who sung the song mr kiss kiss bang bang

Mike Ripley, for anyone who doesn’t know, is the leading historian of the British thriller - I wouldn’t limit him like that, but since that is the subject of this work I will– an astute critic who not only writes about the genre, but who went to the trouble in the recent past of hunting down many of these writers, often thought dead, and bringing some of their work back in print.

Though Ripley wisely chooses to mark his territory with two hallmarks of that era, 1953’s publication of Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel by Ian Fleming, and the 1970’s publication of prolific Jack Higgins first mega-hit The Eagle Has Landed, the book begins before Fleming and ends with the rise of the American spy novelists such as Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry. Now added to that list is Mike Ripley’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (the title taken from a dismissive remark by Ian Fleming about his own work) a work which wisely narrows its focus to the Golden Age of the modern British Men’s thriller, roughly 1950 to 1980.

Ellery Queen’s Queen’s Quorum Richard Usborne’s The Clubland Heroes, about the between the war works of Buchan, Yates, Sapper McNeile Julian Symons’ first critical study of the genre Ron Goulart’s essays in the anthology The Hard-Boiled Dicks Kingsley Amis’s A James Bond Dossier Barzun and Taylor’s A Catalog of Crime the oft quoted, in these pages, 1001 Midnights by Pronzini and Mueller et al - these are just a few examples. We can all name texts in the broad genre covered on this blog that were like that going back to ur-texts like Howard Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure and Vincent Starrett’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Just as there are novels that appear that seemingly had to be written, and characters whose time has come to emerge, there are books about books, even in the genres, that appear and the proper reaction to them is why wasn’t this book always here?

MIKE RIPLEY – Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed.

Who sung the song mr kiss kiss bang bang