Cover

Epigraph

When the times change, all men change with them. So many of both the friends and critics of the police talk as if police constables were not men.

—WITNESS, ROYAL COMMISSION ON POLICE POWERS

To the ordinary soldier, the battle is his own small part of the front.

—GENERAL GRANT

INTRODUCTION

The name Jack Higgins will be eternally associated with the 1975 bestselling novel (and film) The Eagle Has Landed. But spectacularly successful as it was, it was anything but an overnight sensation, as Jack Higgins had already earned his spurs as an author guaranteed to provide action-packed, fast-paced thrillers.

Before that famous eagle landed, Jack Higgins had written – under several pen-names – 35 novels, and has written 37 more since then, proving beyond doubt his legendary status as a born story-teller.

His career as a novelist began in 1959 when, as a 29-year-old teacher with a growing family to support, he sold his first book, Sad Wind from the Sea, a treasure-hunt adventure set in Macao and China, for the princely advance of £75. He never looked back and regularly produced two books a year, often set in exotic locations, always providing red-blooded – though far from perfect – heroes and suitably nasty villains, with the action always moving at a furious pace. He used the pen-names Martin Fallon, James Graham and Hugh Marlowe, as well as his given name, Harry Patterson. In an early novel (Cry of the Hunter) he was suitably self-depreciating when the main character is revealed to be a writer and admits: ‘I write thrillers under two different names … All they do successfully is pay the bills and keep me in whisky.’

From similar modest beginnings, Jack Higgins’ fan base grew inexorably during the 1960s, a golden decade for British authors of adventure thrillers, with novels by Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes and Desmond Bagley regularly topping the international bestseller lists. Jack Higgins was soon to join their company. As it was also a decade when relatively few readers had travelled abroad unless in the armed forces, adventure stories set in locations such as China, Albania, Tibet, the Greek islands, Greenland, the Bahamas and the Brazilian jungle provided an additional touch of the foreign and dangerously exotic. He also offered a variety of settings, from wartime Egypt, Portugal, Austria and the Channel Islands, to Prohibition America, Mexico in the 1920s, Ireland in the nineteenth century and, treading where few other thriller writers dared to tread, contemporary Northern Ireland with its legacy of sectarian violence.