William Haggard

William Haggard, August 11, 1907—1993, the pseudonym of Richard Henry Michael Clayton, was an English writer of fictional spy thrillers set in the 1960s through the 1980s, or, as the writer H. R. F. Keating called them, "action novels of international power." Like C. P. Snow, he was a quintessentially British Establishment figure who had been a civil servant in India, and his books vigorously put forth his perhaps idiosyncratic points of view. The principle character in most of his novels is Colonel Charles Russell of the fictional Security Executive. During the years of the fictional spy mania initially begun by the James Bond stories Haggard was considered by most critics to be at the very top of the field. Keating says that "...the books were fore-runners in a trend that was noticeable in both British and American crime writing from the late 1960's onwards, a turning of the tide to flow to the right. After the revolution carried out in the late 1930s by Eric Ambler in the espionage field... a revolution which swung crime writing generally to the left... there had been little change. With the Haggard books the first signs of a silent swing began to show."

Sources

• Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly, St. Martins Press, New York, 1980, ISBN 0-312-82417-3

See also

• Catalog of prominent mystery writers