Jack Higgins’s writing routine was said to start with dinner at his favourite Italian restaurant in Jersey, followed by writing through the night until dawn, when he rounded off the working day with a glass of champagne and bacon and eggs. With his estimated lifetime sales of 250 million copies, his routine seemed to work.
Len Deighton, on the other hand, takes a more austere view of his craft, arguing that the biggest dangers for a writer are alcohol and praise. He has a weakness for writers’ gadgets, though — in 1968, he leased an IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter weighing 200lbs. The front window of his house had be to removed in order to deliver it. That’s true dedication.
Mike Ripley sprinkles the anecdotes through his account of the postwar British thriller with a generous hand. The book is the story of his love affair with a genre that goes back to his adolescence.
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