Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed. Mike Ripley

twenty years before taking to writing radio and television plays and then thrillers, Francis Clifford – a genuine war hero, Clive Egleton – a long-serving professional soldier, Eric Ambler, Victor Canning and Hammond Innes, who all saw wartime service in the Royal Artillery. Also, John Gardner and James Leasor, who both served with the Royal Marines, John Michael Brett and Adam Hall were in the RAF, and Lionel Davidson and Antony Melville-Ross served in submarines throughout WWII.

      Quite a few that we know of had worked for the British Intelligence services. Famously, Graham Greene had served in MI6, as had Kenneth Benton and Ian Fleming in Naval Intelligence during the war and John Le Carré, John Bingham and Antony Melville-Ross during the Cold War. Several others had experience of intelligence or counter-intelligence work during their military careers, for example: Ted Allbeury, Clive Egleton, Francis Clifford and Berkely Mather.

      It is also worth mentioning that of the few (five) women thriller writers in this period, other than Helen MacInnes who, in the words of American academic Professor B. J. Rahn ‘always seemed to be flying solo’, two also had similar useful experiences. Joyce Porter had served throughout the Fifties in the Women’s Royal Air Force where she learned Russian in order to work in Intelligence, and Palma Harcourt, after reading classics at Oxford, worked for various branches of British Intelligence including MI6 postings abroad. She began to write her ‘diplomatic thrillers’ in 1974, by which time Joyce Porter (now better remembered in America than Britain) had abandoned comic spies and was concentrating on comic detectives.

      The Companion Tenth Anniversary Issue, The Companion Book Club, April, 1962

      There were career diplomats (for example, Dominic Torr), three advertising executives, two doctors, several television scriptwriters, two television presenters, and three actors. One of the latter, Geoffrey Rose, had a starring role in a popular BBC drama written by another thriller writer (James Mitchell’s When the Boat Comes In) as well as a part in the long-running soap opera Crossroads.

      The prospect of fame and fortune also attracted disciples from many a respectable, more stable, career. There was an accountant, a research chemist, a brace (at least) of publishers, several advertising and public relations executives, a graphic artist, a merchant seaman, a poet, a senior policeman, a technical writer for the Ministry of Defence, two bankers, a poultry farmer, a football commentator, and a Governor of Bermuda.

      Given their access to news sources not in the public domain (which many would call ‘gossip’), their natural links to publishers, and their opportunities for travel – particularly abroad – it was inevitable that journalists and especially foreign correspondents would be tempted into testing their typewriters with a thriller. At least a third of the authors named in this book were journalists by trade, and half of them had been foreign correspondents. It must have seemed, at certain points in the 1960s, that everyone on Fleet Street was bashing out a thriller in their spare moments. After all, journalists led pretty exciting lives – the travel, the deadlines, the expense accounts … Indeed, it is often forgotten that Ian Fleming was rather a good journalist before he created James Bond. Hammond Innes, Desmond Bagley, James Leasor, John Gardner, Duncan Kyle, and Anthony Price were all, among many others, journalists before they were thriller writers.

      Foreign correspondents who had reported from Russia were perceived to have an immediate advantage, and several put the experience to good use, notably Ian Fleming, Derek Lambert, Andrew Garve, Donald Seaman and Stephen Coulter (‘James Mayo’). But it was not just the traditional Cold War enemy which provided useful background for a plot or two.

      Frederick Forsyth spent many years as a senior correspondent in France, work experience which clearly proved useful for The Day of the Jackal. However, his first published book was non-fiction, a quite harrowing account of the Nigerian civil war he had covered in 1967, The Biafra Story, and he was to use his knowledge of Africa again in his third novel, The Dogs of War. In his 2015 memoir, The Outsider, Forsyth revealed that it was during his time as a reporter in Africa that he was approached by MI6 to take undertake minor jobs (unpaid, he stresses) as a courier.

      Other trouble spots covered by journalists also gave rise to some outstanding thrillers as well as dramatic reportage and, in the early 1970s, there was no more troubled a spot than Northern Ireland. Independent Television News reporter Gerald Seymour covered ‘The Troubles’ there, which provided the background and the inspiration for his first thriller, Harry’s Game, in 1975. Alan Williams too reported from the front lines in Northern Ireland and also from Vietnam, Rhodesia, and Algeria as well as covering the Arab–Israeli Six Day War in what was, to put it mildly, a colourful career. Even as a student at Cambridge, he had been drawn to political ‘trouble spots’ starting with the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule and later helping to smuggle a dissident student out of Poland via East Germany. (He was also credited with helping to smuggle the manuscript of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward out of Russia.) His coverage of the civil war in Algeria not only gave him the background for his thriller Barbouze (meaning ‘spy’ in French slang) but brought official complaints about him from both Arab insurgents and the French Army and made him something of a legend in Fleet Street.

      Barbouze, Panther, 1970

      Many of Alan Williams’ contemporaries from Fleet Street told stories of his time in Algeria and of how his fondness for dressing in a white safari suit and Panama hat made him such a clear target for the gangs of roving gunmen (from both sides) that fellow foreign correspondents would discreetly move away from him whenever he entered a sidewalk café or a bar frequented by the press corps. In later years, Williams gleefully told the story himself.

      As part of their job, journalists mingled with thriller writers on a regular basis, whether they had their own ambitions in that direction or not. In a feature marking the 50th anniversary of The Ipcress File on the crime fiction website Shots Magazine, journalist and film critic Barry Norman recalled:

      I first met Len Deighton in the ‘Mucky Duck’ (The White Swan pub off Fleet Street frequented by reporters from the Daily Mail) when The Ipcress File had just hit the bestseller lists. He couldn’t believe his luck. Up to then he’d been known – if at all – as a cookery writer in national papers. Nice bloke, he seemed then, and personally I took to the guy.

      But I wasn’t all that happy with Deighton later after I’d written my first spy novel, The Matter of Mandrake, rather in the James Bond genre, and I wasn’t too chuffed about some bloke coming along and moving the whole business from upper and middle to the working class. But his were bloody good books and I still enjoy the films.

      Another Fleet Street stalwart, George Thaw, the Literary Editor for the Daily Mirror, became close friends with and a neighbour of one of the rising stars of that decade, Duncan Kyle – himself a journalist until he hit the bestseller lists with his debut A Cage of Ice in 1970. When Kyle’s novel was reissued in 2012, Thaw recalled how the author took his research seriously, sometimes allowing it to spill over into his private and social life:

      The research for Whiteout! (Kyle’s seventh thriller, published in 1976) included a sojourn at an American kind-of-secret base in the Arctic. Apart from background and colour (mostly snow white) for the book he emerged with the recipe of the most sophisticated dry Martini ever served in Suffolk and perhaps in Britain. It involved keeping a special tea pot in his fridge/freezer, carefully measured high-proof gin, un-waxed lemons and a very secret proportion of Martini to gin. It tasted fabulous and he always claimed the most important part of the whole business was using that teapot –and drinking with friends.

      The lure of writing a bestselling thriller which would lead to untold riches, film deals, and tax exile in Ireland (the popular choice for high-earning artists in the Seventies), was stunningly obvious. Journalists knew, or thought they knew, that they could write; former military men who had seen active service and overseas postings felt they had the required background knowledge. Journalists certainly had the confidence