At the insistence of his fashionista wife, the currently heavily pregnant Amy May, streetwise chancer Fitzroy Maclean Angel has joined Rudgard & Blugden Confidential Investigations, a previously all-female private detective agency – although the vintage crime paperbacks he refers to as ‘training manuals’ still haven’t sold him on the idea of having to go to work every day. His latest assignment is seemingly simple – to track down an elderly client’s long-lost first love – but before long he is up to his eyes in problems, including dealing with a teenage internet scammer, being kidnapped on a motor-cruiser and getting caught up in a shoot-out between two deranged OAPs …
Telos Publishing is proud to present another of its reissues of Mike Ripley’s acclaimed series of comic crime novels – complete with a new, specially-written introduction by the author.
‘England’s funniest crime writer’ – Marcel Berlins, The Times.
‘Street wisdom, weird and wonderful information and very, very funny’ – Michael Dibdin.
282pp. B-format paperback novel.
ISBN: 978-1-84385-127-1
Published 6 January 2019
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Ripley is the author of 23 novels, including the award-winning Angel series of comedy thrillers, a dozen short stories and the non-fiction memoir Surviving a Stroke. He was a scriptwriter on the BBC series Lovejoy and the crime fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph and the Birmingham Post, reviewing more than 950 novels over 18 years. In the 1990s he was the co-editor, with Maxim Jakubowski, of the three Fresh Blood anthologies, showcasing new crime-writing talent such as Ian Rankin, Lee Child, Ken Bruen and Denise Mina. He has appeared at many literary festivals and conventions, developed a creative crime writing course for Cambridge University and devised and produced ‘An Audience With …’ stage shows for Colin Dexter and Minette Walters.
After a 25-year career in journalism and public relations, latterly for the Brewers’ Society, he became an archaeologist specialising in Romano-British sites in East Anglia until he suffered a stroke at the age of 50. He sat on the government’s Stroke Strategy Committee and currently supports both the Stroke Association and the Blood Pressure Association.
He wrote the monthly column Getting Away With Murder for the online Shots Magazine, is part of the obituary writing team at the Guardian, and is the series editor for the imprints Top Notch Thrillers and Ostara Crime. Working with the Margery Allingham Society, he completed the novel left unfinished on the death of Youngman Carter in 1969, which was published in 2014 as Mr Campion’s Farewell. Three more ‘continuation’ novels featuring Allingham’s famous detective Albert Campion followed, with a fourth due to appear in 2018.
His non-fiction ‘reader’s history’ of the boom in British thrillers, 1953-75, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was published in 2017 to great acclaim.