Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  KENNETH ROYCE

  Kenneth Royce Gandley (1920–97) was born in Croydon and during WWII served in the 1st Northern Rhodesia Regiment and the King’s African Rifles, rising to the rank of Captain. After the war he became managing director of a travel agency, which gave him the opportunity to research settings for his thrillers. The first, My Turn to Die, a spy story, was published in 1959 but Royce’s breakthrough came with his eleventh novel The XYY Man in 1970 featuring Spider Scott, an ex-cat burglar recruited by the security services, which formed the basis of a popular television series (and a spin-off one) in the mid-Seventies. Royce also wrote well-regarded spy fiction such as Man on a Short Leash (1974) under the pen-name Oliver Jacks.

  DOUGLAS RUTHERFORD

  James Douglas Rutherford McConnell (1915–88) was born in Kilkenny in Ireland, educated at Cambridge, and served in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps in North Africa and Italy during WWII. After the war he became a master at Eton College, teaching modern languages until his retirement in 1973. As Douglas Rutherford he wrote 28 thrillers, many set in the world of motor or motor-bike racing, including Clear the Fast Lane (1971) which had a Middle East terrorist plot set against a car race across Europe, and Kick Start (1973) which had a germ-warfare in Tunisia plot, but was really a homage to the Norton Commando motor-bike.

  K. ALLEN SADDLER

  Pen–name adopted by London born Ronald Richards (1923–2011), journalist, theatre critic, and prolific writer of stage and radio plays and, latterly, children’s books. His three thrillers The Great Brain Robbery (1965), Gilt Edge (1966) and Talking Turkey (1968) featured private investigator Dave Stevens invariably becoming involved in international espionage or skullduggery and were highly thought of by Desmond Bagley who recommended them to a publisher with the endorsement that they might ‘have another Lionel Davidson’ on their hands.

  JOHN SANDERS

  John Sanders (b. 1930?) introduced his spy hero Nicholas Pym –‘Cromwell’s James Bond’ – in A Firework For Oliver in 1964. Pym was promoted as ‘a tough, exciting hero who shares with Bond a convenient tendency to lose the women he becomes involved with’ and appeared in five novels set during the English Civil War. Sanders also wrote novels of Gothic horror under the name Ralph Comer, which were highly regarded in Spain and Germany.

  JIMMY SANGSTER

  James Henry Kinmel Sangster (1927–2011) was born in Kinmel Bay, North Wales and apart from service in the RAF, had a lifetime career in the British film industry as producer, director and writer, most famously on the Hammer Films productions The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy in the Fifties. In the Sixties he created two additions to the cast of fictional spies. John Smith, a former secret agent turned private eye who is drawn back into espionage, in Private I (1967) and Foreign Exchange (1968), both of which were filmed for American television; and Katy Touchfeather, ‘a jet-propelled heroine’ (she was a BOAC stewardess) in Touchfeather (1969) and Touchfeather, Too. Sangster also wrote the stand-alone thriller Your Friendly Neighbourhood Death Pedlar in 1971 and a crime series set in the USA.

  DONALD SEAMAN

  Donald Peter Seaman was born in London in 1922, served in the British army in the Middle East and Europe 1939–46 and then with the Merchant Navy in the Mediterranean to gather background on the migration of Jewish refugees to Palestine. After working in provincial journalism, he joined the Daily Express in 1948 where he had a twenty-five-year career, mainly as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Russia. He covered the defection of British spies Burgess and Maclean in 1951 and wrote The Great Spy Scandal (edited by John S. Mather) in 1955. He began to write spy fiction in the Seventies, with The Bomb That Could Lip Read in 1974 (about an IRA plot to plant one of the most unpleasant booby traps in fiction!), and The Defector, about Russian defectors to Britain being hunted by the KGB. Seaman later turned to writing studies of true crimes in conjunction with Colin Wilson.

  OWEN SELA

  Born in Ceylon, Owen Sela moved to London and qualified as an accountant in 1963, gaining many clients in film and publishing. His first thriller, The Bearer Plot in 1972, was very much in the Gavin Lyall mould, the action moving rapidly across Europe from Spain to Switzerland to Berlin and then Austria. With The Kiriov Tapes (1973) he established himself as a writer of spy-fiction and with An Exchange of Eagles (1977) he produced a very successful WWII conspiracy theory thriller of which Len Deighton said: ‘A magnificent action-packed thriller … places Sela with Innes and MacLean.’ Sela wrote briefly under the name Piers Kelaart but his last thrillers appeared in the Eighties and he now lives in Canada.

  GITTA SERENY

  Born in Vienna, Gitta Sereny (1921–2012) is best known as a prize-winning journalist, historian, and biographer and for controversial books on child murderer Mary Bell, Franz Stangl and Albert Speer. Her only novel was a thriller set in the Russian Zone of post-war Vienna, The Medallion, in 1957.

  GERALD SEYMOUR

  Born in Guildford in 1941, Gerald Seymour was the son of a poet and a novelist and the godson of James (Lost Horizon) Hilton, so a literary career seemed to beckon, but after reading history at University College London, he joined ITN as a television journalist. He became a well-known face on British television reporting from some of the world’s major trouble spots, including Vietnam, the Munich Olympics massacre, on terrorist activities in Germany, Italy and Palestine and, most famously, on the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. His 1975 debut thriller, Harry’s Game, set in Northern Ireland, caused a sensation when published and went on to be a huge bestseller. Seymour gave up journalism on the strength of it and continued into the twenty-first century as one of England’s most popular thriller writers.

  GERALD SINSTADT

  Born in 1930 in Kent, Gerald Sinstadt began his broadcasting career with the British Forces Broadcasting Services in 1949 before joining BBC Radio and then Anglia Television. From 1969 to 1981 he was the main football commentator for Granada Television and later became a golf commentator for Channel 4. In 1966 he tried his hand at the espionage thriller, introducing former classical musician Geoffrey Landon as a part-time agent for ‘The Organisation’ in The Fidelio Score.

  DESMOND SKIRROW

  Born in South Wales, Desmond Skirrow (1924–76) was a painter, book-jacket designer, and creative director with a major advertising agency who produced three tongue-in-cheek spy novels, described by one critic as ‘extravagant nonsense’, between 1966 and 1968 starring John Brock, an advertising executive (like Skirrow) who also works for an undercover department of British Intelligence run by ‘The Fat Man’. In his debut, It Won’t Get You Anywhere, Brock is up against a fanatical Welsh Nationalist who plans to fuse the National Grid and deprive England of electricity! The French edition of the book was titled Le Grand Black Out.

  RALPH STEPHENSON

  Born in 1914, Ralph Stephenson, latterly to write about sailing and catamarans, wrote a handful of crime thrillers in the 1960s including Spies in Concert (1965), which is very much in the tradition of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. It even has a returning ‘colonial officer’ (Malaya this time) arriving back in England to fall immediately into a nest of (Russian) spies, and a code hidden in a music score.

  DOMINIC TORR

  Pen-name of John Pedlar, a British diplomat, who wrote three Cold War thrillers in the Sixties starting with Diplomatic Cover in 1965 and, after a gap of more than 40 years, a fourth, self-published title, Hoodwink, which controversially suggested a Freemason conspiracy influencing Kremlin policy.

  NIGEL TRANTER

  Prolific Scottish author Nigel Tranter (1909–2000) is best-known as a historian and expert on historic Scottish buildings. Born in Glasgow and trained as an accountant in the family insurance business, his interest in architecture and Scottish castles led to a writing career. After serving with the Royal Artillery during WWII he concentrated on being an author and produced over 130 books, including histories, guides, children’s books, historical novels, wester
ns and a handful of thrillers including The Man Behind the Curtain (1959) set on the Baltic island of Bornholm, and Cable from Kabul (1967) set in the Hindu Kush.

  JAMES TREVOR

  Thought to be the pen-name of Bertram John Boland (1913–76), this crime and sci-fi writer is best known for his novel, filmed in 1960, The League of Gentlemen. In 1967 he created John Savage – ‘a freelance agent: swift, silent, deadly as the knife he wields’ – in The Savage Game. A British agent who seemed to specialise in intervening in (and violently sorting out) civil wars, Savage made one further appearance in The Savage Height in 1969.

  ANTONY TREW

  Antony Francis Trew (1906–96) was born in Pretoria, South Africa and left school at 16 to go to sea as a naval cadet. He was commissioned in the South African navy and served 1926–9 but then left the navy to work for the fledgling Automobile Association in the Transvaal. In WWII he re-joined the navy and served in the Eastern Mediterranean and on Arctic convoy duty and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. After the war he returned to the South African AA, becoming its Director General. Shortly before he was due to retire, he wrote Two Hours to Darkness, a thriller where the Captain of a British submarine armed with nuclear missiles has a breakdown and decides to fire on the Russian naval base at Kronstadt. The book sold three-and-a-half million copies after publication in 1963 and Trew moved to England where he was to write a further 17 novels, the majority with naval or nautical settings. Although he was never to repeat the outstanding success of Two Hours to Darkness, he became something of a specialist in the ‘submarine thriller’ with books such as The Zhukov Briefing (1975), Kleber’s Convoy (1974), and Yashimoto’s Last Dive (1986).

  WARREN TUTE

  Warren Tute (1914–89) was born in County Durham and joined the Royal Navy in 1932, serving on board HMS Ajax and eventually on the staff of Earl Mountbatten. After WWII he embarked on a career as a script editor and television executive for both the BBC and London Weekend Television, as well as writing some thirty books including highly successful tales of naval warfare. In 1969 he turned to spy fiction and produced six novels sometimes known as ‘the Tarnham secret-service thrillers’ as they all concerned a British spy called Tarnham who had defected to the Soviet Union. The first was A Matter of Diplomacy.

  PETER VAN GREENAWAY

  As an author, Peter Van Greenaway (1929–88) wrote thrillers which often included elements of Gothic horror and science fiction, as in The Medusa Touch (1973) which was filmed starring Richard Burton. His forte however was political satire, describing a very British coup d’etat in The Man Who Held the Queen to Ransom and Sent Parliament Packing (1968), taking on the Vatican in The Judas Gospel (1972) and in Take the War to Washington (1974) he tackled the war in Vietnam – with awful prescience – through terrorist attacks in the US launched by disenchanted veterans.

  CONRAD VOSS BARK

  Conrad Lyddon Voss Bark (1913–2000) was born in East Yorkshire into a Quaker family. Following schooldays in Bristol, he initially went to work for chocolate-maker J. S. Fry but opted for journalism in 1935. As a Conscientious Objector he volunteered to work in a mobile ambulance unit in WWII, afterwards resuming his journalistic career, moving on to The Times in 1947 and then the BBC in 1951. As a parliamentary correspondent, he became a household name in Britain for his on-air political news reports. He published his first novel in 1947, but in the Sixties wrote a series of thrillers starring ‘Mr’ William Holmes – a troubleshooter for the British Prime Minister – beginning in 1962 with Mr Holmes at Sea. Although the plots were often outrageous, the Holmes stories were always humorous and readable and the best-remembered is probably The Shepherd File from 1966, about the use of LSD – manufactured in Libya – as a weapon of mass destruction!

  MARTIN WADDELL

  Born in Belfast in 1941 and now internationally successful as the author of more than 200 children’s books, Martin Waddell’s early success came with four comic spy thrillers beginning with Otley in 1966, which introduced the slightly sleazy and definitely shady antique dealer and sometime actor Gerald Otley, press-ganged into working for Department M-2 of British Intelligence. Otley’s successful debut was adapted for the cinema by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais in 1968, starring Tom Courtenay. New York Times critic Anthony Boucher said of the books: ‘Otley – second-rate actor, third-rate secret agent, first-rate opportunist is Martin Waddell’s anti-heroic and entertaining contribution to the gallery of espionage.’

  PETER WAY

  Author of Super-Celeste in 1977, which introduced freelance agent Crispin Bridge, and was blurbed as ‘the ultimate thriller of the international aviation business’.

  NOAH WEBSTER

  One of several pen names used by Bill Knox (1928–99); Scottish journalist, broadcaster, and prolific crime-writer. In 1970 he introduced Jonathan Gaunt, an agent for The Queen’s and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer Office (an office which oversees the Queen’s interests in Scotland) in A Property in Cyprus, the first of ten adventures with settings including Bavaria, Spain, Malta and Iceland.

  DENNIS WHEATLEY

  Dennis Yates Wheatley (1897–1977) was an established bestseller, revelling in the title ‘The Prince of Thriller Writers’, before WWII, enjoying huge success with his first two novels The Forbidden Territory (1933) and The Devil Rides Out (1934). During the war he served in Counter-Intelligence and ‘Deception’, where he worked occasionally with Ian Fleming, and produced a series of thrillers starring Gregory Sallust which were set against almost contemporary wartime events. Not surprisingly, the saturnine hero Sallust was later seen by some as a model for Fleming’s James Bond. Wheatley was still producing bestsellers in the Sixties, notably long and detailed historical novels set during the French Revolution but also a final Gregory Sallust story, adding Wheatley’s trademark Occult elements to the last days of Hitler, They Used Dark Forces in 1964. There was also a revival of interest in his work when Hammer Films released the movies The Devil Rides Out and The Lost Continent (based on his 1938 novel Uncharted Seas) in 1968. Despite being derided for his ‘Clubman’ style, stiff characterization, and a constant desire to shoe-horn large chunks of history text books into some of his novels, there is no doubt that Wheatley was a huge figure on the British thriller scene, his output ranging from the adventure thriller to the ghost story via occasional forays into science fiction and fantasy.

  JAMES DILLON WHITE

  Pen-name of Stanley White (1913–78), whose first novel was published in 1952, is best known for his historical naval stories featuring Captain Roger Kelso. In The Leipzig Affair in 1974 he created the reluctant and rather melancholic spy Sebastian Kettle, who also appeared in The Salzburg Affair and The Brandenburg Affair.

  TED WILLIS

  Edward Henry ‘Ted’ Willis (1914–92), the playwright and scriptwriter was created a life peer in 1964. Lord Willis is best known as the creator of the long-running television series Dixon of Dock Green and once said, with Berkely Mather, to be responsible for virtually all scriptwriting for British television drama in the Fifties. In the Seventies he turned to novels with some noteworthy thrillers: the spy story The Left-Handed Sleeper; Man-Eater – an adventure thriller about tigers loose in rural England which drew comparisons (not always favourable) with Jaws; the wartime thriller The Lions of Judah and The Buckingham Palace Connection, which speculated on the survival of members of Imperial Russia’s royal family, the Romanovs.

  DIANA WINSOR

  Said to have published her first short story aged 15, Diana Winsor became a journalist in the Sixties, writing for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. She wrote two thrillers featuring Octavia ‘Tavy’ Martin, a public relations officer at the Ministry of Defence who, with is recruited into Naval Intelligence. Red On Wight appeared in 1972 and The Death Convention in 1974.

  JON WINTERS

  Pen-name adopted by Gilbert Cross, a British teacher educated at Manchester University and at universities in Kentucky and Michigan after emigrating to the US in the m
id-Sixties. As Jon Winters he wrote three spy novels starting with The Drakov Memoranda in 1979. Under his real name, he writes academic texts and books for children and has taught a course in Folklore and Children’s Literature.

  THOMAS WISEMAN

  Born Alphons Weissman in Vienna in 1931, he escaped to England with his mother in 1939. At 16 he went to work on the West London Observer, reviewing films, theatre, and books. Eventually he came to write the show-business column for the Evening Standard, novels, plays, screenplays, and non-fiction works on cinema. His best-known thrillers had wartime settings, notably The Quick and the Dead (1969) and The Day Before Sunrise (1976).

  MARTIN WOODHOUSE

  Born in Essex, educated at Cambridge and trained initially as a doctor, Martin Charlton Woodhouse (1932–2011) incorporated science and technology into everything he wrote, from his scripts for the children’s TV show Supercar to his involvement with the cult series The Avengers, as well as his novels. The first, Tree Frog, in 1966, introduced Giles Yeoman, a research scientist assigned to British Intelligence to investigate a revolutionary ‘drone’ aircraft. His five Giles Yeoman books were in many ways precursors of the ‘techno-thrillers’ of the 1990s and Mama Doll (1972) attracted praise from Alistair MacLean who said of it: ‘Has a combination of originality, inventiveness and technical expertise that is so rare to be almost unique.’ Woodhouse switched to writing historical novels and returned to his first love, science and technology, developing ‘Illumination’ in 1987, a fore-runner of the eBook.