Ostara Publishing

Barry Forshaw Review

The Grosvenor Square Goodbye

Francis Clifford

Ostara/Top Notch Thrillers

Who does one write to in order to propose a knighthood? Whoever it is, that individual should be bombarded with requests (at least from thriller aficionados) for Mike Ripley to be bending the knee – not for his services to genre writing as a practitioner (adroit though his work in the field may be), but for his sterling efforts with Ostara/Top Notch Thrillers in making available once again some gems from the crime/thriller field’s glorious past – as is the case with this very welcome reappearance for the underrated Francis Clifford’s The Grosvenor Square Goodbye, another of that master thriller writer’s perfectly tuned offerings, this one involving the after-effects of a killing in London’s West End (in the vicinity of the American embassy) by an unbalanced sniper. Courtesy of Ostara/Top Notch Thrillers, Mr Ripley has dusted off a Francis Clifford title before (with the splendid Time is an Ambush) and – largely speaking – this second novel captures all the brio of the earlier reissue. A warning, though: as so often with offerings from this enterprising company, modern thriller writing will seem thin and etiolated to you after reading a book such as The Grosvenor Square Goodbye.

BARRY FORSHAW

Editor of  The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (2007) and  British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia (2009).