Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

An 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. From 1953, with the publication of Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel, Britain ruled the waves when it came to thriller novels, and HarperCollins stood at the forefront of this. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang presents an engaging, informal history of British thrillers, from Ian Fleming up to Jack Higgins, and it will tell the story of how thrillers would take over from crime, transporting readers from the cosy, class-ridden detective novels of 'Golden Age' authors such as Agatha Christie to the exotic, international settings of Fleming, Le Carre and Deighton. In turn these writers and their books would help Britain stagger out from under the yoke of rationing into a bright new golden age of the 1960s and 70s. Excitement was in, and it would be the dominant...