Think you know a lot about British Thrillers? Think Again!

The cover illustrations beautifully hint at the material discussed by Ripley

Author and friend of the Deighton Dossier Mike Ripley - he of the Angel series of crime novels - has produced a super new reference work on the golden age of the British thriller which readers of spy fiction will find informative and revealing, very much a book that deserves repeated dipping into.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang - wow, what a cool title, straight off - is an authoritative exposition on how, to use its subtitle, "Britain lost and empire but its secret agents saved the world."

From the first Bond novel Casino Royale to the publication of The Eagle has Landed in 1970s, Ripley pinpoints these three decades as the period during which British authors - famous (Deighton, Fleming, Le Carre, Dick Francis ) and those now often overlooked by the current generation of readers (Lionel Davidson, Adam Hall, Gavin Lyall) - captured the imagination of readers worldwide in the post-war era with their tales of derring-do, spycraft, murder, and other written word adventures which, in the pre-Internet age, fuelled the imagination like very little else.