Anthony Price

You may not have ever heard of Anthony Price. I had not heard of him until one day in the late 80's - he was still writing then I later found out - when I happened to come across a couple of his books in the Mysterious Book Store when it was in the west side of midtown NYC.

I picked up his first one, "The Labyrinth Makers", and his fifth, "Other Paths to Glory". I was instantly hooked. The series, eventually 19 in all, was about a British spy organization much like the real MI5. It featured an agent, David Audley, with a deep knowledge of history as well as being a very good spy. Audley was in each book, but oftentimes he was secondary to others. But he always played a significant part in the climax or conclusion. At least in the 11 books I was able to collect.

  I still look for his books whenever I go to a used bookstore, but to date have not been able to find any of the remaining eight books. He wrote like the spy genre of the day, but one peculiarity I found when I read him was that he wrote less about describing the scenes around the characters; only the minimum to get a picture for the reader. He spent most of his writing efforts on what the characters were thinking and what they thought the other characters were thinking. At first, I had trouble following the storylines but soon was able to understand where the story was going.

Price got his start in writing for a local newspaper and once was given the chance to interview a man who had written a book but was not having any success getting it reviewed. Price did the interview; the man gave him the book to read; Price read it and gave it a very good writ-up. The man let him read the drafts of his second and third books of the series as well. It was a very lucky day for J.R.R. Tolkien.

Anthony Price was born in 1928 and died in 2019. I missed his obituary.