a prolific writer of scripts for ‘supporting features’ in British cinemas, usually on true crime subjects and featuring Edgar Lustgarten, such as the Scales of Justice series (1962–3) and was also the co-writer of the cult 1954 science fiction film Devil Girl from Mars. Between 1965 and 1969 he created the resourceful heroine Anna Zordan, a female Bond of Hungarian–American parentage but working for British Intelligence in three under-rated spy thrillers beginning with The Chinese Visitor.
CLIVE EGLETON
Born in Middlesex, the only child of a truck driver, Clive Frederick Egleton (1927–2006) claimed that ‘from the age of six’ he wanted to be a soldier. He enlisted, under age, on D-Day 1944 serving initially in the Royal Armoured Corps before taking a commission in the South Staffordshire Regiment. In a thirty-year career he served in India, Hong Kong, Germany, and the Persian Gulf and worked in Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He began writing whilst in the army but his breakthrough novel was Seven Days to a Killing in 1973, which was filmed by Don Siegel as The Black Windmill, starring Michael Caine. Egleton followed up his success immediately with The October Plot (1974), a WWII conspiracy thriller about an abortive attempt to assassinate Deputy Führer Martin Bormann. Reviewing that novel, the Birmingham Post said that ‘Alistair MacLean should look to his laurels’. He was to write over 40 thrillers, many with military or ex-military protagonists, including a ‘speculative’ trilogy which imagined Britain under Soviet rule.
NICHOL FLEMING
Nicholas (Nichol) Peter Val Fleming (1939–95) was the son of Peter and nephew of Ian Fleming. He tried his hand at thriller writing with Counter Paradise (1968), Czech Point (1970) and Hash! (1971), though his fiction was always overshadowed by that of his famous uncle. After the death of his father in 1971, Nichol concentrated on farming and maintaining the family estate, although he did publish a creditable history of the last days of peace before the Second World War, August 1939, in 1979.
PETER FLEMING
The elder brother of Ian, Robert Peter Fleming (1907–71) was best known as a travel writer, producing very successful books of his adventures in Brazil, Russia, and China in the Thirties. He also wrote numerous historical works and one satirical spy thriller The Sixth Column, published in 1952, the year before his brother published Casino Royale. After Ian Fleming’s death, Peter served on the board of Glidrose Productions and was said to be instrumental in choosing Kingsley Amis as the author of the first James Bond ‘continuation’ novel, Colonel Sun.
ALFRED FLETT
Born in Sunderland but taken to New Zealand when aged 11, Alfred Flett became a journalist and author of several works of non-fiction. Returning to England in the late Sixties, he worked in Fleet Street and wrote Never Shake a Skeleton in 1973.
JAMES FOLLETT
A former technical writer for the Ministry of Defence, James Follet was born in Kingston upon Thames in 1939. In the early Seventies he began to write plays and scripts for radio and television (including an episode of the cult sci-fi series Blake’s 7) before writing his first thriller, The Doomsday Ultimatum in 1976, where a group of British ‘patriots’ seize a nuclear power station to prevent a left-wing Britain descending into anarchy. This was followed by Ice in 1978, a story where a giant iceberg threatens New York.
KEN FOLLETT
Born in Cardiff in 1949 and educated at University College London, Kenneth Martin Follett entered journalism with the South Wales Echo and then became a reporter with the Evening News in London. In the Seventies he ran London publisher Everest Books and wrote numerous crime novels under several pen-names before launching his thriller-writing career proper with an instant bestseller, Eye of the Needle, in 1978. His early novels were spy thrillers but he moved into historical blockbusters, which he continues to write with great success.
COLIN FORBES
After three early crime novels published under his own name, Raymond Harold Sawkins (1923–2006) adopted the pen-name Richard Raine for three thrillers featuring lawyer-turned-secret-agent David Martini, starting with A Wreath for America in 1967. Born in London, Sawkins left school at 16 to work as a sub-editor in a publishing firm, interrupted by WWII when he served in the British army in the Middle East and, towards the end of the war, on the army newspaper in Rome. He was to establish himself as a thriller writer and become a millionaire under the pen-name Colin Forbes with, initially, wartime thrillers such as Tramp on Armour (1969), The Heights of Zervos (1970) and The Palermo Ambush (1972). In all he wrote more than 40 thrillers, including the long-running series featuring ‘Tweed’ – the Deputy Director of SIS – from Double Jeopardy (1982) onwards. His 1977 novel Avalanche Express was filmed starring Lee Marvin and Robert Shaw.
STEPHEN FRANCES
Forever associated with the post-war British pulp fiction scene and the novels of (and ‘by’) Hank Janson with their famously lurid covers, Stephen Daniel Frances (1917–89), who also wrote under fourteen other pen-names, created special agent John Gail in 1965 in This Woman is Death, a title he had already used for a Hank Janson novel in 1948. Prolific as ever, Frances produced seven John Gail novels in six years.
JOHN FREDMAN
John Fredman (thought to have been born in 1927) attempted to combine the private eye and spy genres with three novels featuring Charles Dexter beginning with The Fourth Agency in 1969.
BRIAN FREEMANTLE
Born in 1936, Brian Harry Freemantle was a much-travelled foreign correspondent said to have worked in twenty-two countries, who became Foreign Editor of the Daily Mail before turning to spy fiction under his own name and the pen-names Jonathan Evans and Jack Winchester. His first Cold War thriller Goodbye to an Old Friend, published in 1973, was the story of two defecting Russian space scientists and their downbeat and deceptively compliant de-briefing officer from British intelligence. It is said that former CIA executive Miles Cop
eland Jr praised the book as ‘a virtual case history’ but it was his creation of the downbeat though worldly-wise hero, Charlie Muffin, in 1977 which led to a 16-book series that brought Freemantle greater recognition and a wider, and devoted, following, especially in America. Anthony Price called Freemantle ‘Mr Deighton’s heir’. In 1975 – the year Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed swept the competition aside – Freemantle’s excellent Nazi-treasure-hunt-KGB-plot thriller, The Man Who Wanted Tomorrow, was sadly overshadowed.
REG GADNEY
Born in Cross Hills, Yorkshire in 1941, Reg Gadney was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards and served in Libya, France and Norway where he qualified as a NATO instructor in winter warfare. He read English, Fine Art and Architecture at Cambridge and became a Senior Tutor then Fellow at the Royal College of Art. As well as academic texts on art and history, he has written screenplays for film and television (including Goldeneye in 1989 about the life of Ian Fleming in which he appeared as the ornithologist James Bond) and 13 novels, starting with the gritty spy thriller Drawn Blanc in 1970. In the twenty-first century he established a reputation as a noted portrait painter.
ALAN GARDNER
Alan Gardner (1925–96) was born in Ilford in Essex and began his journalistic career on the Daily Graphic. During WWII he joined the RAF and was posted to the Far East, staying in Singapore after the war to join the Straits Times. In 1948 he returned to Fleet Street to join the Daily Sketch and then the Daily Mail, eventually becoming its foreign correspondent in America where he reported on the election of President Kennedy. He covered the shooting of the film Mutiny on the Bounty in Tahiti and was later posted to Rome. He created Davis Troy, journalist and globe-trotting foreign correspondent, for a series of adventures beginning with The Escalator in 1963, which involved the hi-jacking of a nuclear submarine. The innocently-titled Six Day Week in 1966 revolving around a communist plot against the Vatican was said to be ‘sensationally exciting’ by Anthony Boucher and The Spectator declared it ‘must be finished at a sitting’.
JOHN GARDNER
John Edmund Gardner (1926–2007) was the consummate thriller writer, producing more than fifty novels, but will always be remembered for his connection to James Bond. His early success came with send-ups of the Bond genre, and he was to find greater fame, if not satisfaction, in reinventing 007 almost twenty years after the death of Ian Fleming.
Born in Northumberland, Gardner was the only child of an Anglican priest but the family moved south when his father became chaplain at St Mary’s, Wantage, Berkshire, where Gardner attended King Alfred’s school. During WWII he joined the Home Guard aged only 14, then the Fleet Air Arm in 1944 and finally served in the Royal Marine commandos in the Middle and Far East. After the war, he read theology at St John’s College, Cambridge, and entered the Anglican priesthood, but after five years and a crisis of faith, he turned to journalism as drama critic of the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, and to drink. By the age of 33, he realised that his intake of gin qualified him as an alcoholic. As part of his therapy, he wrote Spin the Bottle (1963), a memoir about his relationship with alcohol, which launched him on a writing career.
Gardner’s first novel, The Liquidator, a complete spoof of the Bond books, appeared in 1964, the year of Fleming’s death. The anti-hero, Boysie Oakes, went on to feature in further fantastic adventures into the Seventies, as Gardner diversified into more serious thrillers and crime novels.
While living in tax exile in Ireland, Gardner was approached by crime novelist and president of the Detection Club Harry Keating, on behalf of the Fleming estate, with the proposal that he reinvent the Bond books for the Eighties. Licence Renewed (1981) was the first in a franchise which lasted 20 years, producing a media frenzy at the return to the page of a more politically correct Bond – and an outcry that 007 was now driving a Saab 900 Turbo.
Although they brought him wealth and a worldwide audience (he wrote more Bond books than Ian Fleming), Gardner never seemed comfortable with the Bond franchise, though he remained proud of one title, The Man from Barbarossa. He later launched a series of five much grittier, hardboiled espionage thrillers, starting with The Nostradamus Traitor (1979) starring ‘Big’ Herbie Kruger, a character shaped by the Second World War – as Gardner had been.
Gardner moved to America in 1989, but ill-health forced him to relinquish the Bond franchise in 1996 and medical bills for treating cancer of the oesophagus forced his return to England in reduced circumstances. He continued writing up to his death in 2007.
ANDREW GARVE
One of several pen-names used by journalist and crime writer Paul Winterton (1908–2001), the son of a left-wing journalist and Labour MP. Graduating from the London School of Economics in 1928, Winterton won a scholarship to travel and live in the Soviet Union for nine months. On his return he joined the staff of The Economist and in 1933, the News Chronicle, for whom he undertook foreign assignments in Russia and Palestine (which formed the background for his first novel Death Beneath Jerusalem, published in 1938 under the name Roger Bax). During the Thirties he stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate for Parliament and became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet Union. In 1942 he was appointed Moscow correspondent for the News Chronicle and the war years there, plus having to work under Soviet censorship, turned him away from left-wing politics for good. He began writing crime fiction as Andrew Garve in 1950, producing some 40 novels up to 1978. His most notable espionage thrillers, all strongly anti-Communist in tone, included The Ashes of Loda (1965), The Ascent of D13 (1969) and The Late Bill Smith (1971).
WINSTON GRAHAM
Winston Mawdsley Graham (1908–2003) was born in Manchester but his family moved to Cornwall, to which he would always be associated because of his hugely successful historical Poldark novels. A prolific historical novelist, he also wrote suspense thrillers, notably Marnie (1961) which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. He was much admired by thriller writers Alistair MacLean and Alan Williams.
JOHN GRIFFIN
Thought to be the pen-name of Michael John Clay (1934–2000) who, between 1976 and 1981, produced two thrillers a year featuring Richard Raven, a young, part-time spy and sometime rally driver, beginning with Midas Operation.
WILLIAM HAGGARD
Pen-name of Richard Henry Michael Clayton (1907–1993), a distant relative of H. Rider Haggard, who was born in Croydon and educated at Lancing College and Oxford University, following which he joined the Indian Civil Service and, on the outbreak of WWII, the Indian Army. After the war he returned to England and became a civil servant with the Board of Trade until retirement in 1969, latterly serving as the grandly-titled ‘Controller of Enemy Property’. He began writing spy fiction at the age of 51 with Slow Burner in 1958, and in all published more than thirty novels, twenty of them featuring Colonel Charles Russell of the Security Executive, an offshoot of British Intelligence which seems responsible to no-one, not even democratically elected governments! (The Security Executive has colour-coded files on ‘persons of interest’ similar, though less brutal, to the ‘Red Files’ system under which James Mitchell’s iconic agent David Callan was to operate.) In The Power House (1965) Russell has to deal with a rogue left-wing MP who may or may not be planning to defect to Soviet Russia and thus save the blushes of the British Prime Minister. There is little attempt to disguise Russell’s disdain (and possibly the author’s) for a Labour Prime Minister which is clearly Harold Wilson. The descriptions ‘urbane’ and ‘dry’ were regularly used in reviews of Haggard’s books, which he himself described as ‘political novels’. The patrician stance of his series hero and his sense of propriety and correctness were definitely out of kilter with the liberalising trends of the Swinging Sixties, but Haggard’s truncated, elliptical style and clever plotting won him a loyal, if not mass, following. Critic Anthony Lejeune wrote that Haggard was ‘one of the few unmistakable originals’ and that his thrillers were ‘highly recommended entertainment for sophisticated readers’.
PALMA HARC
OURT
One of the few women writers of spy thrillers of the period, Palma Harcourt (1917–99) was born on Jersey in the Channel Islands and worked in British Intelligence where she met her husband, Jack Trotman. They were later to write police procedural crime novels together as John Penn, but Harcourt began to write ‘diplomatic thrillers’ as she called them in 1974 with Climate for Conspiracy set in newly-independent Canada. More than twenty more followed, along with 15 co-authored crime novels, up to her death. Her spy stories were promoted as ‘In the best tradition of Helen MacInnes’, and with the quote from Desmond Bagley: ‘Palma Harcourt’s novels are splendid.’
JOHN HARRIS
John Harris (1916–91), who also wrote as Mark Hebden and Max Hennessey, was born in Yorkshire and joined the Rotherham Advertiser as a reporter in 1933. During WWII he served in the RAF including an attachment to the South African Air Force, returning to the Sheffield Telegraph in peacetime as a cartoonist until becoming a full-time writer in 1955. He was best known for his war novels, especially The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1953) (which was filmed) and Covenant with Death (1961), and latterly, as Mark Hebden, for his series of crime novels featuring the French Inspector Pel, a series continued by his daughter Juliet after his death. He wrote numerous adventure thrillers, including The Unforgiving Wind (1963) set in the Arctic and three spy thrillers featuring ‘Colonel Mostyn’ beginning with Mask of Violence in 1970.