First edition. The third in the ‘Boysie Oakes’ series of thrillers by the British thriller writer John Gardner (1926-2007), who had served in the Fleet Air Arm and the Royal Marines during World War II. After the war he studied at St John’s College, Cambridge and then became a priest, but left the Anglican Church a few years later, to embark on a career as a critic and writer. The Liquidator, Gardner’s first novel, was published in 1964 and introduced the anti-hero secret agent Boysie Oakes, who returned in Understrike (1965) and Amber Nine (1966). ¶¶

Reviewing Amber Nine, Julian Symons described Oakes as a ‘successful send-up of Superspy’, summarising the plot as ‘Boysie passes on the job of liquidating a Leftish MP to Soho gangster whose work is anticipated by the Other Side, meets sexy, sinister Klara Thirel [...] who runs a sadist’s school for spies, becomes in the end totally confused between Us and Them’ and concluding that the novel was ‘[q]uite exciting, often funny, occasionally with a slight sense of strain’ (The Sunday Times, 22 May 1966, p. 33). Gardner subsequently wrote six further Boysie Oakes novels (concluding with A Killer for a Song in 1975), and a few years later he was asked by Ian Fleming’s estate to write further James Bond novels, thus initiating a sequence of sixteen new titles, beginning with Gardner’s License Renewed in 1981. ¶¶¶

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