Plum Island (John Corey #1)

Author: Nelson Demille
eBook Publisher: Sphere
eBook Date: September 2008

First Published: 1997
Pages: 574

I've read two books by Nelson DeMille, and both of them have been superb reads. A few years ago I read Up Country, about a former Army Criminal Investigator by the name of Paul Brenner, who is asked to visit Vietnam in order to look into a 30 year old murder. The main character is revisiting his former posting and a lot of the book covered him retracing his steps. It didn't sound like something I would like as the Vietname War is not a conflict I'm very familair with or particularly intersted in, but the sheer power of the writing drew me in and kept me enthralled throughout.

With that pleasant reading experience in mind, I decided to finally take a chance on another novel by Demille. I was in the mood for a good book by an American modern adventure author along the lines of a Clive Cussler, or a Tom Clancy, and I was really surpised and dissapointed that neither of these two were in stock on the shelves of a number of my local Charity shops here in the UK - but I did finally spot a pristine copy of Plum Island for a very reasonable £1, so nabbed it quickly and abandoned the boring book I'd been wading through to immediately start it. 

Nelson Demille was born in 1943 in the city of New York and soon moved out to Long Island. After a stint in the US Army during the late sixties in the aforementioned Vietnam War - where he was awarded the Air Medal, Bronze Star, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and Combat Infantryman Badge - he returned to education in order to earn a degree in Political Science and History. He had a string of jobs, but freely admits they "were so boring, I missed Vietnam." His first major novel under his real name was called By the Rivers of Babylon, published in 1978. Before this he had written under a few pen names, particularly as the author of the Ryker series from Leisure Books.

Tightrope

Author: James Grant (aka Bruce Crowther)

Publisher: Muller

Date: 1979

Pages: 168

Cover illustration: Alun Hood 
Not currently available in Paperback or eBook format

 First off, I have to thank Bob Deis at MensPulpMags.com and publisher/editor of Men's Adventure Library and Mens Adventure Quartlery for pointing out to me that mysterious author James Grant from my previous blog entry had a profile on his Amazon.com author page informing everyone (expect me of course!) that it was the pen name of British writer Bruce Crowther. That knowlege set me off on the hunt for as much information as I could find about James Grant/Bruce Crowther. I am very pleased to be able to present below an update and fuller list of Crowther's work and history. Thanks Rob!

After being so impressed with The Ransom Commando, I have spent the last few weeks tracking down as many titles by Crowther as I can. The result is that I was driven to abandon my current read (The Chinese Bandit by Stephen Becker - I'm not too sure I'll ever get back to finishing that one?) in order to start reading Tightrope - a 1979 novel published under the James Grant name by Frederick Muller Limited in the UK in hardback format only it would seem. I don't believe there has ever been a mass market paperback edition, but there may have been a large-print paperback by Lynford Mystery Library put out at some point? 

Bruce Crowther (b.1933) was born and raised in Hull, England. He became an avid reader at a very young age and soon ran out of books to consume from the local library. He found himself turning to crime fiction and American literature; developing a passion for the books of Chandler, Cain and Woolrich. This interest accompanied his love of film noir that had begun in his youth. He began writing crime fiction as a way to escape the boredom he encountered in his working life in industry and accounting, and never looked back. All those years of consuming classic American noir fiction probably meant that it was inevitable he would take up crime fiction writing as an adult.

The Ransom Commando

Author: James Grant

Publisher: Hamlyn Paperbacks

Date: 1978

Pages: 184

Not currently available in eBook format

It's always a thrill to find an undiscovered gem of a book and unearth a wealth of material by an author that has gone unnoticed since their heyday in the 20th century. It gives me great pleasure to tell you I've just finished the best book that I have read so far in 2021. The book is titled The Ransom Commando and the author is listed as James Grant.

Now, before you get too excited, this is not the James Grant that became the publishing titan that is known as Lee Childs. Grant's work appeared in the late 1970's to early 1980's - long before Childs turned to writing. However, Grant is an exceptional writer if this book is anything to go by. Bloody fantastic in fact. A faultless thriller in the vein of the best work by British authors such as Bagley, Kyle, Lyall and Higgins. 

The story of The Ransom Commando takes place in and around a quiet village in the English countryside. Dave Lorrimar is enjoying a dirty weekend away from London with his young female partner. They are staying in the Fenton Oak public house owned by ex-soldier Simon Arne. There is something threatening about Lorrimar, the way he treats his women and the way he speaks to the locals, its clear he isn't the usual sort of visitor they get. Also, he has been paying special attention to the manor house that overlooks the small village, Fenton Hall. The house is owned by the multi-millionaire businessman Sir James Garroway.

Before long Lorrimar is back in London, and it becomes clear that he is a career criminal of some renown. He tends to keep his nose clean when it comes to outright violence or murder - but when the circumstances call for it, he is willing to shoot his way out of trouble without batting an eyelid. He gathers his team together to discuss plans to invade Fenton Hall and take the Garroway family, father, mother and two daughters, hostage in order to extract money out of the businessman in exchange for their safe release.

Lorrimar is accompanied by McKendrick, a steady and reliable crook with a terminally ill mother; Hart, an openly gay member of the team who has many talents up his sleeve, the most important being the ability to pilot small aircraft; and lastly Ken Mannion, someone who normally stays in the background by bankrolling their jobs, but who has unexpectedly insisted upon joining the trio on this job. All of them are planning on making this one big - enough to leave England and live abroad for the rest of their lives.

Breakout

Author: Oliver Jacks (aka Kenneth Royce)
Publisher: Grafton Books

Date: 1986

Pages: 254

Not currently available in eBook format

In one of those happy coincidences, I was attracted to a previously unknown author's book by its cover artwork, only to find out out it was actually a pen name used by an established and well-known writer.

Breakout is a thriller published in 1986 in the UK by Grafton Books. The author is Oliver Jacks, who I'd not had any previous experience of reading. Some light internet research didn't surface much of a backlog. A few other thriller/action adventure tales in the 70's and 80's but nothing outstanding or particularly well-known. It seemed that Mr Jacks penned another four books (Man on a Short Leash, Assassination Day and Autumn Heroes) but had disappeared by the nineties. Jacks doesn't have much of a presence on the internet and doesn't even have a page dedicated to him on Fantastic Fiction.

However, after finishing the story, I persevered in my studies and started to notice something. Along with Jacks name I noticed a listing that coupled one of his books with the name Kenneth Royce. This rang a bell and a quick reference back to the Appendix of Mike Ripley's excellent Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang confirmed that indeed Oliver Jacks was a name used by thriller writer Kenneth Royce. It seemed I had inadvertently landed the final Jacks book in his quartet of standalone tales.

Royce was born in 1920 in Croydon, UK. He served in the British Armed Forces during the Second World War, raising to the rank of Captain. After the war he became involved in running a travel agency which afforded him the perfect position to conduct research on the background to his many books. It was with the Spider Scott series that he rose to fame. Spider is an ex-burglar who can't quite give up the temptations of crime and who is recruited to work for the secret services. Scott became known as the XYY Man due to his extra 'Y' chromosome giving him a pre-disposition towards criminality.

A Touch of Death

Author: Charles Williams

First Published: 1954

Ebook Publisher: mysteriouspress.com
Ebook Date: Jun 2014

It can be gratifying to read a really good book. It can be thrilling to read a really great book. But it is totally captivating to read a book that has been written by a suspense novelist at the top of his game.

I have just had the pleasure of reading A Touch of Death by Charles Williams. It was an experience I will never forget. There are sequences that occur in this book that will stay with me for a long time. I suspect I will be recalling scenes from this book when I read other stories - because I'm sure there will be imitators. I am absolutely certain I will be comparing other writers to Williams, and holding him up as an exemplar to their detriment.

Charles K. Williams was a Texan, born in 1909. After leaving education he enlisted in the US Merchant Marines, where he enjoyed a ten year stint before leaving to get married in 1939. Having become an expert in electronics, he worked for RCA and at Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington State. After the end of the Second World War he moved his family to San Francisco, where he was employed by the Mackay Radio Company. He contiued to work there until the publication of Hill Girl, his first novel, in 1951.

Williams went on to write a number of seminal books in the noir and suspense genres. Quite a few of his books have been turned into movies over the years with a fair few being foreign language films, perhaps a reflection of the superb plotting his stories contain. One of the most famous productions was for Dead Calm. It was the subject of an ultimately doomed adaptation by Orson Welles, who was the director, producer, writer and star of the abandoned 1970 project - eventually the book was made into a vehicle for Nicole Kidman in 1989.

Another title, which I remember as an extended TV-movie in 1990, was Hell Hath No Fury. Renamed, The Hot Spot, it was directed by Dennis Hopper and starred Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connelly. Apparently, Hopper decided only a matter of days before filming started, to use a 1962 screenplay that Williams had worked on with Nona Tyson rather than the originally planned script. This resulted in a much more dense noir tale that had been written for actor, Robert Mitchum in the 1960's.

The Naked Runner

Author: Francis Clifford (aka Arthur Thompson)

First Published: 1966

Pages: 208pp
Publisher: Hodder and Staughton

Francis Clifford has an entry in the appendix of Mike Ripley's excellent study of British thrillers of the fifties, sixties and seventies, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (read the review here). In it, he is described as having the "dubious honour of being the most highly regarded, but totally forgotten author from the Golden Age of British thriller writing."

You won't find many Clifford novels in eBook format these days. A couple were published by Top Notch Thrillers in 2011; Time is an Ambush, and The Grosvenor Square Goodbye. The rest of his back catalogue, dating between 1953 and 1979, will need to be purchased from used booksellers.

I consider myself very lucky to have found a copy of the 1966 novel, The Naked Runner from one of my favourite second hand booksellers, Scarthin Books of Cromford, Derbyshire. It wasn't the edition pictured to the left, a movie tie-in to the 1967 film adaptation starring Frank Sinatra and directed by Sidney J. Furie (The Ipcress File).

Francis Clifford was born Arthur Leonard Bell Thompson in 1917 in Bristol, England. Before joining the British Army he worked in the commercial department of a company dealing in the rice trade. This lead him to travel abroad for a number of years ostensibly in Burma between 1938 and 1939. During the war he was recruited into the Special Operations Executive, serving in India and then back in London. After leaving, he was a journalist in the steel industry, and began writing in his spare time. He started writing full-time from 1959 following the success of his first four books, which drew heavily on his wartime experiences. He wrote eighteen novels under the pen-name of Francis Clifford, most of which were very well received by reviewers at the time. Considering this reception, it's surprising that he is so under represented in modern times.

The Plague of Silence (Dr Palfrey #20)

1966 Edition

Author: John Creasey

First Published: 1958

File size/Pages: 776KB (Omnibus) / 190pp
Ebook Publisher: House of Stratus
Ebook Date: October 2013

The usual disclaimer: Although many Creasey books are readily available in eBook format, I saved some pennies and picked mine up (the one pictured) at a local used bookshop for just £2.
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I think you can safely call John Creasey a 'prolific' writer.

He penned a staggering amount of novels, over six hundred. He was born to a family of limited means in 1908 in Surrey, England, and died in 1973. An author of ostensibly crime and science fiction thrillers, who had his first book published in 1930 - there was no holding him back from that moment to produce some of the most famous and long-lasting series of books starring some memorable characters who are still lovingly collected by bibliophiles across the world today.

No stranger to the pseudonym, Creasey used twenty-nine of them. Among his most notable pen-names are; J. J. Marric, Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday, Anthony Morton and Jeremy York.

Due to polio as a young man he was unable to take part in the War, so he determined to write as many books as he could to support the soldiers and their families during those hard times.

In order to have written and published quite so many books, Creasey had to have been successful right? Well, yes indeed. His most popular books were those that had recurring roles for his creations such as The Toff (an amazing 59 novels over the course of forty years), Chief Inspector Roger West (43 novels), Commander George Gideon (21), Dr Stanislaus Alexander "Sap" Palfrey (34 science fiction novels), The Baron (47 books and an adaptation into a TV Series by ITC) and the Patrick Pawlish series (50).

The Running Man

1983 NEL UK Edition

Author: Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King)

First Published: 1982

File size/Pages: 978KB (Omnibus) / 317pp (Individual)
Ebook Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Ebook Date: March 2010 (Omnibus)

I wonder how some publishers had the cheek to put covers like the one highlighted here for Richard Bachman's, The Running Man. Its a total missrepresentation. At no point in the book does anyone approach anything near to dressing up like an extra from the 1975 film Rollerball...and the cover is too early to tie into the 1987 film version starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, so what gives?

However, putting that to one side the book is the fourth and last published novel that Stephen King issued using this pen-name before he was 'outed' as Richard Bachman with the release of Thinner.

King has quoted (and has written in various introductions) that he wrote the entire novel in a single week. In some ways this is an amazing achievement - and in others its a shame because you can tell when you read The Running Man. Its much the inferior novel to the other Bachman book I reviewed recently, The Long Walk.

The premise of the novel is, in a similar vein to The Long Walk, quite simple. Ben Richards, husband and father with a sick child, out of work and suffering poverty with the masses in a dystopian future America of 2025 (scary though that its not that far away), decides to try to enter the Games Network, a government-operated television station that is responsible for free-to-air "Free-Vee" violent game shows. The most notorious of which is "The Running Man". In this show the contestants are presented as crazed citizens and enemies of the state; they are to be hunted down and killed by the Games Networks security forces. All of this with the help of the general public - who are actively encouraged to assist in the contestants capture and public execution with the promise of lucrative rewards should they bear fruit.

The Pass Beyond Kashmir

Author: Berkely Mather (aka John Evan Weston Davies)

First Published: 1960

Pages: 252

This is another thriller reprint in eBook format from Ostara Publishing, in their Top Notch Thriller range. My review of The Eliminator by Andrew York was from the same company. They have been putting some very good novels into the  platform.

The Pass Beyond Kashmir was written by Berkely Mather, a thriller writer whose reign during the sixties has somewhat been forgotten all these years later by the general public.

His first novel-length thriller was The Achilles Affair, published in 1959 when he was 50 years old. It was critically lauded - Ian Fleming was quoted as describing it as “one thriller which I can unreservedly recommend”. However, with his second book, The Pass Beyond Kashmir, he drew on his mysterious experiences in India and it established Mather as one of the top thriller-writers of the period. He went on to have fifteen fiction novels published into the eighties.

Mather was born in Gloucester, England in 1906 and died in 1996. His writing career tailed off in the early eighties when he completed a family saga trilogy. The success of The Pass Beyond Kashmir brought him a lot of attention, notably from Ian Fleming, who suggested that Mather should write the script for the first James Bond film, Dr No. A script was already in existence by that time, so Mather took a look and lightened it considerably, injecting some camp satire into the character of Bond. As we all know, under other writers, this was exaggerated enormously in later films. Although he was offered a percentage of the take for his work, Mather disastrously decided to accept a flat fee.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

Author: Mike Ripley

First Published: 2017

Pages: 465

Something a bit different for this latest blog. Whilst browsing through Amazon UK I came across this book and instantly knew I would have to get it.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang was written by Mike Ripley, author of the award-winning 'Angel' comedy thrillers. Between 1989 and 2008 he was crime fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph newspaper and then the Birmingham Post, reviewing over 950 crime novels. He was also a scriptwriter on the BBC's television series "Lovejoy". Mike is the series editor of the Ostara Crime and Top Notch Thrillers imprints, which is reviving novels that will be of interest to thriller, spy and high adventure fans around the world. He is also responsible for the "Getting Away With Murder" column on www.shotsmag.co.uk. Most recently, Mike completed the Albert Campion novel left unfinished on the death of Pip Carter (husband of British golden age crime author Margery Allingham) "Mr Campion's Farewell" and he has continued the Campion series with a further six original novels.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a fantastic study of the boom in British thrillers between the 1960s and the end of the 1970s. Between these times British born authors ruled the thriller fiction scene across the world. Ripley examines the background to this phenomena, providing an interesting, fun and informative journey from its roots with such authors as Hammond Inness, Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming.