Georgette Heyer is best remembered today as having been virtually the inventor of the Regency Romance genre but she also wrote a dozen or so detective novels. Her fourth detective novel was Death in the Stocks, published in 1935.

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Death of a Citizen, published in 1960, was the first of Donald Hamilton’s many Matt Helm spy novels. The character is better remembered these days from the four 1960s movies staring Dean Martin as the super-cool super-spy.

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Your Turn, Mr Moto, published in 1936, was the first of John P. Marquand’s Mr Moto novels. Mr Moto is better remembered today from the film series with Peter Lorre as the Japanese master detective.

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William P. McGivern’s novel The Big Heat was the source for Fritz Lang’s classic 1953 film noir of the same title. McGivern enjoyed considerable success as a novelist and screenwriter in various genres.

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This Girl For Hire, published in 1956, was the first of eleven Honey West crime thrillers written by Gloria and Forrest E. Fickling under the name G. G. Fickling. The Honey West character is probably better known these days from the 1960s Honey West TV series starring Anne Francis in the title role.

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Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller novel Rogue Male deals with a plot to kill HItler. Only it’s not actually a plot, it’s more of a solo mission that at first seems to have no real motive.

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If there’s one thing I love even more than spy novels it’s pre-First World War spy novels. E. Phillips Oppenheim’s The Double Traitor was actually published in 1915 but it’s set in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of war in August 1914.

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Eric Ambler’s 1938 novel Epitaph for a Spy is a perfect example of his distinctive approach to spy fiction. Ambler’s heroes were not professional spies but ordinary people caught up in the dangerous web of espionage. They do not thereby metamorphose into brave and noble heroes. They remain ordinary people, struggling desperately to survive, blundering through as best they can.

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Robert Bloch is best-known as the author of Psycho. He stated his career as a disciple of H. P. Lovecraft but quickly established his own style. He wrote science fiction, horror and crime fiction but his trademark was always his interest in what makes people tick - especially people with a weakness of some kind.

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Dornford Yates (1885-1960) was one of the most popular British authors of thrillers in the years between the two world wars. In fact Yates, Sapper and John Buchan he could be said to be the big three of the thriller genre at that period. All three authors are unjustly neglected today, Yates even more so than Sapper and Buchan.

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