A career British army officer retiring with the rank of Lt-Colonel thirty
years after enlisting (underage) in the Royal Armoured Corps on D-Day in 1944,
Clive Egleton (1927-2006) began writing thrillers whilst still a serving
officer. SEVEN DAYS TO A KILLING was his fourth published novel
and the film rights were snapped up on first publication by director Don Siegal
fresh from his box-office hit Dirty Harry. With a cast including
Michael Caine, Janet Suzman and Donald Pleasance, the film version was
renamed The Black Windmill after Siegal took the decision to shoot the
climactic gunfight at the famous Claydon Windmills on the Sussex Downs.
The success of Seven Days and The Black
Windmill allowed Egleton to retire from the army and become a
full-time writer and his next novel, THE OCTOBER PLOT, became a
huge international bestseller as a World War II thriller to rank alongside
Where Eagles Dare and The Eagle Has Landed.
Known in America as The Bormann Brief, the book is a detailed
description of an attempt to assassinate Hitler’s Deputy Martin Bormann in 1944,
in the wake of the failed July Bomb Plot.
Clive Egleton went on to write more than forty novels. Seven Days To A
Killing and The October Plot are the first of his titles to be
reissued as Top Notch Thrillers, the print-on-demand and e-book imprint of
Ostara Publishing which is dedicated to reviving Great British thrillers which
do not deserve to be forgotten. In three years of operation, Top Notch Thrillers
have published 28 titles, including novels by authors such as Geoffrey
Household, Duncan Kyle, Francis Clifford and Victor Canning.
Full details of all titles can be found on www.ostarapublishing.co.uk.
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