"Oil. Billions of dollars worth. The Americans, British, Chinese, Russians, Arabs all were willing to get their hands dirty trying to scoop it up. The intrigue started in Cairo. It moved through the bars and bedrooms, brothels and boardrooms, embassies and alleyways of the great capitals of Europe. The beautiful women appeared and disappeared. New corpses turned up as fast as old ones were buried. And Edmund Trothe, British agent extraordinaire, began to blow his cool in an inferno of red-hot action."
Richard Llewellyn (real name Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd) was a British novelist.
Llewellyn was born of Welsh parents in Hendon, north London in 1906. Only after his death was it discovered that his claim that he was born in St. Davids, West Wales was false, though of course he was of Welsh blood.
Several of his novels dealt with a Welsh theme, the best-known being How Green Was My Valley (1939), which won international acclaim and was made into a classic Hollywood film. It immortalised the way of life of the South Wales Valleys coal mining communities, where Llewellyn spent a small amount of time with his grandfather. Three sequels followed.
He lived a peripatetic life, travelling widely throughout his life. Before World War II, he spent periods working in hotels, wrote a play, worked as a coal miner and produced his best known novel. During World War II, he rose to the rank of Captain in the Welsh Guards. Following the war, he worked as a journalist, covering the Nuremberg Trials, and then as a screenwriter for MGM. Late in his life, he lived in Eilat, Israel.
Protagonists who assume new identities, often because they are transplanted into foreign cultures, are a recurring element in Llewellyn's novels, including a spy adventure that extends through several volumes.
Llewellyn married twice: his first wife was Nona Sonstenby, whom he married in 1952 and divorced in 1968, and his second wife was Susan Heimann, whom he married in 1974.