Captain Matthew Ranklin Spy Thrillers by Gavin Lyall (1-4)
Requirements: epub reader, 1.7 mb 2023 Reissue
Overview: Though he was not a prolific writer, attributing his slow pace to an obsession with technical accuracy, he published seventeen novels over a forty-year career span and mastered the genre of the espionage thriller.
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
1. Spy’s Honour – London, 1910. Britain’s spies are a laughing stock. Even the King calls them ‘the worst in the world’.
The country desperately needs to become a force in the shadowy world of espionage, and so the Secret Service Bureau is formed.
One of the first moves the Bureau makes is to hire Captain Matthew Ranklin, fresh from war in the Balkans and reeling from his genteel family’s fall from grace.
Ranklin’s role is to lead from the front, to take care of tricky matters on the ground. But with no spy’s handbook for guidance Ranklin will have to learn on the job.
In Spy’s Honour, Ranklin – with the help of the Irish rebel and bullion robber Conall O’Gilroy – writes the rules of this new game for himself, while around him the lamps of Europe flicker in the winds of oncoming war.
2. Flight From Honour – The Italian senator wants the fledgling British Secret Service Bureau to offer him protection from assassins, an aeroplane for the Italian army and the means of fuelling a strike in a Trieste shipyard.
Newly recruited spies Captain Matthew Ranklin of the shires and Conall O’Gilroy of the Irish backstreets are given the job.
But Ranklin and O’Gilroy quickly discover there is a hidden agenda behind their orders.
O’Gilroy realises he has been recruited for a flight which could accidentally change the course of history, while Ranklin finds himself languishing in a Trieste jail trying to solve a puzzle on which his life could depend.
With Europe on the brink of war, the fate of the continent depends on how far the two men are prepared to go – honourably or otherwise.
3. All Honourable Men – When a Turkish bandit holds engineers building the Baghdad railway to ransom, Britain is secretly relieved as the railway threatens the precious Persian Gulf oilfields.
Pretending to help, the Foreign Office sends the notorious Lady Kelso, once the lover of the bandit-in-chief, with Captain Matthew Ranklin and Conall O’Gilroy of the fledgling Secret Service Bureau as ‘diplomatic protection’.
A journey on the Kaiser’s private train to the bandit stronghold leads the group through ambush, betrayal, murder and bombardment. For there are others – German, Turkish and French – honourably putting their own countries’ interests above everything else.
In the misty Turkish mountains, all Ranklin’s military experience and O’Gilroy’s back-streets savvy will be tested to the full.
4. Honourable Intentions – London, 1914. An American anarchist is about to be extradited to France on charges of blowing up a government building.
But when he claims he is the illegitimate son of the king and threatens to tell the world if he is handed over to the French, the British authorities are thrown into a panic.
It is common knowledge that King George V kept a mistress in Portsmouth when he was a young naval officer. But the revelation that the King might have a secret child would be devastating.
This delicate affair requires the skills of Britain’s recently formed Secret Service Bureau and Captain Matthew Ranklin and Conall O’Gilroy are brought in.
As Ranklin begins to expose the truth behind the concealed facts, he realises there’s no fire without an awful lot of smoke.
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