Autumn Titles from Ostara Crime

Independent publisher Ostara are playing it strictly for laughs with their Autumn crime releases, with new editions of two Nick Madrid ‘escapades’ by novelist, critic and doyen of the literary festival scene Peter Guttridge.

The adventures of Guttridge’s yoga-practising, accident-prone, self-depreciating journalist Nick Madrid have always combined a deep affection for the worst excesses of Fleet Street with outrageously farcical situations and the delivery of a stand-up comedian.

In Foiled Again the plot ranges from an accidental death during an international fencing competition to the uncovering of a piece of shady family history from the 1930s and the rise of the fascist Blackshirt movement. Along the way, there’s a rather revolting art exhibition called ‘The Shock of the Poo’, a night club for sado-masochists, a coven of fanatical Sylvia Plath fanatics, Russian Mafiosi, Colombian drug lords and the vexed question of why Madrid is such an unusual surname in Burnley…

Cast Adrift reflects one of the author’s other areas of expertise, Hollywood, in a merciless satire on movie-making, specifically the making of a low budget (a very low budget) pirate movie, which is also a musical, on location  somewhere suspiciously near the Caribbean. When the main cast of characters get involved with real, modern-day pirates and the sole survivor of a desert island survivalist TV game show, there seems little chance of anyone sticking to the script – assuming there ever was one.

The late Reginald Hill described Peter Guttridge’s early comic crime novels as ‘fast-moving, laugh-a-line frolics’ and the Nick Madrid novels became famous for their trade-mark trait of having the hapless hero always falling foul of the local wildlife wherever the story was set. 

Since 2004, Peter Guttridge has concentrated on more serious fiction including his much admired ‘Brighton series’ of crime novels, novellas and short stories, one of which won the 2016 Margery Allingham Short Story Competition.

Foiled Again and Cast Adrift are now available as Ostara Crime paperbacks and eBooks.

Callan Complete

Ostara Publishing’s Top Notch Thrillers imprint has now completed its republication of the five-volume series of novels by the late James Mitchell which feature his iconic secret agent hero Callan.  

Originally created for a one-off television drama in 1967, the character of David Callan – the surly but vulnerable and ferociously downbeat professional hit-man working for a very dirty section of British Intelligence – struck an instant chord with the viewing public. As portrayed by actor Edward Woodward, Callan went on to feature in highly successful television series (1967-1972), a film and a TV movie, some 40 short stories syndicated worldwide in newspapers and five novels.

 Top Notch Thriller editions of the Callan novels began to appear in 2013 and now the long out-of-print fourth and fifth volumes – Smear Job and Bonfire Night – are available as trade paperbacks and eBooks.

First published in 1975, Smear Job is the longest and most densely-plotted of the Callan novels, featuring all the characters Mitchell created for ‘the Section’ – his fictional (one hopes!) department which deals in surveillance, blackmail and even assassination of anyone deemed a threat to national security.

Callan’s sidekick Lonely – the cowardly and often pungent professional burglar – play a key role, as do Spencer Purceval FitzMaurice, Toby Meres and even Hunter finds himself ‘in the field’ as the action moves, at Mitchell’s typically lightning pace, from Sicily to London gangland, to Las Vegas and Mexico, from Cold War West Germany to the deserted Suffolk coast.

Bonfire Night, the fifth and final book in the series, was written more than 25 years later and published in 2002, the year of James Mitchell’s death. It has been out of print for 13 years and, with no previous paperback edition, this rapidly became the most sought-after of the Callan novels. The new Top Notch Thriller edition comes with a specially-written Introduction by the author’s son, Peter Mitchell, describing the extraordinary circumstances under which Bonfire Night was written, towards the end of his father’s life.

Series editor Mike Ripley said: “Since the Top Notch Thrillers imprint was established in 2009 to revive and republish great British thrillers, we have had many requests from readers to reissue Bonfire Night – ‘the lost Callan’ – far more than for any other title and we are now proud to so.  After long consultation with the author’s son Peter, I have kept editing to the bare minimum so that dedicated Callan fans can read this final coda to the Callan saga as the author intended. It is something of a ‘difficult’ book as Mitchell tried to merge a typically serpentine plot with major developments in the lives of his main characters. Callan is now rich, in danger of falling in love, and living in retirement in his own personal castle in Spain and the new Hunter heading the Section, is a woman. The seismic character change, though, is for Lonely, who has (thanks to a prison education course) become a computer genius and software millionaire!

“But if the world of Callan seems to have turned upside down, he still finds himself having to deal with old enemies (including a vicious ex-Stasi villain who tortured Callan in East Berlin back in the day) and treacherous former allies, but he does so with all the ruthless efficiency of the Callan of old.

“In his Introduction, Peter Mitchell describes, sensitively and poignantly, how Bonfire Night came to be written and I strongly recommend his account to readers.”

Smear Job (£12.99) and Bonfire Night (£10.99) are now available as Print-On-Demand trade paperbacks.

Other Callan titles by James Mitchell from Ostara Publishing are:

A Magnum for Schneider

Russian Roulette

Death and Bright Water

Callan Uncovered*

Callan Uncovered 2*

[* short stories and scripts]

For further information visit www.ostarapublishing.co.uk.

In Memoriam James Melville

James Melville (aka Roy Peter Martin and Hampton Charles)

January 5^th 1931 - 20th March 2014

It is with deep sadness that Shots reports the death of Roy Peter Martin, better known to crime fiction fans as James Melville and Hampton Charles, who passed on 23rd March, aged 83, only weeks before his most famous crime series, the novel featuring Japanese policeman Superintendent Otani, was to be brought back into print by Ostara Crime, after a gap of more than thirty years.

Roy Peter Martin was born in London in 1931.  He read philosophy at Birkbeck College and after National Service in the RAF worked in local government and then entered teaching.  In 1960 he became a British Council Officer and thereafter his career was in cultural diplomacy and educational development in Indonesia, Japan and Hungary.  In 1979 he returned to Japan as Head of the British Council and began to write the Superintendent Otani series of crime novels which “provided a vivid and multi-stranded portrait of Japanese society, caught between its traditional (and often hidebound) past and the exigencies of modern life”.  He also wrote historical novels set in Japan and spy novels which drew on his experiences in Indonesia and Hungary.

Under the pen name Hampton Charles, he continued the ‘Miss Seeton’ series of stories (gentle parodies of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books) originally written by Heron

Carvic (1913-1980).  He was also a noted reviewer of crime fiction for the Hampstead & Highgate Express and a member of the Detection Club.

Series editor for Ostara Crime, Mike Ripley, writes: ‘I knew James/Peter primarily as a reviewer and in particular a very generous reviewer of my own early novels.  After a gap of twenty or so years, I found myself in a position to bring his excellent Japanese mysteries back into print and James/Peter seemed delighted at the prospect.  It is truly depressing that he was not to live to see his books back in print – and as eBooks for the very first time.  He was a gentle reviewer and a fine writer who used his extensive experience of Japan to shed light on Japanese culture and society by showing how the Japanese dealt with foreigners and all things foreign.  That was a difficult trick, but James Melville pulled it off.’

Ostara Publishing are to release new Ostara Crime editions of James Melville’s first three ‘Otani’ novels: The Wages of Zen, The Chrysanthemum Chain and A Sort of Samurai.  Further details on: www.ostarapublishing.co.uk.