#Artistic licence kyle plus#

KISS KISS, BANG BANG attempts to define the term ‘thriller’ and show 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 books and then films) and the more realistic spy fiction created by Len Deighton, John Le Carré and Ted Allbeury, plus the many variations (and imitators) in between. In his researches he drew on many of the personal contacts he has made in over 25 years as a crime writer and reviewer as well as 25 years before that as an avid thriller reader. The genesis of KISS KISS, BANG BANG dates from 2010 when Mike Ripley was asked to develop a creative crime writing class for Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education and through his work as consultant editor for the Top Notch Thrillers imprint, which has reissued over 50 British thrillers ‘which did not deserve to be forgotten’. Many flourished only briefly, in the wake of the success of the James Bond films after 1962 some were ground-breaking and wrote novels now rightly regarded as classics of the genre some authors became national treasures, some became synonymous with parts of the genre (as Graham Greene and Eric Ambler of an earlier generation had done) many were disgracefully forgotten, many probably rightly so. In KISS KISS, BANG BANG, award-winning comedy crime writer and crime fiction critic Mike 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). Many have been labelled ‘boys’ books’ written by men who probably never grew up, but as Mike Ripley recounts, the thrillers of this period provided the teenage (male) reader with adventure and escapism, usually in exotic foreign settings, or as Lee Child puts it in his Foreword: “the thrill of immersion in a fast and gaudy world.

The spread of eye-catching mass market paperbacks in the 1960s also boosted the careers of already-establish thriller writers (such as Hammond Innes and Victor Canning) but also encouraged new entrants into the field – a large proportion of them coming from the military and/or journalism and almost all of them male.

Artistic licence kyle