I always enjoy the company of the
Talented Mr Ripley, for as a raconteur he is incomparable in the literary end
of Crime and Thrillers; and he has a wickedly amusing sense of humour and
proportion to boot.
Mike and I found ourselves spending a day together paying our
respects to Phil Kerr, who passed away far too early. Mike Ripley was one of
the group of new emerging talent in British Crime Writing in the late 1980s /
early 1990s, as was Phil Kerr. Mike pays
his respects to Philip Kerr in his April 2018 column of Getting Away with
Murder – read it HERE
Apart from his own writing, his reviewing, literary commentary,
bee-keeping and interest in archaeology, Mike acts as a literary consultant for
Ostara Publishing,
unearthing classic work from the Thriller genre. He is obviously well qualified
for this role, as the writer / editor of the extraordinary Kiss, Kiss, Bang,
Bang CLICK HERE for more
information.
At Crimefest 2014 held in
Bristol, in-concert with Barry Forshaw and Peter Guttridge, our trio
of writer / critics presented an amusing, as well as insightful look at the British
Golden Age of Thriller Writing. We have archived the video presentation from
the event HERE and I am
still giggling from the memory of the that day.
I was delighted to hear that The Talented Mr Ripley has
uncovered two extraordinary thrillers - that I can still recall from my
adolescence, so let Mike tell us more.
New
Titles from Top Notch Thrillers
First published in 1970,
Kenneth Royce’s thriller The XYY Man introduced
a new anti-hero into the world of spy and crime fiction and despite the rather
questionable premise behind the main character, Spider Scott, the book launched
a popular television series which spawned not one but two distinct spin-offs.
The unique aspect of XYY Man Spider
Scott – said to be based on a professional criminal Kenneth Royce met whilst a
prison visitor – is that he is blessed, or cursed, with an extra male ‘Y’
chromosome in his genetic make-up. This predisposes him to a life of crime,
which was in fact a common theory in the late 1960s, though there was little –
if any – scientific evidence for this.
Whatever his genetics, Scott
is a ‘creeper’ or cat burglar and a very good one, so good that his talents
come to the notice of British Intelligence when a dangerous piece of house
breaking is called for – the ‘house’ in question being the Chinese Legation in
London. Unfortunately, Spider is also firmly on the radar of Detective Sergeant
Bulman and it was this antagonistic relationship which was not only the
mainstay of the 1976 television series The
XYY Man but allowed the Bulman character to develop in the spin-off police
series Strangers in 1978 and then to
star in his own series as a private eye, in Bulman
in 1985.
Kenneth Royce (1920 -1997)
wrote seven Spider Scott novels and, later, three novels featuring Alf Bulman.
Top Notch Thrillers is proud to be able to reissue the first two novels, The XYY Man (which has been out-of-print
for more than 20 years) and the immediate sequel, The Concrete Boot from 1971.
When The XYY Man was first published, Dame Ngaio Marsh called it ‘a
brilliantly sustained thriller’ and the Manchester Evening News rated it ‘A new
dimension in thriller writing’.
Top Notch series editor Mike
Ripley, the author of the ‘reader’s history of British thrillers’ Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, said:
‘The Spider Scott books were not big, brash, shoot-em-up spy fantasies, as was
very much the norm when they first appeared. They were down-beat tales of
betrayal and fear, more Callan than Bond. Quite often Spider Scott – a criminal
who is outside the protection of the law – when pursued by the KGB, the CIA,
the Chinese secret police and goodness knows who else, has only his underworld
contacts and fellow criminals to rely on. The books are highly recommended for
their descriptions of Spider’s London, especially by night, in the early 1970s;
a cold, hard city which has millions of inhabitants but where Spider is always
alone.’
Top
Notch Thrillers is an imprint of Ostara Publishing and has so
far revived more than 60 British thrillers ‘which do not deserve to be
forgotten’. The XYY Man and The Concrete Boot are available as trade
paperbacks and eBooks.
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