Читать книгу Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed - Mike Ripley, Mike Ripley - Страница 17

As the 1970s dawned, it seemed that British thriller writers, albeit with some new faces joining the ranks of the bestselling, would continue to offer more of the same when it came to using foreign locations. For the writer of detective stories, particularly ‘police procedurals’, a familiar British (usually English) setting was thought necessary for realism. There were, back then, very few crime novels set abroad featuring local policemen, available either in translation or, daringly, written by British authors with specific knowledge of the country featured.¹⁵

For the thriller writer, however, ‘abroad’ still meant ‘exciting’, even though British readers were availing themselves of cheap travel abroad and seeing more of the world via television and, more worryingly for the British writer’s sales figures, through the eyes of a new breed of American thriller writers. (Ironically perhaps, British thriller readers who liked their fictional thrills in foreign locations were introduced to American thriller writers through airport bookshops whilst waiting for their holiday flights.)

Both Graham Greene and Eric Ambler continued to offer foreign backdrops with customary professionalism and fluency; Greene setting The Honorary Consul (1973) in South America and Ambler again used the troubled Middle East for The Levanter, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 1972.¹⁶

There was little sign, initially, that the two leading lights of the adventure thriller were running out of steam. Hammond Innes had been a published author since 1937 and Alistair MacLean since 1955, and neither seemed to have run out of new locations for their books.

MacLean donned his fur-lined parka once more and took us to the Barents Sea north of Norway and to Bear Island in 1971 and then switched to the sunny, though not safer, west coast of America for The Golden Gate