Manning Coles

>> "Which means," said the representative from the Foreign Office, summing up, "that when the Sultan, who is over eighty, dies, we shall not only be thrown out of Qathusn lock, stock and barrel, and the British-American capital which has been sunk in developing oil fields, lost, but also we shall have a rabid enemy at the very gates of Aden, who may very well succeed in alienating the whole of the Trucial Coast and all the other oil States in the Gulf." >There seems to be one faint hope. The late Crown Prince Achmed, murdered at an Embassy reception, is thought to have been secretly married. There may be a grandson of the Sultan living. If so, M.I.5 must find him. >So begins Tommy Hambledon's craziest adventure ever, which takes him in a mad race against time and enemy agents, to Paris, across France and into North Africa, to find a Prince and to avert a revolution.

From inside the book jacket: "Young George Micklejohn managed to have a British Cabinet Minister for a father, to cross the East-West German frontier, to get his hands on some top-secret Russian plans -- and to disappear. Which was when Tommy Hambleton of the Foreign Office's Intelligence Service made his entry -- into the search for the missing college student and into the East Zone.

The two ghosts from Brief Candles and Happy Returns return once more to help out a young relative who is accidentally caught up in burglary and murder. As always, Ulysses the pet monkey is up to mischief along the way.

Light fantasy about two ghosts in the Rhineland who return to right a wrong that took place some 86 years earlier.

The ghostly cousins from Brief Candles are back to help a young relative who is being pursued by a determined widow, managing to help out with bank robbers, a duel, and a murder along the way.

Tommy Hambledon #18 A British diplomat, wearing a green hat, walks into the hills above Lake Como and disappears. The police investigate but can uncover no clues or evidence. British Intelligence agent Tommy Hambledon is sent to Italy to find him in a quest that includes Italian underworld figures and unrepentant fascists.

Describes the socialised horror of a futuristic utopia devoid of individual freedom. Human beings, graded from intellectuals to manual workers, are hatched from incubators and brought up in communal nurseries and learn by conditioning to accept their social destiny. The story develops around an unorthodox AlphaPlus, who visits a New Mexican Reservation and brings a savage back to London.

Tommy Hambledon is sent to rescue Kaspar, the young boy who is king-in-hiding of a small European nation that has been subsumed by the USSR. But when Tommy gets there he finds that Kaspar has been taken to a distant school intended to turn out the future leaders of Russia. By devious means, Tommy ingratiates himself with the leaders of the Russian secret police, the M.V.D., and gets himself sent to the town where Kaspar's school is located. Eventually, Tommy and Kaspar make their harrowing escape from the USSR. A fascinating look at the state of Berlin and Russia before the Berlin Wall was constructed.

AKA The Vengeance Man From the paperback edition's back cover: "Hambledon's most trusted man was snatched away from a crowed Paris hall -- and vanished into oblivion. With him went Hambledon's hopes of smashing the international kidnapping ring whose crimes menaced the uneasy peace of a continent. Then the missing agent reappeared with a fantastic story of an incredible conspiracy -- and Hambledon went into fast and furious action!"

In the Central American republic of Esmeralda, Tommy Hambledon finds himself trapped between hot Latin temperaments and cold 'hostile powers,' waiting for his American opposite number to show up -- waiting, and waiting. . . But to keep things interesting there is a sherry-swilling parrot, a lethal local lottery, and the hostile powers to be stymied, with or without the missing American, and all in the middle of a wild, ravine-filled terrain.

Blurb from the book: It all started when Tommy Hambledon was asked by the Home Secretary to become an inmate of a prison. Seems prisoners were disappearing with unnerving regularity and Tommy, identity unknown even to the local prison authorities, set to work to find the leak. Tommy wasn't exactly en rapport with prison life, and when he got a chance to substitute for a prisoner who was to be spirited away, he was delighted. When the break came, however, Tommy found himself in a tight spot -- he was in danger by refusing to play along with the gang and he was in undeniable danger from the law. But he found two allies, both of whom were out for blood, and one for murder too. Among Those Absent zips around that tight little island of England with speed and humor and outrageous disregard for legal conventions.

From the back cover of the paperback edition: Five British prisoners have escaped from the Nazis -- or have they? British Intelligence suspects an elaborate ruse and that one of the five may well be a double agent prepared for counter-espionage. Tommy Hambledon is assigned to uncover the most dangerous German spy in England.

From the book: News that Hambledon is killed in a chemical explosion spreads gloom throughout the British Foreign Office and Military Intelligence. He had been sent to Switzerland to investigate a new explosive being developed by Professor Ulseth, a famous German chemist. Both Hambledon and the Professor had apparently gone up in the blast. Then from British agents inside Germany come reports that a Professor Ulseth is in Berlin, alive and doing well under the care of the Nazis -- but the Herr Professor's fingerprints are those of Tommy Hambledon.

A tank designer, disgraced and court martialed because tank plans have gone missing, teams up with a burglar to expose German spies in pre-World War II England. The amateurs provide their information, anonymously, to Tommy Hambledon at the Foreign Office's Intelligence Service, frustrating Tommy no end.

From the book: Tommy Hambledon, back in England, was a gift that the intelligence department lost no time in using. He was an espionage agent par excellence with the additional qualifications of having been a practical police officer for many years. When one ship after another sank mysteriously not long out of Portsmouth harbor, Tommy was called on to find the source of the trouble. The case of the sinking ships turned into the case of the murdered MacGregor, and Mr. Hambledon of the Intelligence functioned as a police officer as well as a government agent. His activities, accompanied by a running fire of his ironic, humorous comments on an England he had not know for twenty years, constitute a superlatively entertaining mystery story.

This book is also known as A Toast to Tomorrow. See that entry for a description.

The story of an English spy in Germany during the First World War. The spy is an young man with a gift for languages who joins the army against his family's wishes. His gift is discovered and he is sent into the enemy country. A series of remarkable adventures, including the destruction of a zeppelin and the necessary murder of a scientist, make the book thrilling. Additional interest is added by his relationships with a German intelligence officer and with a young woman whose tragic death will ultimately prove his undoing.