Anthony Price (1938- )

Anthony Price was born in Hertfordshire, England. From 1947 to 1949, he was in the British Army where he rose to the rank of captain. He studied at Merton College, Oxford where he obtained a MA in 1952. In 1953, he married Ann Stone with whom he had three children, two sons and one daughter. From 1952 to 1988, he was a journalist with the Westminster Press and from 1972 to 1988, he was an editor with the Oxford Times.

His books are espionage books, or something; not precisely mysteries. Whatever they are, they're just wonderful. They're highly intellectual, not primarily action-oriented. They're not particularly violent, though a certain number of people do get killed on stage. There's usually a historical tie-in of some sort, from Troy to WWII; it's usually being used by one side to try to distract or confuse the other side in the pursuit of the real problem, and it's often not clear until the end, if then, just who was using it on whom, either.

Nice technical thing: All these books take place in and around an (imaginary, I believe) department of British Intelligence (which, at least in these books, isn't an oxymoron). They have lots of characters in common. There's one character, Dr. David Audley, who appears in all of them. But he's not the central or viewpoint character in all of the books, and people who are the central character in some of the books are not immortal, even in their own books (not too big a spoiler, I think). It's also very interesting seeing the same characters from different viewpoints.

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