What drew Jack Higgins to the crime novel in the mid-Sixties? Secret agents and tales of high adventure in dangerous foreign parts dominated popular fiction, and he had proved his worth in both those fields. The crime novel was something different to the thriller, often referred to as a ‘detective story’ or a ‘whodunit’, where part of the pleasure for the reader was to guess who the murderer was (there was usually a murder) before the fictional detective did. In the thriller, of course, it was not what had happened before that propelled the story but what was going to happen next – how was the hero going to triumph or, indeed, survive?

Unlike the devil-may-care adventurers who populated thrillers, policemen were restrained by law and legal procedure as to what they could do when confronted with the villain of the piece. In Britain, the police were not usually armed, although well-publicised criminal gangs of the period certainly were and were not afraid to use violence in robberies or in territorial disputes with rival gangs; plus there was a growing drugs problem.

How did fictional British policemen deal with all this? The answer is probably not very well. Those future ‘queens of crime’ P.D. James and Ruth Rendell were only just starting out and the British crime novel was going through a rather lethargic period, certainly compared to the boom in British thrillers. If anything, American crime novels were now more popular than the domestic product, especially those featuring the resourceful private eye acting independently of the police, a figure notably absent (apart from a very few examples) in British crime-writing.

On television, the British police were depicted with either a warm glow of nostalgia, as in the evergreen Dixon of Dock Green, or with stiff-upper-lip reverence for British values of decency and fair play as personified by Commander George Gideon in Gideon’s Way or Detective Superintendent Lockhart in No Hiding Place. True, there was an inclusion of harsh realism in new Sixties’ shows such as Z-Cars but the violent action, guns and car chases of The Sweeney were still a decade away.

If anything, Jack Higgins was ahead of the curve with his Nick Miller trilogy, for here was a hero who could have stepped straight out of the pages of one of his thrillers. All crime novels had to be exciting in some way, if only in the competition between detective and reader to discover ‘whodunit’; but Jack Higgins wrote them as thrillers, packing them with incident, violence and action that could only be sorted out by a resourceful, supremely confident detective unafraid to follow his hunches.