Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: the Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to the Eagle Has Landed
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Mike Ripley Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed «HarperCollins» Ripley M. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed / M. Ripley — «HarperCollins», WINNER OF THE HRF KEATING AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTION CRIME BOOK 2018An 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. © Ripley M. © HarperCollins M. Ripley, L. Child. «Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed» Содержание 7 Copyright 8 Dedication 9 SPOILER ALERT 10 THRILLERS 11 FOREWORD 12 PREFACE 14 Chapter 1: 17 Chapter 2: 23 Chapter 3: 31 Chapter 4: 48 Chapter 5: 57 Chapter 6: 68 1960s 69 1970s 87 Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. 88 5 M. Ripley, L. Child. «Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed» 6 M. Ripley, L. Child. «Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed» 7 M. Ripley, L. Child. «Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed» Copyright Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017 Copyright © Mike Ripley 2017 Foreword © Lee Child 2017 Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017 Cover illustration: detail from When Eight Bells Toll by Alistair MacLean © HarperCollinsPublishers 1981 (front); Robert Kyle’s Kill Now, Pay Later by Robert McGinnis © Dell Publishing/Penguin Random House 1960 (back). Author photograph © Mike Ripley Mike Ripley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions on the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down- loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008172237 Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008172244 Version: 2017-11-20 8 M. Ripley, L. Child. «Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed» Dedication For Len Deighton, who has a lot to answer for. 9 M. Ripley, L. Child. «Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed» SPOILER ALERT There will be spoilers. Live with it. Many of the thrillers referred to here were published fifty years ago. You’ve had time. 10 M. Ripley, L. Child. «Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed» THRILLERS ‘A book, film, or play depicting crime, mystery, or espionage in an atmosphere of excitement and suspense.’ Collins English Dictionary ‘What exactly is a thriller? The term seems to cover a multitude of sins and quite a fair proportion of virtues.’ Margery Allingham, 1931 ‘You after all write “novels of suspense” – if not sociological studies – whereas my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.’ Ian Fleming in a letter to Raymond Chandler, 1956 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Spoiler Alert Thrillers Foreword Preface Chapter 1: A Question of Emphasis Chapter 2: The Land Before Bond Chapter 3: Do Mention the War Chapter 4: Tinkers, Tailors, Soldiers, Spies. But Mostly Journalists. Chapter 5: End of Empire Chapter 6: Travel Broadening the Mind Chapter 7: Class of ’62 Chapter 8: The Spies Have It, 1963–70 Chapter 9: The Adventurers, 1963–70 Chapter 10: The Storm Jackal Has Landed – The 1970s Chapter 11: The New Intake Chapter 12: Endgame Appendix I: The Leading Players Appendix II: The Supporting Cast Notes & References Acknowledgements & Bibliography Index Also by Mike Ripley About the Publisher 11 M. Ripley, L. Child. «Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed» FOREWORD Some time ago Mike Ripley e-mailed and asked if I would write a foreword for his new book. I knew roughly what it was about: Mike and I bump into each other a couple of times a year, at industry junkets, and like writers everywhere we always ask about works in progress – secretly hoping, I suppose, that the other guy is having it even worse than we are. So I knew the project was a survey of British thriller fiction during the two golden decades between the mid-Fifties and the mid-Seventies. Knowing Mike, I knew the scholarship would be meticulous; I knew the writing would be pleasantly breezy, but always willing to seize passionately upon a point, and render a clear and acute conclusion, without fear or favour. It would be a book I would want to read – maybe even pay for – so why not get it early and free? So I said yes. Mike is a slightly older codger even than I, so there was no immediate e-mail response to my response. I got the impression he treats e-mail like the country squire he pretends to be, treats the post, perhaps once a day, perhaps in the early morning, at the breakfast table. I spent the rest of my own day writing a newspaper article commissioned by the New York Times. I was never quite sure what they wanted, but it seemed to require a retrospective mood, even elegiac, starting right back at the beginning, which in my case meant growing up in provincial post-war Britain. I polished the piece and sent it off. Then – bing – the attachment arrived from Ripley. For the New York Times, I had started, ‘Objectively I was one of the luckiest humans ever born.’ Ripley’s preface started, ‘I am of the luckiest generation.’ He’s a couple of years older than me, which makes us a typical older brother–younger brother age pairing right in the middle of the luckiest demographic in history. For the Times I said we were a stable postwar liberal democracy, at peace, with a cradle-to-grave welfare system that worked efficiently, with all dread diseases conquered, with full employment for our parents, with free and excellent education from the age of five for just as long as we merited it. We had no bombs falling on our houses, and no knocks on our doors in the middle of the night. No previous generation ever had all of that, not in all of history, and standards have eroded since. We were very lucky. But, I said, it was very boring. Britain was grey, exhausted, physically ruined, and financially crippled. The factories were humming, but everything went for export. We needed foreign currency to pay down monstrous war debt. Domestic life was pinched and austere. We escaped any way we could. Reading was the main way. Thrillers were the highest high, and British writers were never better than during our formative years.