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

1966 when A Dandy in Aspic was published and 1968 when the film came out¹⁴ there would have been thousands of British thriller-readers who knew, quite confidently, that Eberlin’s journey would be far from simple. Fans of spy fiction, even those who had never been to Germany, knew all about Vopos, checkpoints, Tempelhof, ‘death strips’ around the Wall and the Ku-damm. They were well aware that everyone reading a newspaper on the street was a spy and every tobacconist’s kiosk was a dead letter drop.

      There were many spy films in that peak period around 1966 and there would be many more thrillers set in Berlin both contemporary and historical, in the years to follow, but those four novels in quick succession by Le Carré, Deighton, Hall and Marlowe – all distinctively different in style – firmly established Berlin as the spy capital of the thriller world. Berlin’s reputation as a sort of espionage Camelot, where anything could happen and probably did, lasted until November 1989 when the Cold War began to thaw rapidly by popular demand with hardly a spy or a secret agent in sight.

       1970s

      As the 1970s dawned, it seemed that British thriller writers, albeit with some new faces joining the ranks of the bestselling, would continue to offer more of the same when it came to using foreign locations. For the writer of detective stories, particularly ‘police procedurals’, a familiar British (usually English) setting was thought necessary for realism. There were, back then, very few crime novels set abroad featuring local policemen, available either in translation or, daringly, written by British authors with specific knowledge of the country featured.¹⁵

      For the thriller writer, however, ‘abroad’ still meant ‘exciting’, even though British readers were availing themselves of cheap travel abroad and seeing more of the world via television and, more worryingly for the British writer’s sales figures, through the eyes of a new breed of American thriller writers. (Ironically perhaps, British thriller readers who liked their fictional thrills in foreign locations were introduced to American thriller writers through airport bookshops whilst waiting for their holiday flights.)

      Both Graham Greene and Eric Ambler continued to offer foreign backdrops with customary professionalism and fluency; Greene setting The Honorary Consul (1973) in South America and Ambler again used the troubled Middle East for The Levanter, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 1972.¹⁶

      There was little sign, initially, that the two leading lights of the adventure thriller were running out of steam. Hammond Innes had been a published author since 1937 and Alistair MacLean since 1955, and neither seemed to have run out of new locations for their books.

      MacLean donned his fur-lined parka once more and took us to the Barents Sea north of Norway and to Bear Island in 1971 and then switched to the sunny, though not safer, west coast of America for The Golden Gate