Anthony Price's Books

Biography

Anthony Price (1928 – 2019) was born in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. Tragically his mother passed when he was only eight, and his aunt raised him. His father, who had worked in India, died in 1942, leaving Price and his elder brother orphans.

Education

Price was educated at the King’s School Canterbury and evacuated to Cornwall during World War II. Shortly after the end of the war, Price won a scholarship to study at Oxford. His education was interrupted by National Service. Price served in the British Army from 1949 to1952, becoming the army’s youngest Captain. Eventually, he read history at Merton College and was particularly interested in the First World War and the Roman Empire.

Price decided to stay in Oxford and, by his admission, drifted into journalism, working for the Oxford Times and its sister paper, the Oxford Mail. He stayed there for the rest of his working life, rising to become the editor. As a former colleague said, “The Oxford Times was the voice of Oxford, and the voice of the Oxford Times was Tony Price.”

A Professional Critic

He worked as a sub-editor and a court reporter in his early days at the paper. One day he was asked to review a children’s book by a local author that one reviewer had scorned as being boring. Price went on to interview the author, an Oxford don J.R.R. Tolkien, the book he’d written was The Fellowship of the Ring. So began Price’s career as a reviewer.

“Unfortunately, he asked for the proof back! Otherwise, I’d be in the South of France now.” (Existential Ennui)

Price’s boss wanted him to review crime fiction, but his interest was in military history, so he managed to negotiate a deal to review both. As a reviewer, he didn’t pull his punches, saying of Ian Fleming’s Dr No, “the villain was 30 years out of date and belonged more to the era of Fu Manchu”.

His success as a crime reviewer led to an enquiry from the publisher, Gollancz, if he would like to write a history of crime fiction. Price turned down the offer but countered that he did have an idea for a crime novel himself. Two years later, in 1970, Gollancz published The Labyrinth Makers. It went on to win a Silver Dagger.

Writing Career

From 1970 to 1989, Price published twenty books, almost one every year. Nineteen of them were tales of the cold war, the twentieth and last, The Eyes of the Fleet, was a “popular history of frigates and frigate captains”.

“That’s what, I think, an ordinary, workaday author does – not a great writer who gets a huge breakthrough and can afford to wait a few years and wait a few years. Most of us are like peasant women: they have one child a year, each must produce or go to jail!” (Existential Ennui)

Price became a respected novelist. His fifth novel, Other Paths to Glory, won the CWA Gold dagger in 1974 and the Martin Beck award from the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy in 1978. It was also shortlisted in the CWA’s fiftieth anniversary “Dagger of Daggers”, arguably making it one of the best crime fiction books in fifty years.

He became a member of the Detection Club, an association of crime novelists that has included Agatha Christy, G.K. Chesterton and H.R.F. Keating in its ranks. Membership mortally wounded his career as a reviewer as he began to meet the people whose novels he had been reviewing.

“What stopped me from reviewing was meeting everybody, meeting people… who I thought were delightful but I didn’t like their books much! And then I met people who I didn’t like, but I thought they’d written super books! And that’s what cracks a reviewer! Well, it cracked me.” (Existential Ennui)

Fascinated by Military History

The storylines of Anthony Price’s books invariably blend two plots, a spy mystery and a tale of military history. Other Paths to Glory played on the Battle of the Somme whilst War Game reflected the antics of the Cavaliers and Roundheads. The American Civil War, World War 2, and Roman and Arthurian battles received the same treatment. Tomorrow’s Ghost was an exception, drawing on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

“‘The past lies in wait to ambush the present’, and that I suppose is my favourite theme: the excavation of an event in the fairly recent past to establish the truth about a present mystery or problem, the action often being set against some more distant historical event.” (Existential Ennui)

The Iron Curtain

The novels are all set in the same fictional counter-espionage organisation, based on MI5. He tells them from various perspectives with different lead protagonists but with a cast of reoccurring characters. They are all set against the Cold War and are full of moral ambiguities.

“I take the view… that ‘Our Side,’ with all its warts and all the character defects of my heroes and heroines, is good and ‘Their Side,’ whatever virtues they may have, is bad. Of course, things are never quite so simple as that in practice, but that, for me, is where it begins and ends.” (The Telegraph)

In 1989 Price retired from the Oxford Times and the Berlin Wall fell. Either of these may have been the reason why that year also saw the publication of his last fictional novel.

“I thought the dangerous moment would come when Communism started to fail. I was entirely wrong! It ended with a whimper, not a bang! But I was terrified it was going to end with a bang.” (Existential Ennui)

Thrillers for Grown-ups

Price’s style was intelligent and ingenious. The Guardian deemed that “Mr Price was more than holding his own in the upper IQ spy story bracket”. The New York Times claimed, “Mr Price writes thrillers for grown-ups”, and H. R. F. Keating suggested, “If think’s your thing, here’s richness in plot, dialogue, implications.”

Despite the accolades, Anthony Price never make the big sales league, though he appeared to be accepting of that fact.

“The problem was, as my accountant said, ‘Not enough sex and violence!’ But you can only write what you can write.” (Existential Ennui)