I already have a groaning tower, teetering Pisa-like, of proofs of books all hoping to be the next big thing in 2016 but the most mouth-watering clash of forthcoming titles will surely be that involving two “big beasts” of the BBC who have turned their hand to writing thrillers.

In March, Radio 4’s James Naughtie, a vocal enthusiast of all crime writers with a Scottish heritage, has a second novel out from Head of Zeus: Paris Spring. I somehow missed his debut last year, despite requesting a review copy. But then, you see, I’m English, so I have already staked a claim to Crisis, coming from Transworld in June, which is a debut thriller by Frank Gardner, the BBC’s Security Correspondent.

First out of the traps in the New Year though, in early January, is the debut crime novel by a very experienced writer for television, Phil Redmond, the creator of long-running dramas such as Grange Hill, Brookside and Hollyoaks. Published by Century, Highbridge is both the title and the setting – ‘a typical Northern town’ according to Redmond. Judging by the opening of Chapter 1 – The trouble with living in a mediocre town is that you end up having to support a mediocre football team – it could be based on several real ones.

With a new publisher (Head of Zeus) in February, Colin Bateman’s new novel Paper Cuts sees him back on familiar darkly comic territory, that heady mix of dubious journalist heroes and the casual, almost cavalier attitude to violence which has become his trade mark. He introduces a new central character in Rob Cullen, a Guardian journalist transported from London to Northern Ireland (quite why I do not know yet – presumably for some terrible misdemeanour) to breathe life into the failing weekly paper, the Bangor Express.

For reasons I do not fully understand, but probably have something to do with my lowered security clearance (or the fact that they were first published in America), I have completely missed out of the award-winning ‘Slough House’ series of spy novels by Mick Herron.

However, I will have no excuse in 2016 as the jolly magnificent John Murray are publishing the much-praised first two volumes, Slow Horses and Dead Lions plus the new, third instalment: Real Tigers.

For reasons of vast age and rapidly failing eyesight, I find it difficult to keep up with the prolific Sophie Hannah who seems to be publishing a new novel every six months. However, I will gird my loins to read The Narrow Bed coming in February from Hodder as it features my favourite of Sophie’s recurring characters, police detective Charlie Zailer.

Triple Whammy

Immaculately timed to coincide with the most excellent new Bond film (which I saw on opening night in very distinguished company), Vintage has published The Spectre Trilogy, comprising the three Ian Fleming thrillers which feature that Special Executive for … etc.: Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice.

Whilst one cannot quibble about the value of this three-book volume (£12.99) and the interesting and erudite Introduction provided by the Bond film producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, I will stick to my much-thumbed Pan paperback copies with their iconic covers.

I should also note the companion reissue by Vintage of the first James Bond ‘continuation’ novel from 1968, Colonel Sun, originally published under the pseudonym ‘Robert Markham’ but now proudly under the author’s real name: Kingsley Amis.

There have been several decent biographies of Ian Fleming and a whole library of books about the James Bond industry but now Fleming’s nephew Fergus has edited the author’s letters, as they related to the Bond books, in The Man With the Golden Typewriter from Bloomsbury.

Fergus Fleming has done an excellent job and even though much of the material was covered in Andrew Lycett’s 1995 biography, it is still a treat to read Fleming’s letters as they flew from his gold-plated typewriter to fans, friends, publishers and fellow writers. There is humour in them – something he thought had no place in a thriller – and it is, with hindsight, incredible to read of his early rows with publishers about print-runs (always too small) and dust jacket designs. He was opinionated and could be rude – as he was to Alan Whicker, who wanted to do a Whicker’s World on him, and as he was, in private, about Len Deighton’s Funeral In Berlin.

There are plenty of big names scattered across this correspondence: Noel Coward, E.L. Doctorow (his American editor at one point), designers Ray Hawkey and Dickie Chopping and, famously, Raymond Chandler to whom he wrote in 1956:  If one has a grain of intelligence it is difficult to go on being serious about a character like James Bond. 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.

In his Introduction, Fergus Fleming reveals one of his uncle’s most fascinating letters, which had nothing to do with James Bond, but rather concerned a certain Adolf Hitler. In September 1938, he wrote to The Times warning of Hitler’s intentions as detailed in a National Socialist Party Programme circulated in 1920 – four years before Mein Kampf was published. Fleming had acquired a rare copy of the ‘programme’ and pointed out that of the 25 ‘goals’ set out eighteen years before, 22 had already been achieved by the Nazis. Fleming’s implication that the remaining three (the creation of a Greater Germany, repeal of the Treaty of Versailles and the quest for lebensraum) would affect the future of Europe, was indeed a timely warning, though as he pointed out: being forewarned is not necessarily the same as being fore-armed.

Vintage Corner

Said to be one of the earliest and possibly most authentic examples of the ‘police procedural’, with the added kudos of being written by a former Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police’s CID, The Grell Mystery is now back in print more than a century after first publication in 1913.

This is the latest in an impressive list of resurrections from Collins’ Detective Club, the predecessor of the more famous Crime Club; all are immaculately produced and very attractively priced hardbacks (£9.95).

The author (though he did have help from a friendly journalist) of The Grell Mystery – and two subsequent crime novels – was Frank Froëst (1958-1930), who joined the Metropolitan Police as a constable in 1879 (the year of the battle of Rorke’s Drift), became a detective and rose to the rank of Superintendent before retiring in 1912 (the year the Titanic sank).

He was, by all accounts, quite an incredible chap, having been involved as a detective in following and arresting in Argentina an absconding fraudster (and MP!) and in the chase to catch Dr Crippen. He could also bend coins and tear a pack of cards in half with his fingers. One suspects the London underworld of the time had a tasty nickname for him.

Whilst I’m in Vintage Corner, I will take the opportunity (every opportunity) to bemoan the fact that the novels of Francis Clifford (1917-1975) are not better known, if indeed they are remembered at all.

A genuine – and modest – war hero,  Arthur Bell Thompson, then a 22-year-old army Captain, lead a company of native (Karen) troops on an almost 1,000 mile trek through Japanese-occupied Burma in 1942. In 1944 he wrote an account of that dramatic escape under the title Desperate Journey but made sure it would not be published until after his death. (It was, in 1979.) In the 1950s, he began to write fiction under the name Francis Clifford and rapidly established himself as a master of intelligent suspense thrillers, often in exotic settings (South America, Franco’s Spain) with believable, vulnerable central characters.

Several of his novels were filmed, notably The Naked Runner (1966) starring Frank Sinatra and Act of Mercy (1959) with David Niven; and two were awarded Silver Daggers by the Crime Writers’ Association. One of his last books, The Grosvenor Square Goodbye, where a lone sniper starts a day-long siege in full view of the American Embassy, caused quite a sensation when published (and was serialised in a Sunday newspaper) in 1974, and still serves today as a text book on how to inject suspense and pace into a thriller without straining the bounds of credibility.

And before I dismount from my high horse, another author I would like to see back in print (or at least less forgotten) is Christopher Landon, whose best known novel was the famously-filmed Ice Cold in Alex – sometimes referred to as the greatest lager commercial ever made. But apart from that classic wartime thriller, Landon (1911-1961) also wrote excellent spy thrillers and crime novels, notably Dead Men Rise Up Never, which I believe was published posthumously in 1963.

Even though Ice Cold in Alex was still in print as recently as 2004, I have been unable to elicit any information from his publisher (now part of Orion) about the author’s literary estate or the possibility of reissuing titles from his backlist.

New Feature

I am seriously thinking of instigating a new regular feature into this column along the lines of “Encounters or Near-Misses with Crime Writers.”

My inspiration comes from Jeremy Cameron, a crime writer who once chronicled the mean streets of wild Walthamstow but who has sensibly moved to East Anglia. Jeremy tells me that whilst working in The Blue Posts pub near the London Ritz in the later 1960s, one of the waitresses said to him one day: "One of our customers has just told me we have got Graham Greene eating here today."  “That’s nice,” said Jeremy and then the waitress said: "By the way, who is Graham Greene?"   It transpired that he had been eating there for years, valuing the anonymity and always booking in as simply ‘Mr Green’. Jeremy never actually met him, but as one of his jobs was to fetch wine up from the cellar, he can almost certainly claim that he was once Graham Greene’s wine waiter.

My own near-miss with the great and good, or at least famous, of the crime fiction world came in 1988. My first novel had just appeared and I was being wined and dined by numerous agents offering to represent me. One agent, a delightful lady well-respected in the business, offered to take me to (if memory serves) the Montcalm Hotel near Marble Arch, which did indeed provide an excellent lunch although rather disconcertingly, the hotel dining room was completely empty apart from the two of us.

That was until about halfway through our entrée, when a lone resident entered and took a table at the far end of the restaurant.  “That’s Freddie Forsyth,” said the agent, “I must go and say hello”. I was not introduced but I could at least boast that I had lunch in the same room (if not actually “with”) the author of The Day of the Jackal. I somehow doubt that the incident features in his recent memoir The Outsider, though I cannot be sure as the review copy I was promised by publisher Bantam seems to have been mislaid in the post.

Finis

I am, of course, appalled at the proposal that the House of Commons should abandon the tradition of recording all Acts of Parliament on sheets of vellum (a medium I am using more and more now that typewriter ribbons are so difficult to come by) in order to save a few groats from the public purse. I will naturally be writing to all my fellow members of the Parliamentary Beer Club to register my protest, just as soon as I have sharpened a new quill.

I am, however, somewhat mollified by the fact that The Times has revived its practice of setting a Latin crossword for the first time since 1930. (It has been rather a long wait for the solution to that one.)

I am rather proud of how far I got with one recently, without resorting to asking my old contubernalis Colin Dexter for help – as I usually have to with English ones. The eagle-eyed may spot, however, that it was my lack of knowledge of Virgil which prevented me from completing the puzzle.

Valete!

The Ripster.