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    Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed
    Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed
    Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed
    Audiobook12 hours

    Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed

    Written by Mike Ripley and Lee Child

    Narrated by Jonathan Keeble

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    About this audiobook

    WINNER OF THE HRF KEATING AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTION CRIME BOOK 2018
    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. With a foreword by Lee Child.

    When Ian Fleming dismissed his books in a 1956 letter to Raymond Chandler as ‘straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety’ he was being typically immodest. In three short years, his James Bond novels were already spearheading a boom in thriller fiction that would dominate the bestseller lists, not just in Britain, but internationally.

    The decade following World War II had seen Britain lose an Empire, demoted in terms of global power and status and economically crippled by debt; yet its fictional spies, secret agents, soldiers, sailors and even (occasionally) journalists were now saving the world on a regular basis.

    From Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean in the 1950s through Desmond Bagley, Dick Francis, Len Deighton and John Le Carré in the 1960s, to Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins in the 1970s.

    Many have been labelled ‘boys’ books’ written by men who probably never grew up but, as award-winning writer and critic Mike Ripley recounts, the thrillers of this period provided the reader with thrills, adventure and escapism, usually in exotic settings, or as today’s leading thriller writer Lee Child puts it in his Foreword: ‘the thrill of immersion in a fast and gaudy world.’

    In Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, 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). Drawing upon conversations with many of the authors mentioned in the book, he shows 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) and the more realistic spy fiction created by Deighton, Le Carré and Ted Allbeury, plus the many variations (and imitators) in between.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 18, 2017
    ISBN9780008172268
    Author

    Mike Ripley

    Mike Ripley was born in 1952. As well as being a noted critic and Lecturer in Crime Writing, he is the author of the ‘Angel’ series of crime novels, for which he has twice been the recipient of a Crime Writers’ Association Award. Working with the Margery Allingham Society, he completed the Albert Campion novel left unfinished, Mr Campion’s Farewell, and has written further continuation novels in the series.

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    • 3/5
      In the two decades that followed the mid-1950s, the English detective novel was displaced in popularity in Britain by a new genre of fiction. Dubbed "thrillers," they were action-oriented books that reflected the legacy of the recent war and the issues of a nation coping with imperial decline and an ongoing Cold War against the Soviet Union. For all of the range of the characters and their foes, what these books shared was a common premise of British spies and adventurers facing off against a range of nefarious foes, typically in an exotic locale, for which various degrees of violence were necessary in order to win the day.

      Having grown up reading these novels, Mike Ripley makes it clear from the start that he is an unabashed fan of the genre. His book looking at the genre is a reflection of this, serving in many ways as an extended love letter to works he looks upon nostalgically, albeit with a healthy dose of criticism. Tracing their emergence in the specific environment of postwar Britain, he charts their evolution from their origins in the sometimes bleak atmosphere of "austerity Britain" through their James Bond-driven emergence as a global phenomenon in the 1960s to their fade by the late 1970s. In his best chapters he explains how they reflected the circumstances of the moment, providing a measure of escapism for people pining for distant places and an assertion of national importance during a period of global eclipse. While the latter part of the book is little more than a recounting of various series by a growing range of authors, his work nonetheless serves as an entertaining study of an important genre, one that Ripley demonstrates reflected both their times and their audience.