PRICE, Anthony

"a tangled web of partial information, misinformation and hidden agendas serves to obfuscate the truth of the matter"

Having obtained a degree in history from Merton College, Oxford, Price joined the Oxford Times as a reporter. In 1954 he was asked to write a book review  -“only a children’s book but it’s by a local author” he was told.  The author turned out to be J R R Tolkien, the book was The Fellowship of the Ring and Price was the first journalist to interview him about it.   This was an auspicious start to a long career as a reviewer, and he became highly regarded as a commentator, particularly in the genre of crime fiction.  His reputation was such that in 1970 Gollancz were happy to publish his first novel, The Labyrinth Makers, which received ecstatic reviews and won the Crime Writer’s Association Silver Dagger award.  The book introduced Dr David Audley and Colonel Jack Butler, respectively an academic and a solid military man working for British counter-intelligence, who were to feature in many of Price’s 19 novels over the next 19 years. One reviewer wrote of the series that they were “in the upper IQ spy story bracket” and were both “ingenious and intelligent”.

He remained in Oxford, juggling careers as a newspaper editor, book reviewer and author of the Audley/Butler novels.  He was an enthusiast of the early Bond books of Ian Fleming and the spy novels of John Le Carre, although he found it a source of wry amusement that his favourite Le Carré novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, was pipped to the 1974 Gold Dagger award  by his own Other Paths to Glory.

With the publication of The Memory Trap in 1989 he retired both from the Oxford Times and from writing fiction, which occasioned protest from reviewers, readers and Gollancz alike, but Price was adamant and went off to live quietly in the Oxfordshire countryside.  1989 was also, coincidentally, the year in which the Berlin Wall came down and Price was one of 4 noted crime writers (the others being Eric Ambler, Julian Symons and Reginald Hill) photographed posing in front of that iconic symbol of the cold war spy novel.