Gavin Lyall

Writer of pacy aviation thrillers in the tradition of John Buchan

Gavin Tudor Lyall, journalist and writer: born Birmingham 9 May 1932; married 1958 Katharine Whitehorn (two sons); died London 18 January 2003.

Gavin Lyall was a writer of superior suspense yarns and tales of high adventure who, especially in the early part of his career, skilfully combined the great storytelling traditions of John Buchan and Dornford Yates with the more contemporary, and technological, riffs of writers such as David Beaty, Nevil Shute and the American Ernest Gann, all of whom utilised their own flying backgrounds in their work; although it was as much his own hands-on experience as a pilot in the RAF that coloured his approach to suspense-novel writing as any strong reliance on his thriller-writing peers.

Lyall wrote aviation thrillers at a time (the 1960s) when flying could still be a hair-raising, seat-of-your-pants experience, and his heroes were tough young men who, in the main, were reasonably honest but could take creative (certainly by no means legal) short cuts if the need arose, and were not at all averse to shooting back if someone was firing at them.

They flew cargoes in rust-bucket planes for dodgy customers to out-of-the-way places with strange-sounding names – epitomised perhaps in his first, highly successful novel, The Wrong Side of the Sky (1961), the plot of which was originally triggered off by a chance conversation with a BEA pilot, while its setting, Greece and the Libyan desert, was drawn from his own honeymoon trip to the Aegean and a journalist exploration of Tripoli. The moral dilemma of the plot is whether the hero, Jack Clay, should join an old wartime friend on the "wrong" (i.e. illegal, but exciting) side of the sky.

The Wrong Side of the Sky was a success not only in the UK but in the far trickier (for the average British writer) American market, to the extent that his American publisher, Scribner, managed to secure first world publication rights to his second book, The Most Dangerous Game (1963). This superb thriller passed the "second book" test triumphantly, with its freelance pilot hero pitted against an obsessive American big game hunter out to bring down the most dangerous prey of all, man. When issued in the UK in 1964 it gained the Crime Writers' Association's "Silver Dagger" award, and was also picked as one of the main monthly choices of the prestigious Book Society.

With his next book, Midnight Plus One (1965), Lyall triumphantly went, in genre terms, one better, securing the CWA's coveted "Gold Dagger". An action-packed "chase" thriller, it maintains a cracking pace throughout as its hero Lewis Cane tries to get his millionaire employer to a vital meeting in Liechtenstein across Europe by plane and car, pursued by assorted villains as well as the French police, who want the millionaire on a trumped-up rape charge.

Lyall continued to write riveting adventure yarns throughout the 1960s and into the following decade, though at times softening the aviation angle to present a richer mix of plot backgrounds – in Venus with Pistols (1969) smuggling and art fraud are central to the plot; the hero of Blame the Dead (1972) pursues the killer of a man he's just met across northern Europe. However, following a five-year lay-off he changed direction as a writer, virtually starting his career again.

Gavin Lyall was born in Birmingham in 1932, the son of an accountant. He was educated at King Edward VI School in Birmingham, and in 1951 was called up for his National Service. Joining the RAF, he became a Pilot Officer. After serving for two years he attended Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read English.

After a stint in the influential photo-journalism weekly Picture Post, he joined the BBC as a film director for television, then returned to print journalism with a reporting job on The Sunday Times, later becoming the paper's aviation editor (1959-62). Having written The Wrong Side of the Sky in his spare time, he was spotted by the critic and novelist Peter Green, who had a legendary nose for new talent. Green turned him over to the publisher Hodder & Stoughton (for whom he was then a consultant editor), where Lyall remained, apart from a couple of essays into non-fiction, for over 40 years – until, indeed, the day he died. He was fortunate, too, in his marriage to the journalist Katharine Whitehorn, another (for a high-profile writer) unusually long-term and happy affair.

In the late 1970s, Lyall was asked to create "a thriller set in Whitehall" for television. This in the end came to nothing (oddly, none of Lyall's very cinematic thrillers has ever been filmed), but having researched in depth and become fascinated by the intricate manoeuvrings and political power struggles of government, he turned the mass of material into a novel, featuring, for him, a new style of hero, Harry Maxim, a Special Services major assigned to No 10 who was a rather cooler dude than the rough-hewn heroes of his earlier books.

Four novels appeared throughout the 1980s, starting with The Secret Servant in 1980, before Lyall decided to change tack yet again, perhaps dissatisfied with what seemed like an increasing blandness of plot-line in the novels. In 1993 he hit on the ingenious notion of chronicling the very early days of the modern secret service; of returning, in fact, to the 1900s as a setting for a series of thrillers.

This was not a new idea – John Gardner's densely plotted "Secret Families" trilogy had preceded, in the 1980s. But whereas Gardner had created a sprawling, multi-character saga, mainly made up of upper class nobs, Lyall concentrated on the seamier aspects of the newly conspiratorial world. His two main characters, Captain Matthew Ranklin and Conal O'Gilroy, are a bankrupt and an ex-Fenian respectively; both move through this pre-Great War society waging war as best they can on the King's enemies, all on a pitiful shoestring budget, treated like hopeless amateurs (which they are) and despised by their gentlemanly bosses.

There is certainly strong evidence to show that Gavin Lyall was thoroughly enjoying his last incarnation. The plots are at one and the same time both complex and startling – in Honourable Intentions (1999) the ill-assorted pair have to investigate the case of the young American anarchist who claims (shock! horror!) to be George V's natural son, and thus heir to the throne.

Even so Lyall's place in crime fiction's hall of fame must surely mainly depend on those wonderfully energetic and pacy yarns he rattled out, to so much acclaim, back in the 1960s.

Jack Adrian