Ted Allbeury

Theodore Edward le Bouthhillier Allbeury (October 24, 1917, Stockport, Cheshire, UK – December 4, 2005, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, UK) was a successful British author who wrote spy thrillers under the name of Ted Allbeury. He was a foundry worker and draftsman before World War, when he became an intelligence officer from 1940 through 1947 in the Special Operations Executive, frequently going behind enemy lines. He attained the rank of lieutenant colonel, running agents during the Cold War in East Germany, and gained a thorough knowledge of the gritty reality of the world of real-life espionage. After running a pirate radio station and working in advertising, he took to writing relatively late in life, not publishing his first book, A Choice of Enemies, until 1973, when he was 56. After that, however, he was both prolific and a critical success, at least in Great Britain. Although he eventually wrote over 40 novels and was well-regarded in England, he was virtually unknown in the United States. His books are all tough-minded, with few attempts at humor, and although they generally come to conclusions that are satisfactory to Western readers of their era, they frequently end with either the protagonist or, more frequently, the female interest, dead. The noted writer and critic H. R. F. Keating summed up Allbeury as "a writer who can handle suffering, make us feel the deep misery of tragedy, and even, because he is a writer, a novelist, make us realise that the tragedy is a part of a greater whole. There are not so many others in the suspense field who can do this."

Sources

• Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly, St. Martins Press, New York, 1980, ISBN 0-312-82417-3

See also

• Crime fiction/Catalogs