Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

The eagle has croaked

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    The eagle has croaked

    Library and charity book staple Jack Higgins has died.

    #2
    Bizarrely Look North reported this as 'Newcastle-born...' thriller writer...
    Since they'd never claimed him before, I looked up his early life. About the same as 'Dumbarton-born David Byrne' in the ​​​Daily Record of my youth, then.

    Comment


      #3
      I must have read The Eagle has Landed about 3 or 4 times in my teens. It was strange how successfully he made the German infiltrators the heroes of the book.

      I never read the sequel and I don't think I've read any of his other (looks up list) 84 books. (84?)

      Comment


        #4
        I read quite a few of his books in my early teens. My grandmother was a member of the Book of the Month Club, or something similar, so had a steady supply to see me through the long holidays in the back end of nowhere (as Pembrokeshire seemed at the time). His heroes were often IRA men, gangsters and the like, supplied with explanations of why they were an old fashioned, honourable variety of same rather than the nasty modern kind that you might see on the news. He produced some reasonable page turners if functional entertainment was your level of expectation from books.

        I picked a late (21st century) effort of his up from a station book table once out of curiosity and it was shockingly bad, not even a competent retread of his earlier stuff.

        Comment


          #5
          I've just remembered that a fictionalised Martin McGuinness used to pop up in the IRA adjacent stories. Throughout his subsequent career he never quite escaped being the guy out of the Jack Higgins books for me.

          Comment


            #6
            I mean, The Eagle Has Flown was right there.

            Comment

            Working...
            X