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

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.

More Top Notch Thrillers

The latest Top Notch Thrillers for October 2012 are the two books which shot Clive Egleton into ‘the Alistair Maclean bracket’ in 1973 and 1974.

A career British army officer retiring with the rank of Lt-Colonel thirty years after enlisting (underage) in the Royal Armoured Corps on D-Day in 1944, Clive Egleton (1927-2006) began writing thrillers whilst still a serving officer. SEVEN DAYS TO A KILLING was his fourth published novel and the film rights were snapped up on first publication by director Don Siegal fresh from his box-office hit Dirty Harry. With a cast including Michael Caine, Janet Suzman and Donald Pleasance,  the film version was renamed The Black Windmill after Siegal took the decision to shoot the climactic gunfight at the famous Claydon Windmills on the Sussex Downs.

The success of Seven Days and The  Black Windmill  allowed Egleton to retire from the army and become a full-time writer and his next novel, THE OCTOBER PLOT, became a huge international bestseller as a World War II thriller to rank alongside Where Eagles Dare and The Eagle Has Landed.

Known in America as The Bormann Brief, the book is a detailed description of an attempt to assassinate Hitler’s Deputy Martin Bormann in 1944, in the wake of the failed July Bomb Plot.

Clive Egleton went on to write more than forty novels. Seven Days To A Killing and The October Plot are the first of his titles to be reissued as Top Notch Thrillers, the print-on-demand and e-book imprint of Ostara Publishing which is dedicated to reviving Great British thrillers which do not deserve to be forgotten. In three years of operation, Top Notch Thrillers have published 28 titles, including novels by authors such as Geoffrey Household, Duncan Kyle, Francis Clifford and Victor Canning.

Full details of all titles can be found on www.ostarapublishing.co.uk.

Top Notch Thrillers from Ostara Publishing

In July 2011, Top Notch Thrillers is proud to reissue two great British thrillers from the early 1980’s, both of which are fine examples of ‘flight and pursuit’ novels in the John Buchan tradition.


Geoffrey Household (1900-88), often seen as the natural successor to John Buchan, is rightly famous for his 1939 classic Rogue Male about an aristocratic English big game hunter’s failed attempt to assassinate Hitler and his subsequent fight for survival as the hunter becomes the hunted.

More than 40 years after that ground-breaking thriller, Geoffrey Household gave us the sequel, Rogue Justice, where the background to the previously anonymous ‘Rogue Male’ is revealed as he declares his own private war on Nazi Germany, blazing a blood-stained trail from Poland to Greece to dispense his own type of justice on the brutal ideology which has destroyed the Europe – and the woman – that he loved.

Not only is Rogue Justice a sustained, fast-moving action thriller, told with all Household’s usual skill when it comes to a pursuit over wild terrain and his self-depreciating humour, it is at heart a dark, nobly romantic but fatalistic love story. For the rogue hero this time, it is not a question of whether he will survive, but how he will choose to meet his death....

*
Jessica Mann is well-known as a broadcaster, journalist and crime-writer and is currently the crime fiction critic for the Literary Review.

Her 1981 novel Funeral Sites is nothing less than an updated, feminist take on John Buchan’s famous tale of flight and pursuit, The 39 Steps, as the main character finds herself on the run from her politically ambitious (and murderous) brother-in-law. In a frenzied escape from a Swiss alp via London’s club land to a Cambridge hospital, she finds a lone ally in feisty archaeologist Tamara Hoyland, who was to become Jessica Mann’s series heroine, and the chase comes full circle in a dramatic showdown back in the Swiss mountains.

Funeral Sites is a frantic, breathlessly-paced chase thriller which puts a female stamp on what had seemed until then a very male preserve and whilst staying true to the form, the novel cheekily references the work of John Buchan – and indeed Geoffrey Household, another master of the genre.

Jessica Mann is the first woman to join the ranks of British authors reissued under the Top Notch Thriller imprint, who include: John Gardner, Victor Canning, Brian Callison, Duncan Kyle, Francis Clifford and Adam Hall.

Rogue Justice ISBN 9781906288549
Funeral Sites ISBN 9781906288600*

(*also available as an eBook)

*

Top Notch Thrillers is a specialist imprint of Ostara Publishing which was established in 2009 to revive Great British thrillers “which do not deserve to be forgotten” using the latest print-on-demand technology and offering many titles as eBooks for the first time. The series editor is Mike Ripley, who currently writes the ‘Getting Away With Murder’ column on www.shotsmag.co.uk.

By September 2011, there will be 20 Top Notch Thrillers available in print and (in many cases) electronic formats. They can be purchased through good bookshops or Amazon and via the Ostara website (www.ostarapublishing.co.uk) which contains much additional information of TNT books and authors.

Mike Ripley - he writes, he publishes...

Crime-writer, critic and SHOTS columnist Mike Ripley – in a poacher-turned-gamekeeper move – has become a publisher!

Mike had been appointed Series Editor for Top Notch Thrillers, an imprint of print-on-demand Ostara Publishing, with a remit to “revive Great British thrillers which do not deserve to be forgotten, each title to be chosen not just for its plot or sense of adventure but for the distinctiveness and quality of the writing.”

Top Notch Thrillers will be drawn in the main from the 1960s and 70s, a period, says Mike, when British thriller writers reigned supreme, not just in the bestseller lists but in a wide range of writing styles. The first four titles, out this month, attempt to show the range and versatility of the writing on offer in what is being increasingly seen as a Golden Age for British thrillers.

TNT has launched with: Snake Water by Alan Williams, a rip-roaring treasure hunt adventure in a South American banana republic, first published in 1965 (Williams, a journalist and much-travelled foreign correspondent, went on to international fame as a spy writer, possibly the first to have real life traitor Kim Philby as a character in fiction); The Terrible Door an atmospheric 1964 debut novel by the late George Sims, a well-known rare book dealer, who went on to be elected to the famous Detection Club; Night Of Glass, a neglected gem form 1968 by Philip Purser in which four students engineer an escape attempt from Dachau concentration camp in 1938; and Geoffrey Rose’s 1973 fantastical and slightly surreal chase thriller A Clear Road To Archangel, set in the wintry wastes of Russia in 1917.

“We are using the latest print-on-demand technology to revive thrillers – and thriller writers – who do not deserve to be forgotten,” says Ripley, “bringing back fond memories for some readers and hopefully enthusing a new generation. The response to the concept so far has been very encouraging. Even before our first titles appeared – and they look really good – I was being lobbied by fan about writers such as Desmond Bagley, Andrew Garve, Francis Clifford and Geoffrey Household

“For me, it is a pure pleasure, and an honour, to be reissuing the books of some great authors – and getting to meet some of them. Everyone knows and respects the history and traditions of British crime novels and detective stories, but thrillers have somehow got sidelined, yet we have a rich and very varied heritage.

“People still remember the big names like Alistair Maclean, Hammond Innes and Gavin Lyall, but many of their titles are now out-of-print and in danger of slipping from popular memory, which would be a terrible shame.”