I knew he was quite elderly, but his death wasn’t reported that widely and I only found out some time after the event. He actually died in May 2019. I suppose it wasn’t considered big news, because his books had somehow fallen out of favour in recent years, and most of them are out of print now. I think that’s a great pity, because they are well worth reading for anyone who enjoys the cold war spy genre.
His approach to the spy novel is original, combining as it does a taste for military history combined with cold war intrigue. His first novel, The Labyrinth Makers (1970), opens with the discovery of a wrecked plane from the second world war in the English countryside. Why are the Russians so interested in it so long after the war? This intrusion of the past into the present is perhaps seen to best effect in Other Paths to Glory (1974). Why is someone is prepared to kill to get hold of a piece of first world war trench map? There are two stories here, the tale of a group of soldiers on the western front, and a modern-day espionage plot. They turn out to be connected, the riddle of what happened to the soldiers providing the answer to the main mystery.
Price’s spy master is Dr David Audley, historian and leading light of the counter-intelligence unit known simply as “Research and Development”. He is also a great enthusiast of the works of Rudyard Kipling. He lives in a country house of great antiquity, not unlike Kipling’s Batemans in Sussex. He appears in almost every book, along with a recurring set of characters, but he is not always the main character. Price has a habit of introducing someone completely new at the start of a novel and telling the story from their point of view. The series was not published in chronological order, either. This may be one of the reasons for Price’s comparative lack of popularity. It can’t have been obvious to readers that the books did in fact form a series and I don’t know if his publisher promoted them in a way that made this clear.
Actually, the books that depart from the main chronological sequence and are set entirely in the past are some of the best. The Hour of the Donkey (1980) is the story of two young British officers in France in 1940. It is also a slice of alternative history, with its explanation of why the German tanks stopped short of Dunkirk. Alert readers will spot several characters who appear in the books set later. The ‘44 Vintage (1978) shows the young David Audley in France in 1944, when he becomes a member of a commando unit operating behind enemy lines, along with Jack Butler, who features in many of the other books. This is the start of his intelligence career, the sort of thing that Ian Fleming hinted at in the Bond books but never got round to writing about at length. Soldier No More (1981) is perhaps the closest Price comes to Le Carre, with its complex double agent plot, set just after Suez in 1956 with Audley indulging in a spot of lotus-eating deep in the French countryside.
So why isn’t Price better known today? After all, his novels won prizes and were highly praised at the time. As well as the reasons I have outlined above it may be something to do with the lack of successful film or TV adaptations. The first three novels were televised (under the title Chessgame) but were altered somewhat and Price was unhappy about the casting. A more popular and continuing series might have made Audley a figure to rival Inspector Morse. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone has another go at some point. There is a lot of material there.
Perhaps I’m on the wrong track, though. It’s often difficult to point to one particular reason why a writer’s works fall out of favour. It may be the military history that puts some readers off, but on the other hand I think that is a great deal of the appeal of Price’s writing. Perhaps there was a confusion with his near namesake Anthony Powell. It may simply be the passage of time and the question of availability. When the Cold War came to an end, Price stopped writing new books, about 1990, and his old ones started to drop out of print. If readers can’t find them, they can’t read them. Well, thanks to the internet, secondhand copies are easily obtainable and I believe some of the titles are available electronically. It’s time for an Anthony Price revival.
The Good Reader 