Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © Mike Ripley 2017
Foreword copyright © Lee Child 2017
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Mike Ripley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008172251
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008172244
Version: 2019-03-04
For Len Deighton,
who has a lot to answer for.
‘That’s one of the reasons I wrote my first crime novel, because my father was reading Alistair MacLean. I didn’t want to write Dubliners. I wanted to write something he would read’
Ian Rankin
‘Indispensable and destined for awards’
Maxim Jakubowski
‘Ripley produces funny lines as often as most people breathe’
The Times
‘[Ripley] reduced me to tears of laughter with some of his deadpan summaries of the period’s lesser lights’
Daily Telegraph
There will be spoilers. Live with it. Many of the thrillers referred to here were published fifty years ago.
You’ve had time.
‘A book, film, or play depicting crime, mystery, or espionage in an atmosphere of excitement and suspense.’
Collins English Dictionary
‘What exactly is a thriller? The term seems to cover a multitude of sins and quite a fair proportion of virtues.’
Margery Allingham, 1931
‘You after all write “novels of suspense” – if not sociological studies – whereas my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.’
Ian Fleming in a letter to Raymond Chandler, 1956
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Spoiler Alert
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1: A Question of Emphasis
Chapter 2: The Land Before Bond
Chapter 3: Do Mention the War
Chapter 4: Tinkers, Tailors, Soldiers, Spies. But mostly journalists.
Chapter 5: End of Empire
Chapter 6: Travel Broadening the Mind
Chapter 7: Class of ’62
Chapter 8: The Spies Have It, 1963–70
Chapter 9: The Adventurers, 1963–70
Chapter 10: The Storm Jackal Has Landed – The 1970s
Chapter 11: The New Intake
Chapter 12: Endgame
Appendix I: The Leading Players
Appendix II: The Supporting Cast
Notes & References
Acknowledgements & Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Also by Mike Ripley
About the Publisher
Some time ago Mike Ripley e-mailed and asked if I would write a foreword for his new book. I knew roughly what it was about: Mike and I bump into each other a couple of times a year, at industry junkets, and like writers everywhere we always ask about works in progress – secretly hoping, I suppose, that the other guy is having it even worse than we are. So I knew the project was a survey of British thriller fiction during the two golden decades between the mid-Fifties and the mid-Seventies. Knowing Mike, I knew the scholarship would be meticulous; I knew the writing would be pleasantly breezy, but always willing to seize passionately upon a point, and render a clear and acute conclusion, without fear or favour. It would be a book I would want to read – maybe even pay for – so why not get it early and free? So I said yes.
Mike is a slightly older codger even than I, so there was no immediate e-mail response to my response. I got the impression he treats e-mail like the country squire he pretends to be, reads the post, perhaps once a day, perhaps in the early morning, at the breakfast table. I spent the rest of my own day writing a newspaper article commissioned by the New York Times. I was never quite sure what they wanted, but it seemed to require a retrospective mood, even elegiac, starting right back at the beginning, which in my case meant growing up in provincial