Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang by Mike Ripley

Author:Mike Ripley [Ripley, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

The Eagle Has Landed, Collins, 1975

Whatever the myths, the reality was that The Eagle Has Landed was a stunning success story. The American edition appeared first, on 28 May 1975, instantly hitting the New York Times bestseller list and staying there for thirty-five weeks. By the time the UK edition was launched, on 8 September, the book was already well-known and highly anticipated, as was the film version, already underway and starring Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and the two Donalds – Sutherland and Pleasence. A cheap hardback edition was published by Book Club Associates in early 1976 followed by the first of many, many paperback editions, but by then Jack Higgins was house-hunting in the Channel Islands to avoid the extreme 83 per cent rate of income tax then in force in Britain.

If The Eagle Has Landed propelled Jack Higgins into the same tax bracket (and tax exile) as Alistair MacLean, then his next novel, published in August 1976 even as the Eagle was flying off the shelves of bookshops, put him even more firmly in MacLean territory: on the high seas in wartime.

Storm Warning, set in 1944, was the story of an epic, 5,000-mile voyage by a vintage German ship – a three-mast ‘barquentine’ – from Brazil to the supposed safety of its home port of Kiel, which has, to add spice to the adventure, a party of nuns as passengers. The main twist here is that it is a German vessel trying to cross enemy-infested waters rather than the stock scenario of an Allied ship trying to evade a wolf pack of U-boats, and with a wartime setting and Higgins’ name on the cover so soon after The Eagle Has Landed, the book couldn’t avoid being a bestseller. Naturally, the film rights were snapped up, but oddly no blockbuster appeared and details of the proposed production are difficult to come by even, it seems, for the author. As Higgins himself recalled: ‘Storm Warning was a huge bestseller. It was going to be a film spectacular; big stars, incredible budget and all that. The project was about three weeks away [from principal photography] and then just like that, for any number of reasons, they completely dropped the whole idea! I still ended up with a small fortune from the cancelled project.’10

The author probably shed few tears over the non-appearance of a film of Storm Warning; he was too busy fulfilling a two-book contract to another publisher and for both books he stayed in the arena of World War II. In The Valhalla Exchange (1977) the ‘good men fighting for a bad cause’ are Finnish ski-troops aiding Nazi bigwig Martin Bormann’s escape from Berlin in May 1945. To Catch A King (1979) revolved around Nazi plans to kidnap the Duke of Windsor for propaganda purposes, the role of the ‘good German’ being taken by SS Foreign Intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg. For contractual reasons, both books appeared under the name Harry Patterson rather than Jack Higgins, but readers were left in no doubt that this was the author of The Eagle Has Landed.

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