Forbes, Bryan

(British, 1926– )

Since 1959 Forbes has combined a career as a novelist with his work as a film director and writer of screenplays. Begin with A Song at Twilight (1989), which opens during a period of critical instability in Britain. The socialist Prime Minister finds himself and his government threatened by an embittered MI5 officer armed with knowledge of links with Soviet Russia. In The Endless Game (1986) the murder of an old woman in residential care begins an investigation that leads British secret services into a web of treachery in high places. A man believed dead is sighted in Venice at the opening of The Twisted Playground (1993). The explanation opens onto the shadowy, brutal world of paedophile rings and child pornography.

Gerald Seymour, Len Deighton, and John Le Carré. See SPY  DH