Download Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed AudioBook Free
An entertaining record of English thrillers from Gambling house Royale to The Eagle Has Landed, where award-winning crime writer Mike Ripley discloses that, though Britain may have lost an empire, her thrillers helped save the earth. With a foreword by Lee Child. When Ian Fleming dismissed his books in a 1956 notice to Raymond Chandler as 'direct cushion fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety', he had been typically immodest. In three short years, his James Bond books were already spearheading a boom in thriller fiction that could dominate the best-seller lists not simply in Britain but internationally. The decade following World Conflict II got seen Britain lose an empire, demoted in conditions of global power and status and financially crippled by debt; yet its imaginary spies, secret agents, troops, sailors and even (occasionally) journalists were now conserving the world frequently, 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 'guys' books' compiled by men who probably never grew up, but, as award-winning writer and critic Mike Ripley recounts, the thrillers of the period provided thrills, excitement and escapism, usually in spectacular settings, or, as today's leading thriller writer Lee Child sets it in his foreword, 'the joy of immersion in a fast and gaudy world'. In Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Ripley examines the surge of the thriller from the austere 1950s through the boom time of the Swinging '60s and early on 1970s, evaluating some 150 English authors (plus a few notable Southern Africans). Drawing upon conversations with lots of the authors stated in the audiobook, he shows how English writers, working very much in the darkness of World Conflict II, came up to dominate the field of excitement thrillers and the two types of spy story - spy fantasy (as epitomised by Ian Fleming's James Connection) and the greater realistic spy fiction created by Deighton, Le Carré and Ted Allbeury, plus the many variations (and imitators) among.
