The new titles from Ostara
Publishing’s Top Notch Thriller imprint feature a bleak, almost Kafka-esque spy
thriller set in London at the fag-end of the 1960’s and a poignant war story
set on the Western Front in 1917, not so much in the trenches but under them.
Drawn Blanc, first published in 1970,
was the debut novel of author, lecturer, screenwriter and artist Reg Gadney
(who also painted the cover illustration). It starkly portrays the bleak world
of the British Intelligence service trying to recover from the debacle of the
Kim Philby years of betrayal. The new way of operating is to trust no-one at
all and recruit small cells of agents on an ad hoc basis. One such recruit – a
very reluctant volunteer – is Czech dissident O.B. Blanc who finds himself
mounting a surveillance operation which rapidly turns violent and Blanc
realises he could be the hunted rather than the hunter.
When first published, Drawn Blanc was
praised by The Guardian for describing “territory bordering on Greene-land and
Kafka country.”
In The Tunnellers, first published in
1986, Raymond Hitchcock (who served in the Royal Engineers during WWII until
wounded on the Normandy beaches), tells the story of the young British Sappers
who dug tunnels 90-feet below the German trenches on the Messines Ridge in
Flanders in order to plant huge mines designed to blow an unsuspecting enemy
sky high. Except the Germans are not unsuspecting…and are digging tunnels of
their own.
Told through the eyes of two young
Somerset lads transported from an idyllic rural life to the foul, damp darkness
of trench warfare, Raymond Hitchcock’s tense and sensitive thriller pulls no
punches when describing the brutality of the underground war conducted by the
Sappers who know – with their casualties running at a thousand a month – they
are expendable.
*
Top Notch Thrillers is the leading
imprint for reviving and reissuing great British thrillers which do not deserve
to be forgotten. Among its authors have been: Geoffrey Household, John Gardner,
Duncan Kyle, Adam Hall and Brian Callison. The series editor is Mike Ripley.
Forthcoming titles in 2016: Smear Job
and Bonfire Night – the last two ‘Callan’ novels by James Mitchell, plus Foiled
Again and Cast Adrift – a brace of ‘Nick Madrid’ comic thrillers by Peter
Guttridge.
For Further Information
http://www.ostarapublishing.co.uk
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