The Kinsmen

by William Haggard

Acceptable Hardcover Cassell & Co Ltd. Acceptable. Hardcover. First Edition. 1974.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

William Haggard (born Croydon 11 August 1907, died Frinton-on-Sea 27 October 1993) was the pseudonym of Richard Henry Michael Clayton, the son of the Rev. Henry James Clayton and Mabel Sarah Clayton. He 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 the urbane Colonel Charles Russell of the fictional Security Executive, (clearly based on the actual MI5 or Security Service), who moves easily and gracefully along Snow's Corridors of Power in Whitehall. 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.

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not one of William Haggard's popular (though now long out of print) Charles Russell series but still very much a Haggard book. The stakes were pretty small in this one so the tension was not as high as usual but the book was still filled with many unique observations and his distinct point of view.