by Mike Ripley
DEREK MARLOWE
Derek Marlowe (1938–66) was born in Middlesex and attended the University of London where he took an interest in drama and began to write plays. His debut spy novel, A Dandy in Aspic, was published in 1966 and filmed from a script by Marlowe. A second spy novel Echoes of Celandine (1970) was also filmed as The Disappearance. He wrote drama and documentaries for television, including adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories and in America, where he went to live in 1989, for Murder, She Wrote. Like Anthony Burgess, he too is said to have written an un-filmed script for the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.
JAMES MAYO
(see STEPHEN COULTER)
PHILIP McCUTCHAN
Born in Cambridge, Donald Philip McCutchan (1920–96) was a prolific author of thrillers, mysteries, war stories, science fiction and historical naval stories, writing at least 99 novels in total, sometimes publishing three a year. His main thriller hero was Commander Esmonde Shaw, an agent for 6D2 – the ‘Special Services Division’ – who was often pitted against the sinister international organisation WUSWIPP (World Union of Socialist Scientific Workers for International Progress in Peace). Commander Shaw may have had the same rank as James Bond, but nowhere near the popularity and WUSWIPP was not SPECTRE. Nevertheless, there were 22 Shaw novels, up to 1995, beginning with Gibraltar Road in 1960, and McCutchan introduced another hero, an ex-police detective now working for the Foreign Office, in Call for Simon Shard, in 1974. Shard was to feature in a dozen novels, often in direct fictional competition with the adventures of Commander Shaw.
HUGH McLEAVE
Born in the west of Scotland, Hugh McLeave (1923–2008) studied history and modern languages at Glasgow University and served for five years as an artillery officer in India and the Far East during WWII. He became a journalist with a particular interest in science and medicine and worked in Fleet Street for twenty years before moving to the south of France in the late Sixties. He wrote over forty books, about half of them non-fiction. One of his early notable thrillers, The Steel Balloon (1964), deals with a KGB plot to sabotage Britain’s nuclear industry by blowing up the Dounreay reactor in Scotland. His ‘Himalayan Quartet’ (1978–87) of thrillers beginning with A Borderline Case, involved a team of World Health Organisation agents caught up in espionage, mostly against the Chinese.
ANTONY MELVILLE-ROSS
Coming from a long line of explorers and adventurers, and a distant relative of Herman Melville, Antony Melville-Ross (1920–93) joined the Royal Navy straight from school in 1938, transferring to submarines in 1941. He served with great distinction during WWII, being involved in the sinking of 25 enemy vessels in the Mediterranean, off Norway and in the Java Sea, earning him the Distinguished Service Cross. After the war he learned Polish and worked in Intelligence as a British ‘naval attaché’ in Warsaw, finally leaving the navy in 1952 to work for BP in oil exploration in South American and Libya, which provided the background for his first thriller Blindfold (1978) and which introduced his secret agent hero Al (short for Alaric) Trelawney. Although reviews of his early thrillers put him ‘alongside the likes of Bagley, Higgins, and MacLean’, he is best remembered for his novels of submarine warfare.
JAMES MITCHELL
Although he wrote over thirty novels – the first in 1955 and the last published in the year of his death – James William Mitchell (1926–2002) will be remembered best for his work in television, particularly his creation of the ruthless, yet sympathetic, secret agent David Callan. Born in County Durham and educated at Oxford, Mitchell flirted with a career in teaching before finding his true vocation as a writer, occasionally using the pen-names Patrick O’McGuire and James Munro. It was as James Munro that he had his first success with the ultra-tough British spy John Craig, who first appeared in The Man Who Sold Death in 1964, shortly after the death of Ian Fleming. Naturally, John Craig was hailed (with some justification) as the suitable heir to James Bond but only three more books followed, up to The Innocent Bystanders which was filmed in 1972 with Stanley Baker as Craig. On its publication in the US, the Los Angeles Times wrote: ‘No one is more qualified to wear the mantle of the late Mr Fleming than Mr Munro.’ But by then Mitchell/Munro had an even bigger success on his hands in the form of Callan. The character, portrayed by Edward Woodward, first appeared in a television play A Magnum for Schneider in 1967. The downbeat, solitary assassin was so good at a job he hated, striking a popular chord and giving rise to a television series which still has dedicated followers to this day. The first of five ‘Callan’ novels, A Magnum for Schneider, was published in 1969. Four more followed along with some forty short stories in the Sunday Express, a film version, and a TV movie, Wet Job, in 1981.
JAMES MOFFATT
James Moffatt (1922–93) was born in Canada and moved to England in the Sixties. A prolific pulp writer under numerous pen-names, his greatest success probably came in the Seventies with Skinhead and subsequent ‘rebellious youth-exploitation’ novels under the name Richard Allen. Under his own name he wrote a brace of thrillers starting with The Cambri Plot (1970) about a sunken U-boat in New York harbour and, in 1974, he created the spy heroine Virginia Box in The Girl from H.A.R.D., a blatant piece of sexploitation reminiscent of the Hank Janson era.
STANLEY MORGAN
Born in Liverpool in 1929, Stanley Morgan embarked on an acting career interrupted by numerous jobs as a salesman and bank clerk before emigrating to Canada in 1951 and moving from there to Southern Rhodesia. Taking up acting again he returned to England to find ‘voice over’ work in commercials and dramatic roles on radio and television. He also appeared in several films, including a minor role in Dr. No in 1962. His first novel appeared in 1968 and he subsequently produced more than 40, mostly paperback originals and mostly ‘saucy comedies’ featuring the amorous exploits of his laddish hero Russ Tobin (‘the Stud of the Seventies’), and by 1973 had sold a million books. He wrote two thrillers set in Africa featuring special agent Michael Morgan (who had a Ghurkha sidekick): Octopus Hill (1970) and Mission to Katuma (1973).
JAMES MUNRO
(see JAMES MITCHELL)
FREDERICK NOLAN
Born in Liverpool in 1931, Frederick Nolan worked in a chocolate factory, as a shipping clerk, and a typewriter salesman before his first job in publishing as a reader for Corgi paperbacks, thanks to his interest in westerns, which then formed an important part of the popular paperback market. Moving to London in 1960, he became an editor and began writing westerns under the pen-name Frederick H. Christian, as well as children’s books and non-fiction. In the Seventies he produced two very successful thrillers set during WWII: The Oshawa Project in 1974 (which was filmed as Brass Target, starring George Kennedy and Robert Vaughn) and The Mittenwald Syndicate in 1976.
DOUGLAS ORGILL
Douglas Orgill (1922–84) was born in Staffordshire, read modern history at Oxford, and entered journalism in 1949, becoming Chief Sub-Editor of the Daily Express in 1970. Best known for his books on military history and modern warfare, and for a science fiction novel co-authored with Dr John Gribbin, Orgill’s first novels were thrillers featuring a reporter, William Mallett. In The Death Bringers (1962) Mallett investigates the death of an old friend and in Ride a Tiger (1963) travels to a Caribbean island to find a missing journalist. In both cases he is reluctantly recruited by ‘Department Two’ of British Intelligence.
GEOFFREY OSBORNE
Little is known about Geoffrey Osborne (b. 1930?) other than that he wrote six thrillers about a pair of agents – James Dingle and Glyn Jones – who work for the Special Security (Operations) Section, or SS(O)S, commencing with The Power Bug in 1968, with settings including the Himalayas, Burma, India, and Russia. The Dingle and Jones stories, which include the cunningly-titled Traitor’s Gait (1969), are highly thought of by spy-fiction aficionados but now rather rare.
JOHN PALMER
Writing name of Edgar John Palmer Watts (1904–88) who burst on to the scene in 1964 with the adventure thriller The Caves of
Claro set in Yugoslavia just after the end of WWII. A Mediterranean thriller, The Cretan Cipher, followed in 1965 and then Above and Below, which introduced the fiercely independent heroine Freya Matthews, a marine explorer and archaeologist, in 1967. Palmer wrote only one more thriller (again starring Freya Matthews), So Much for Gennaro, set in Spain, in 1968.
JAMES PATTINSON
James Pattinson (1915–2009) wrote more than 100 novels, mostly mysteries, thrillers, sea-faring adventures and occasionally science fiction, set in many exotic foreign locations, though he rarely left the small Norfolk village where he was born. Educated at Thetford Grammar School, his early career was as a poultry farmer until he volunteered to join the Royal Artillery on the outbreak of WWII in 1939. In 1941 he was transferred to serve as a gunner on armed merchant ships on the North Atlantic convoys. After the war he returned to Norfolk and poultry farming but used his wartime convoy duty as the basis for his early fiction (as did Alistair MacLean) and his third novel, Last in Convoy, was a bestseller in America. In 1972, in Away with Murder, he introduced reluctant secret agent Steve Brady – a failed antiques dealer only taking up the cloak and dagger when he needs the money – who featured in nine novels up to 2001.
LAURENCE PAYNE
Laurence Stanley Payne (1919–2009) was born in London and trained as an actor with the Bristol Old Vic. Primarily a theatre actor, he appeared in numerous films, including A Tale of Two Cities and Ben Hur, and often on television where he played the detective Sexton Blake (an accident whilst rehearsing a sword fight for an episode of Sexton Blake resulted in him losing the sight in his left eye). He wrote several highly regarded detective stories and a brace of comic thrillers starring John Tibbett, a former thief recruited into MI5 – Spy for Sale (1969) and Even My Foot’s Asleep (1971).
RITCHIE PERRY
Born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, in 1942, Ritchie Perry was educated at Oxford and spent two years in Brazil as a trainee bank manager. Returning to England he became a teacher and author of children’s books. His first thriller, The Fall Guy in 1972, introduced a former smuggler- (in Brazil) turned-spy called ‘Philis’ working for ‘SR2’ – the ‘Special Responsibilities’ department of British Intelligence. A dozen further adventures followed in what was promoted in the US as ‘The Super Secret Agent Series’.
CHAPMAN PINCHER
Henry Chapman Pincher (1914–2014) was a renowned Fleet Street journalist, working for the Daily Express for thirty years. Originally covering science and defence he became an authority on – and meddler in – security and espionage matters and was heavily involved in the row over the publication of Peter Wright’s Spycatcher book in the 1980s. John Bingham (the MI5 officer and writer) said of him ‘When there exist such people as Mr Chapman Pincher, the KGB does not need a disinformation department.’ As well as non-fiction, he wrote several thrillers, notably The Penthouse Conspirators (1970) and The Skeleton at the Villa Wolkonsky (1975).
JOYCE PORTER
Joyce Porter (1924–90) attended King’s College, London before joining the Women’s Royal Air Force in 1949 where an intensive course in Russian qualified her for work in Intelligence. She left the WRAF in 1963 and began to write fiction. Her first books were highly acclaimed comic crime novels featuring the odious Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover, who was to become her best-known character, but in 1966 she introduced ‘the world’s most reluctant spy’ Eddie Brown in Sour Cream with Everything. Played strictly for laughs, Eddie Brown was an agent of the Special Overseas Directorate, or S.O.D. for short.
ANTHONY PRICE
Journalist, editor, prolific and respected reviewer, and finally award-winning spy novelist, Anthony Price was born in Hertfordshire in 1928 but was to spend most of his life in Oxford, where he studied at Merton College and eventually became editor of the Oxford Times. His first novel The Labyrinth Makers won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger in 1970 and Other Paths to Glory received the Gold Dagger in 1974. His spy novels featuring the academic David Audley and the more military Colonel Jack Butler, usually featured one or more historical strands – in the case of Our Man in Camelot, the link proposed was between a current KGB plot and the discovery of the site of the sixth-century battle of Badon Hill. All Price’s books were intelligent and rife with historical or archaeology references – and therefore not necessarily to every reader’s taste. Price also wrote the outstanding short story The Boudicca Killing (1979) about an outrageous financial scam perpetrated in Roman Britain.
PHILIP PURSER
Philip Purser (born 1925) was a journalist for the News Chronicle in the Fifties before becoming television critic for the Sunday Telegraph in 1961, a post he held until 1987. He has written non-fiction and screenplays as well as novels. His first thriller, Peregrination 22, published in 1962, was a Buchanesque adventure (starring an out-of-work screenwriter) set in the Arctic on the island of Spitsbergen when Russians co-exist with Norwegians, but the visiting German tourists are not exactly what they seem to be. Purser’s outstanding thriller Night of Glass (1968) was set in pre-war Germany and centred on an audacious prison break-out, the prison in question being Dachau concentration camp! An unofficial (and again outstanding, if long overdue) sequel featuring one of the main characters, Lights in the Sky, was published in 2005.
COLIN ROBERTSON
Born in Hull, Colin Robertson (1906–80) wrote some 57 crime novels between 1936 and 1970, most of which were translated and successful in France, and three spy thrillers featuring British agent Alan Steel (whose code name was ‘222’ and whose boss in the secret service was ‘R’) starting with Clash of Steel in 1965.
MANNING K. ROBERTSON
One of many pen-names used by prolific pulp writer John Stephen Glasby (1928–2011), whose output included science-fiction (usually as ‘A. J. Merak’), war stories, hospital romances and westerns – possibly 300 novels and short stories in total. Glasby read chemistry at Nottingham University and worked for ICI until retirement. By training he was a research chemist but also an enthusiastic astronomer. Between 1965 and 1967 he produced six paperback originals featuring secret agent Steve Carradine, the first being Seek and Destroy.
GEOFFREY ROSE
A professional actor for 47 years, Geoffrey Rose (born 1932) wrote only three thrillers and one short story in the early Seventies, but his work was noted for a sense of surreal weirdness, particularly in A Clear Road to Archangel (1973) where a British spy flees for his life across Russia in the winter of 1917 – a ‘chase and pursuit’ thriller in the tradition of Buchan or Household, but with a uniquely atmospheric twist.
ANGUS ROSS
Pen-name of Kenneth Giggal; born in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire in 1927. In 1944, aged 17, he volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm and served until 1952. A twenty-year career in publishing with D. C. Thompson followed until his first novel The Manchester Thing was published in 1970, introducing his no-frills secret agent Marcus Aurelius Farrow, the polar opposite of the suave, sophisticated international man of mystery. Farrow works for ‘The Section’ and takes his orders from ‘The Man’. His adventures are distinctly underplayed and the locations far from exotic, as in The Huddersfield Job and The Bradford Business though he is occasionally allowed assignments abroad in Franco’s Spain and Holland. Mark Farrow’s most distinct characteristic is his ordinary Britishness. He wears blazers and smokes a pipe (numerous references to ‘packing a pipe’ and ‘knocking out the dottle’) and he thinks nothing about travelling to France and Spain under the assumed name of ‘Horatio Nelson’!
JOHN ROSSITER
John Rossiter (1916–2005) joined the Wiltshire Constabulary in 1939, retiring in 1969 with the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent, at which point he wrote the first of more than twenty police procedurals under the name Jonathan Ross. In 1970 he began to write thrillers, under his real name, featuring the suave secret agent Roger Tallis. The first was The Murder Makers but his best known Tallis title is probably A Rope for General Dietz (1972) about the hunt for a Nazi war crim
inal hiding in Spain.
H. T. ROTHWELL
Born in Lancashire in 1921, Henry Talbot Rothwell – not to be confused with the Talbot Rothwell who wrote screenplays for the Carry On films – served in the British army 1938–59 and became a tobacco-farmer in Rhodesia before turning to spy fiction with five novels starting with Exit a Spy (1966), featuring British agent Michael Brooks. Dive Deep for Danger centred on a wrecked Soviet submarine and No Kisses from the Kremlin was presumably his answer to From Russia, with Love. Rothwell’s books were translated into French and Italian but never, it seems, paper-backed in the UK.