Gavin Lyall

Between 1993 and 1999 Gavin Lyall published four linked novels, Spy's Honour, Flight From Honour, All Honourable Men and Honourable Intentions, following Captain Matthew Ranklin, an army officer whose finances forced him out of his commission, and O'Gilroy, an Irishman with a Fenian past, through the underfunded first years of the British Secret Service Bureau before 1914. The cases run from an Italian senator wanting protection to a Turkish chief holding Baghdad Railway engineers to ransom. Lyall (1932 to 2003) grew up in Birmingham, flew Meteors for the Royal Air Force from 1951 to 1953, read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and edited the student paper Varsity. He directed film for the BBC and was air correspondent of the Sunday Times until The Wrong Side of the Sky (1961) let him write full time. He took the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger in 1964 and again in 1965, and chaired the association in 1966 and 1967. His output stayed small because he checked everything, testing weapons effects in his own kitchen. He was married to the journalist Katharine Whitehorn.