Alistair Stuart MacLean was a Scottish novelist who wrote popular thrillers and adventure stories. Many of his novels have been adapted to film, most notably The Guns of Navarone (1957) and Ice Station Zebra (1963). In the late 1960s, encouraged by film producer Elliott Kastner, MacLean began to write original screenplays, concurrently with an accompanying novel. The most successful was the first of these, the 1968 film Where Eagles Dare, which was also a bestselling novel. MacLean also published two novels under the pseudonym Ian Stuart. His books are estimated to have sold over 150 million copies, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time.
Kate Atkinson is an English writer of novels, plays and short stories. She is known for creating the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which has been adapted into the BBC One series Case Histories. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995 in the Novels category for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, winning again in 2013 and 2015 under its new name the Costa Book Awards.
David Stephen Mitchell is an English novelist, television writer, and screenwriter.
Parker is a fictional character created by American novelist Donald E. Westlake. A professional robber specializing in large-scale, high-profit crimes, Parker is the main protagonist of 24 of the 28 novels Westlake wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark.
Colonel Sun is a novel by Kingsley Amis published by Jonathan Cape on 28 March 1968 under the pseudonym "Robert Markham". Colonel Sun is the first James Bond continuation novel published after Ian Fleming's 1964 death. Before writing the novel, Amis wrote two other Bond related works, the literary study The James Bond Dossier and the humorous The Book of Bond. Colonel Sun centres on the fictional British Secret Service operative James Bond and his mission to track down the kidnappers of M, his superior at the Secret Service. During the mission he discovers a communist Chinese plot to cause an international incident. Bond, assisted by a Greek spy working for the Russians, finds M on a small Aegean island, rescues him and kills the two main plotters: Colonel Sun Liang-tan and a former Nazi commander, Von Richter.
Christopher Robert Fowler was an English thriller writer. While working in the British film industry he authored fifty novels and short story collections, including the Bryant & May mysteries, which record the adventures of two Golden Age detectives in modern-day London. His awards include the 2015 CWA Dagger in the Library, The Last Laugh Award (twice) and the British Fantasy Award, the Edge Hill Prize and the inaugural Green Carnation Award. He was inducted into the prestigious Detection Club in 2021. His other works include screenplays, video games, graphic novels, audio and stage plays.
James Hadley Chase was an English writer. While his birth name was René Lodge Brabazon Raymond, he was well known by his various pseudonyms, including James Hadley Chase, James L. Docherty, Raymond Marshall, R. Raymond, and Ambrose Grant. He was one of the best known thriller writers of all time. The canon of Chase, comprising 90 titles, earned him a reputation as the king of thriller writers in Europe. He was also one of the internationally best-selling authors, and to date 50 of his books have been made into films.
Queenie Dorothy Leavis was an English literary critic and essayist.
Hortense Calisher was an American writer of fiction and the second female president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Patrick Neate is a British novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and podcaster.
Maggie Mary Gee is an English novelist. In 2012, she became a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Simon Beckett is a British journalist and author. His books, in particular the crime series around forensic anthropologist Dr David Hunter, have sold 21 million copies worldwide, and have had particular success in Germany and Scandinavia.
The Summer Book is a novel written by the Finnish author Tove Jansson in 1972.
James Edmond Macdonnell was an Australian novelist. The covers of his novels declare him "Australia's leading novelist of the Navy" and "Australia's greatest novelist of the sea".
Alan Emlyn Williams was an ex-foreign correspondent, novelist and writer of thrillers.
Jeremy Brooks was a novelist, poet, and dramatist. He is best known for his novels and for his stage adaptations of classic works, particularly a series of Maxim Gorky plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company. His novels were praised for their lyricism and for their "Chekhovian mixture of comic concision and pathos". Anthony Burgess, in The Novel Now said "Jeremy Brooks has come to considerable stature in Jampot Smith and Smith, as Hero: he has created one of the few really large picaresque characters in the post-war novel."
Nancy Richler was a Canadian novelist. Her novels won two international awards and were shortlisted for three others; Richler was also shortlisted for the Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year award in 2013.
Valerie Winifred Grosvenor Myer was a British writer, university teacher, and editor.
Henrietta Keddie (1827–1914) was a prolific Scottish novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Sarah Tytler. Her domestic realism became popular with women, as did her conduct books for girls.
Kimberley Chambers is an English novelist who lives in Essex. She has published sixteen crime novels, including the Mitchells & O'Haras and Butlers series, which are mainly set in Essex or East London. She writes gritty, crime family sagas, laced with her trademark humour, most often from the perspective of the villain. Three of her novels – Payback, Tainted Love and Life of Crime - have been Sunday Times Number One bestsellers.
