Ripley Uncovers

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.

Further details: www.ostarapublishing.co.uk

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.