by Mike Ripley
DUFF HART-DAVIS
Peter Duff Hart-Davis (b.1936), the journalist, book reviewer, naturalist and biographer is the author of numerous works of non-fiction, including a biography of his godfather Peter Fleming (see above). He also wrote a handful of adventure/spy thrillers, his first being The Megacull in 1968 but his best known is probably The Heights of Rimring (1980), a spy adventure set in the Himalayas very much in the Alistair MacLean tradition.
SIMON HARVESTER
The pen-name of Henry St John Clair Rumbold-Gibbs (1909–75) whose first book was published in 1942, but who established his reputation as a thriller writer for his novels set in Central Asia and the Far East (the critic Edmund Crispin referring to his main body of work as his ‘Asia in turmoil’ series). He had two main protagonists, who sometimes overlapped. His agent hero Heron Murmur first appeared in The Chinese Hammer in 1960, set mainly in the Himalayas, the same year that his more famous creation, British spy Dorian Silk, made his debut in Unsung Road, set in Iran. The Dorian Silk books, usually with a Road in the title (Battle Road, Siberian Road, Treacherous Road, etc.) were noted for their local colour, detail, and often shrewd predictions about power politics in Asia. Legend has it that the KGB station in Kuala Lumpur always placed a bulk order for copies of any new Dorian Silk thriller.
RAYMOND HAWKEY
Raymond John Hawkey (1930–2010), the highly respected graphic designer and design director of the Daily Express is best known for his innovative covers for the novels of Len Deighton and the mass market paperbacks of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels in the Sixties. He also wrote a handful of thrillers with medical/scientific conspiracy themes and a Gothic twist such as Side-Effect (1979) and It (1983).
JOSEPH HONE
Born in London in 1937 but brought up and educated in Ireland, Joseph Hone’s career was in teaching, including working for the Egyptian Ministry of Education in Cairo and Suez. He became a theatrical producer in London, worked for the BBC, wrote for The Listener and was made Radio and Television Officer for the United Nations in 1968. His first (of four) spy novels to feature Peter Marlow, The Private Sector, was set during the Arab–Israeli Six Day War and became an instant success on publication in 1971, drawing comparisons with John Le Carré and Len Deighton for his depiction of the back-stabbing world of espionage.
GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD
A highly influential thriller writer often compared to Eric Ambler and John Buchan, Geoffrey Edward West Household (1900–88) was born in Bristol and read English at Oxford before embarking on a variety of careers including as a junior banker in Romania, importing bananas in Spain, and travelling in printers’ inks in South America. Having written children’s stories for radio in the USA during the Depression, he published his first novel in 1937 but it was his third, Rogue Male, which caused a sensation. Published in Britain on 1 September 1939, three days before war was declared, Rogue Male, the story of a lone Big Game hunter caught training his rifle on an un-named dictator (but clearly Hitler). The story of the anonymous hero’s torture, escape, and the hunt for him across rural England became an instant classic and was filmed in 1941 as Man Hunt. It was more than forty years later that readers learned the hero’s name – Raymond Ingelram – in the sequel, Rogue Justice in 1982. After serving with British Intelligence and then the army during World War II, Household alternated his output of thrillers with picaresque adventure novels, short stories, and children’s stories. Most notable were A Rough Shoot and A Time to Kill in 1951 and 1952, and Watcher in the Shadows in 1960, all of which showed that the English countryside could be a very dangerous place, but his stories were not confined to English settings. His 1968 Dance of the Dwarfs was a macabre and slightly surreal adventure thriller set deep in the Amazonian jungle and his romantic wartime thriller Doom’s Caravan (1971) was set on the borders of Syria and Lebanon.
HARTLEY HOWARD
One of the pen-names of Leopold (‘Leo’) Horace Ognall (1908–79), Scottish journalist and author, from 1951 onwards, of more than 90 crime novels as Hartley or as ‘Harry Carmichael’, most of which – 38 of them – featured New York private eye Glenn Bowman. In 1964 he introduced Philip Scott, the owner of a toy company who becomes involved in espionage with the eponymous ‘Department K’. Although the book was filmed as Assignment K, starring Stephen Boyd and Michael Redgrave, Philip Scott seems to have made only one further appearance, in The Eye of the Hurricane in 1968.
GEOFFREY JENKINS
Geoffrey Ernest Jenkins (1920–2001) was born in Pretoria, South Africa and on the strength of a piece of local history published when he was 16, won a journalistic scholarship to London and Fleet Street. He spent WWII working as a war correspondent for the Sunday Times, where he became friends with Ian Fleming. Settling back in Africa, he wrote the adventure thriller A Twist of Sand (1959), set on the desolate Namib desert coast of West Africa. It received an enthusiastic review from Ian Fleming and became a bestseller as did Jenkins’ subsequent thrillers A Grue of Ice, The River of Diamonds and Hunter-Killer. His second novel, The Watering Place of Good Peace, was published in hardback in 1960 but was thought rather esoteric and unrealistic for the mainstream thriller market. Even Fleming had reservations about it and it only appeared in paperback, after revision by the author, in 1974. After Fleming’s death in 1964, Jenkins was an early contender for the job of continuing the Bond franchise but his James Bond novel, Per Fine Ounce, was not accepted by the Fleming estate.
RONALD JOHNSTON
Scottish author of sea-faring adventure stories, Ronald Johnston (born 1926) made his name with a series of thrillers involving disasters at sea, usually involving large tankers or oil rigs in British coastal waters. He had success at home and in America with Disaster at Dungeness (1964) which was later turned into a radio play, The Wrecking of Offshore Five (1967), and The Angry Ocean (1968) but also with The Black Camels of Qashran (1969) set in the deserts of the Arabian Gulf.
BRADSHAW JONES
The writing name of Malcolm Henry Bradshaw Jones (1904–89). Educated in Switzerland and the University of London, Jones joined the Tanks Corps in the 1920s but left the military for a career with Shell Mex BP until the outbreak of WWII when he joined the RAF and was twice Mentioned in Dispatches before being invalided out in 1942. In The Hamlet Problem (1962) he created the spymaster James Keen who was directly responsible to the Cabinet Office and who ran agents which included an Anglo-French married couple, Claude and Monique Ravel, once described ‘as if James Bond had married Modesty Blaise’. The crime critic Julian Symons described Bradshaw Jones as ‘a lively and intelligent addition to our native Flemingites’.
DEREK LAMBERT
Derek William Lambert (1929–2001) was born in London, educated at Epsom College, and did his National Service in the RAF, after which he began a long career in journalism with the Dartmouth Chronicle (from where he was reportedly fired, age 21, for reporting an outbreak of chickenpox as smallpox). After working for the Eastern Daily Press and Sheffield Star, he joined the Daily Mirror in 1953, later moving to become the Daily Express correspondent in Moscow. His experiences there lead to his first novel, Angels in the Snow in 1969, which brought him both critical and financial success. From then on he concentrated on writing thrillers as well as historical novels under the name Richard Falkirk, more than two dozen in all. Having served as a foreign correspondent in Israel, Cyprus, Africa, and India as well as Russia, he often drew on his own experiences for his thrillers, which veteran Daily Telegraph reviewer Martha Gellhorn called ‘pure unadulterated story telling.’ His best-known books were The Yermakov Transfer (1974), set on board the Trans-Siberian express, and The Saint Peter’s Plot (1978) which imagined an escape route for high-ranking Nazis via the Vatican at the end of WWII.
CHRISTOPHER LANDON
Born in Surrey, Christopher Guy Landon (1911–61) read medicine at Cambridge and during WWII served in Field Ambulance brigades in North Africa and in Persia, ending the war with the rank of major. His wartime experiences contr
ibuted to his best-known thriller Ice Cold in Alex (1957) which he adapted as a screenplay for the classic British war film in 1958, and to his excellent debut spy novel set in Iran, A Flag in the City (1953). He published seven novels and wrote scripts for television before his untimely death from an accidental overdose of barbiturates. His 1960 thriller The Mirror Room was set in Berlin just before the Wall was built dividing the city.
BOB LANGLEY
Born in Newcastle in 1939, Bob Langley did his National Service in the RAF then, for three years, hitch-hiked Kerouac-style across America. On his return to England he became a local reporter for Tyne Tees television and then a nationally-recognised BBC presenter. He began writing thrillers in 1977 with Death Stalk, his best known work being Traverse of the Gods (1980) about a WWII German commando team climbing the Eiger which Jack Higgins described as ‘unputdownable’.
JAMES LEASOR
Educated at Oxford and a Captain in the British Army in Burma, India, and Malaya during WWII, Thomas James Leasor (1923–2007) joined the Daily Express in 1948 and became a bestselling author with over 50 thrillers, historical novels, military histories, biographies, and ghosted autobiographies (also writing under the name Andrew MacAllan). One of his earliest bestsellers was The Millionth Chance (1957), the non-fiction story of the R101 airship disaster. In 1964 he created ‘the urbane man’s James Bond’ – according to the Daily Express, for which he wrote – in Dr Jason Love, the hero of Passport to Oblivion, which is said to have sold over 4 million copies worldwide. Although clearly inspired by Bond when it came to globe-trotting adventures, high living and being irresistible to women, Jason Love was only a part-time secret agent, supposedly also a dedicated GP in the Somerset village of Bishop’s Combe, though he seemed to spend little time with patients. Love also had unusual hobbies, not only teaching judo to his local British Legion but also a passion for supercharged American Cord roadsters (a passion shared by his creator). At the time he first appeared, in the year Ian Fleming died, Dr Jason Love seemed a suitable heir to James Bond – though there were many contenders for that role – especially when Passport to Oblivion was filmed in 1966 as Where the Spies Are. The film, however, failed to inspire any sort of Love-mania although there were half-a-dozen more novels (usually with Passport in the title) with settings ranging from the Bahamas to the Himalayas up to 1971, at which point Leasor began to concentrate on other projects. There were two ‘return of’ Love novels in 1989 and 1992 but by then Leasor was far better known for his other fiction, particularly historical novels and war stories such as The Sea Wolves (originally titled Boarding Party) set in the Far East.
EDWIN LEATHER
Born in Canada, Sir Edwin Hartley Cameron Leather (1919–2005) came to England during WWII and became a Conservative MP in 1950. He was knighted in 1962 and in 1973 appointed Governor of Bermuda. Retiring in 1977, he remained in Bermuda and wrote three thrillers, the first of which, concerning artworks stolen during the war, was The Vienna Elephant (1977).
BRIAN LECOMBER
Brian Kenneth Lecomber (1945–2015) left school at 16 and embarked on a career in motoring journalism, a career he was to abandon almost immediately after his first flying lesson in the Sixties. He was to become one of the most experienced aerobatic pilots, giving an estimated 1,800 performances at public air shows. It was whilst working as a flying instructor in the Caribbean that he took to writing thrillers all with strong aviation backgrounds: Turn Killer (1975), Dead Weight (1976), and Talk Down (1978) (which was a huge bestseller in Germany). When he received an offer to join the Rothmans Aerobatic Team, he gave up writing fiction as ‘boring’ compared to stunt flying.
ANTHONY LEJEUNE
Pen-name of journalist, critic, and author Edward Anthony Thompson, born in London in 1928, who reviewed crime novels and thrillers for the Catholic weekly paper The Tablet for an impressive fifty years. (He rated Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever as ‘an adult and entertaining thriller’.) He wrote detective novels and non-fiction, most famously a history of London’s Gentlemen’s Clubs, but began with a series of thrillers staring Adam Gifford, a crime reporter not averse to working with the British security services, including Crowded and Dangerous (1959), Duel in the Shadows (1962) and The Dark Trade (1965).
TOM LILLEY
One of the few thriller writers to write about the ‘Emergency’ in Malaya in the late 1940s/early 1950s, Thomas William Lilley was born in London in 1924, joined the RAF in WWII and served in Bomber Command, then joined the Overseas Civil Service and spent twenty years in Malaya, Hong Kong, Borneo, and Brunei. He retired as Deputy Head of the Special Branch in Sabah (Borneo) and wrote The Projects Section (1970) and The K Section (1972), which both dealt with the British response to Communist insurgency in south-east Asia.
RICHARD LLEWELLYN
Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd (1906–83) had his first play performed in London in 1938 and published his most famous novel, How Green Was My Valley, in 1939. He served with the Welsh Guards during WWII and covered the Nuremberg Trials as a journalist, before a career as a scriptwriter with MGM. In 1968 he introduced MI5 agent Edmund Trothe in a quartet of adventures commencing with The End of the Rug.
PATRICK LONG
Born in 1934, Patrick Long was a journalist colleague of Ken Follett on the London Evening News and the publication of his debut thriller, Heil Britannia (about the rise of a second Hitler, this time in British politics) in 1973 is said to have inspired Follett’s own career in fiction.
DESMOND LOWDEN
A former film technician and television scriptwriter, Desmond Lowden (born 1937) wrote a handful of quirky thrillers, notably Bandersnatch in 1969 and Boudapesti 3 in 1979, which was filmed in 2003 as Quicksand. His most famous crime novel (and film script) was Bellman and True in 1975.
NICHOLAS LUARD
Nicholas Lamert Luard (1937–2004) was educated at Winchester College, did his National Service in the Coldstream Guards and then read English at Cambridge. He was closely associated with the ‘satire boom’ of the early 1960s, first as co-founder (with Peter Cook) of The Establishment Club in Soho, and then, briefly, as owner of Private Eye. Latterly a respected travel writer, his first novel, The Warm and Golden War (1967), was based on his own (unofficial) experience of helping refugees from the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Of his fiction, his best-remembered thrillers are The Robespierre Serial (1975) and The Dirty Area (1979).
GEORGE MACBETH
George Mann MacBeth (1932–92), was born in Scotland and educated at Oxford before joining the BBC as a radio producer. He was already established as a noted poet before turning to the thriller and inventing the highly sexed female agent/assassin known as ‘Cadbury’ in The Samurai in 1975. There were three Cadbury novels, with an eclectic cast of (usually unlikeable) supporting characters with names such as Valerian and Loyola, but the plots always revolved around sex used literally and metaphorically as a weapon. The Cadbury books could hardly be described as ‘erotic’ but were certainly classed as pornography by some and their reputation overshadowed MacBeth’s fine achievement with an outstanding wartime spy thriller set in Singapore and Ceylon, A Kind of Treason, in 1981.
CHARLES MACHARDY
On leaving school, Charles MacHardy (1920–96), worked as a builder’s labourer and a trawler hand before joining D. C. Thomson as a trainee journalist until the outbreak of war in 1939, upon which he joined the Royal Navy. When the war ended he began a career in Fleet Street, working for the Daily Express, the Daily Sketch and as arts editor for ITN in the early days of independent television. In the Sixties he moved to rural Scotland and wrote the wartime thriller Send Down a Dove (1968) based on his own experiences of submarines on active service. Two more thrillers followed – The Ice Mirror (1971) and Blowdown (1978) – but neither could repeat the success of his debut, which was praised by Alistair MacLean as ‘The finest submarine story to come out of either world war’.
GEORGE B. MAIR
Scottish surgeon, much-travelled doc
tor and explorer George Brown Mair (likely born in 1914) had already written widely on his experiences in Russia and Asia before turning to fiction with The Day Khruschev Panicked in 1961 about a (failed) attempt at world domination by the USSR through a secret weapon attached to a Sputnik satellite. In 1963, Mair created Dr David Grant: a Scot, a doctor, and a secret agent for NATO and the World Health Organisation in Death’s Foot Forward. The adventures of Dr Grant, recorded in 10 novels up to 1973, were renowned for their exotic locations, including the Sahara, the Himalayas, Russia, Argentina, and a Caribbean rife with voodoo. David Grant often found himself opposed by a sinister criminal conspiracy known by the acronym S.A.T.A.N. and Dennis Wheatley said of him: ‘James Bond must look to his laurels – and his weapons, and his girls.’
GEORGE MARKSTEIN
Born in Berlin, his family leaving Germany to escape the Nazis, George Markstein (1929–87) became a journalist before moving to work in commercial television as a writer, script editor, and producer. From 1966–72 he was closely involved with top-rated shows such as Danger Man, The Prisoner (in which he appears briefly in the opening credits) and Callan. He also wrote screenplays for the films Robbery (1967) and The Odessa File (1974) from the novel by Frederick Forsyth. His own thriller-writing career began with the highly successful WWII story The Cooler (1974) and then The Man from Yesterday (1977), which remain his best-known books.