Our Man in Camelot: quintessential Anthony Price

Anthony Price’s thriller Our Man in Camelot is quintessential Price, as if all his other David Audley novels had been boiled down into one concentrated example.

Take one Cold War, add the British secret service, flavour with a military history puzzle (King Arthur and the Battle of Badon), mix in long, complicated scenes of dialogue, scatter on top only the slightest smattering of physical action and round off with a denouement involving one man bravely risking their life in front of a sniper.

Price’s novels, published in the 1970s and 1980s, were rather like the HBO TV series of the 21st century – long-running plots across the novels, involving richly developed characters and the sort of super-complicated dialogue that has you going back to read again and again to tease out all the nuances.

Our Man in Camelot is a fantastic example of his range, though those with more knowledge of American slang than me apparently find some of the attempts to use it inauthentic and grate a little.

Buy Our Man in Camelot by Anthony Price here.