The Shots Team are delighted
to hear about an upcoming work from Writer, Reviewer, Columnist,
Game
Show Host and Raconteur
Extraordinaire, The Talented Mr Ripley.
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in
British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed
An
entertaining history of British thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has
Landed, in which award-winning crime writer Mike Ripley reveals that, though
Britain may have lost an empire, her thrillers helped save the world. With a
foreword by Lee Child.
When Ian Fleming dismissed
his books in a 1956 letter to Raymond Chandler as ‘straight pillow fantasies of
the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety’ he was being typically immodest. In three
short years, his James Bond novels were already spearheading a boom in thriller
fiction that would dominate the bestseller lists, not just in Britain, but
internationally.
The decade following World
War II had seen Britain lose an Empire, demoted in terms of global power and
status and economically crippled by debt; yet its fictional spies, secret
agents, soldiers, sailors and even (occasionally) journalists were now saving
the world on a regular basis.
From Ian Fleming and
Alistair MacLean in the 1950s through Desmond Bagley, Dick Francis, Len
Deighton and John Le Carré in the 1960s, to Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins
in the 1970s.
Many have been labelled
‘boys’ books’ written by men who probably never grew up but, as award-winning
writer and critic Mike Ripley recounts, the thrillers of this period provided
the reader with thrills, adventure and escapism, usually in exotic settings, or
as today’s leading thriller writer Lee Child puts it in his Foreword: ‘the
thrill of immersion in a fast and gaudy world.’
In Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,
Ripley examines the rise of the thriller from the austere 1950s through the
boom time of the Swinging Sixties and early 1970s, examining some 150 British
authors (plus a few notable South Africans). Drawing upon conversations with
many of the authors mentioned in the book, he shows how British writers,
working very much in the shadow of World War II, came to dominate the field of
adventure thrillers and the two types of spy story – spy fantasy (as epitomised
by Ian Fleming’s James Bond) and the more realistic spy fiction created by
Deighton, Le Carré and Ted Allbeury, plus the many variations (and imitators)
in between.
Mark your diaries as Kiss
Kiss, Bang Bang is released on May 18th from Harper Collins, who incidentally
published Martin Edward’s multiple award-winning Golden
Age of Murder.
Photo L-R Writers
Mark Timlin, Mike Ripley & Martyn Waites
Mike Ripley in-concert with
fellow writer / reviewers Barry Forshaw and Peter Guttridge entertained us at Crimefest
2014, with their amusing presentation of the British Golden Age of
Thrillers.
We have the presentation
archived in 5 sections
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
So we asked Mike Ripley to
tell a little about his upcoming Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang -
After several years
in the gestation, I am delighted that my ‘reader’s history’ of the boom in
British thriller writing 1953-1975 (or thereabouts) has been given a home by
HarperCollins in their famous Crime Club imprint, my very first publisher, back
in 1988, for Just Another Angel which
started what is laughingly called my career
in crime fiction. They have, therefore, a lot to answer for, but please
do not hold it against them as they done a splendid job indulging a great
passion of mine.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – or KK-BB as it is known in certain circles in honour of Len Deighton –
has been many years in its gestation, you might say about fifty years since, as
a callow youth, I realised that I was reading my way through a purple path of
British thriller writing. Was it a ‘Golden Age’? Well, that is, as with all
‘Golden Ages’ a matter for debate, but it was undeniably a boom time for
British thriller writers, who dominated international bestseller lists.
Mike will reveal more in
next month’s Getting Away With Murder Column, which is hosted at Shots Magazine
online, as well as republished in George Easter’s Deadly Pleasures Magazine.
Shots Magazine have Kiss
Kiss, Bang Bang available for pre-order HERE
and like Martin Edward’s Golden Age of Murder, it would be criminal to miss
out.
“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit, but also the
spirit of his friends.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
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