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Dr David Audley & Colonel Jack Butler #6
Our Man in Camelot
By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory
Anthony Price ingeniously combines the machinations of British Intelligence with the legend of King Arthur in an extraordinary thriller that crackles with suspense from start to finish.
A US Air Force plane mysteriously vanishes on a flight from its base in Britain, and its ace pilot with it. The CIA investigates the missing pilot, and makes some odd findings - finding that will take British Intelligence officer David Audley back to the sixth century in an absorbing battle of wits with the Soviet secret police.
Anthony Price ingeniously combines the machinations of British Intelligence with the legend of King Arthur in an extraordinary thriller that crackles with suspense from start to finish.
A US Air Force plane mysteriously vanishes on a flight from its base in Britain, and its ace pilot with it. The CIA investigates the missing pilot, and makes some odd findings - finding that will take British Intelligence officer David Audley back to the sixth century in an absorbing battle of wits with the Soviet secret police.
215 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1975
24 people are currently reading
73 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Price
29 books37 followersBorn in Hertfordshire in 1928, Price was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and Oxford. His long career in journalism culminated in the Editorship of the Oxford Times. His literary thrillers earned comparisons to the best of Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Goddard.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 18, 2021
A Cold War spy thriller about the hunt for Badon Hill, site of King Arthur's most significant victory. Very talky, with only a little action, and apparently part of a series. If you know your Arthuriana, you'll get a kick out of how the pieces fall together, but I wonder how compelling it would be to regular readers.
February 6, 2019
Another good episode if you like this series to begin with. This time the history lesson is about King Arthur and the CIA/US military in the UK during the Cold War.
July 9, 2019
For the life of me I don't understand how Anthony Price managed to avoid me for all those years! It's sad that he died the other day but, as his obituary in The Guardian pointed out, his work stopped being reprinted once he stopped writing - which is disgraceful!
Price is an intelligent writer crafting very intelligent espionage stories that rarely go into the field and are, more often than not, centred round the dinner table, the office or a cup of tea. Yet! How does he manage to keep one gripped to the book, unwilling to put it down?
Good storytelling and good writing with a dash of historical mystery thrown in, that's part of the formula. There is also a touch of good British Seventies television drama feel to it...
This one had me all the way. A US plane goes missing over the Irish Sea, sad accident? The CIA men carrying out a routine (?) check think so until a letter happens to come through the letterbox whilst they're there... and then things take a more interesting turn...
Price is an intelligent writer crafting very intelligent espionage stories that rarely go into the field and are, more often than not, centred round the dinner table, the office or a cup of tea. Yet! How does he manage to keep one gripped to the book, unwilling to put it down?
Good storytelling and good writing with a dash of historical mystery thrown in, that's part of the formula. There is also a touch of good British Seventies television drama feel to it...
This one had me all the way. A US plane goes missing over the Irish Sea, sad accident? The CIA men carrying out a routine (?) check think so until a letter happens to come through the letterbox whilst they're there... and then things take a more interesting turn...
January 28, 2018
From 1975, the historical hook is the location of Badon Hill, the battle where the Britons, perhaps under Arthur, temporarily turned back the Anglo-Saxons around 500 AD. Two CIA agents, posing as husband and wife, set out to interest David Audley after deaths linked to what looks like a KGB plot with connections to the Arthurian legend. Engaging history and convincing characters mark a story with very little action but much subtle and involving maneuvering and wheels within wheels as the plot develops in Camelot country. 4.5 stars.
October 10, 2019
I had never heard of Anthony Price until I recently read his obituary in 2019. This was the first of his work I have checked out via the interlibrary loan system (it would seem most of his books are out of print and no room at the inn of your local library when James Patterson takes over ten rows.) I started reading and within the first two chapters I thought, "This just isn't grabbing at me." I put it down and went to something else. The next attempt I settled in for a long read and got so hooked on the story and his writing that I did not put the book down until it was finished. Now I'm going to try and find his complete work, again using the same library efforts.
Our Man in Camelot is one of Anthony Price's cold war espionage novels, all of which have some connection to (much older) history or archaeology. This one is populated by academics and amateurs who are, or become, caught up in Arthurian legend or history (as Price himself clearly is.) This is a actually a good book to explain to the novice reader the essential historical details of Arthurian Britain (c.500). It also features a romance between two of the main characters, and there are self-conscious Arthurian resonances in the roles some of the characters adopt. Most of it takes place within a few days, and with a cold-war setting the twists and turns are quite gripping, but seem plausible to me. It hinges on a search for a famous Arthurian locale: Badon, supposedly the site of Arthur's decisive victory over the Anglo-Saxons. I won't spoil the ancient mystery of finding Badon, or how it relates to the cold war, but it was surprisingly satisfying to me.
Finally, I want to add his obituary as GoodReads will be a good source for seeking it at a future date.
Mike Ripley
Sun 9 Jun 2019 11.07 EDT
Anthony Price juggled careers as newspaper editor, book reviewer and author. As a cub reporter on the Oxford Times in the early 1950s, Anthony Price, who has died aged 90, was asked if he fancied reviewing a book for its sister paper, the Oxford Mail. It was, he was told, “only a children’s book but it’s by a local author”. The local author turned out to be a Prof JRR Tolkien and the book was The Fellowship of the Ring. Price’s career as a reviewer was off to an auspicious start.
He was to specialise in crime fiction, and his reviews in the Oxford Mail made him one of the most highly regarded commentators on, and judges of, the genre, so much so that in 1968 the publisher Livia Gollancz asked him to consider writing a history of the crime novel. Price turned down the offer, feeling it would involve too much work, but added he did have an idea of his own for a novel, if Gollancz might be interested.
They were; and when The Labyrinth Makers was published in 1970, it was to ecstatic reviews (from Edmund Crispin and Marghanita Laski among others) and won the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger award. The book introduced Dr David Audley and Colonel Jack Butler, respectively an academic and a solid military man working for British counter-intelligence, who were to feature in many of Price’s 19 novels over the next 19 years.
Anthony was born in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, his parents having recently returned from India where his father, Walter, had been a civil engineer. His mother, Kathleen (nee Lawrence) died when he was seven and he was brought up first by an aunt and then, when his father remarried, a stepmother from whom he was quickly estranged.
He as educated at the King’s school, Canterbury, where he prospered academically and came to the attention of the headteacher, Canon Frederick Shirley. When Anthony’s stepmother wouldn’t pay his last year’s school fees, Shirley’s wife paid and Anthony returned her faith in him by winning a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford. Oxford had to wait until after national service, 1947-49, first in the Royal Signals, then the Education Corps, where Price achieved the rank of captain. After reading history at Merton he remained in Oxford, where he met Ann Stone, a nurse, and opted for a career in journalism with the Oxford Times, becoming editor in 1975.
While reviewing crime fiction, he became a friend of the literary editor, Brian Aldiss. He treated thrillers with the respect reviewers usually only showed to traditional detective stories and was an enthusiast for the early Bond books of Ian Fleming, though he did add the caveat when reviewing Dr No in 1958 that the villain was 30 years out of date and belonged more to the era of Fu Manchu.
In the 1960s he welcomed the arrival of writers such as Len Deighton, Dick Francis, Gavin Lyall and John le Carré, the last of whom he particularly admired. It was a source of wry amusement that his favourite Le Carré novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, was pipped to the 1974 Gold Dagger award by his own Other Paths to Glory.
For two decades Price juggled careers as a newspaper editor, book reviewer and author, with Ann acting as his unofficial business manager. The success of his first novel resulted in rapid election in 1971 to the Detection Club, where he met and befriended many of the authors he admired, including Eric Ambler, and gained international recognition with the Martin Beck award from the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy in 1978.
All his novels reflected his deep interest in military history, and sub-plots and background settings could contain elements of Roman legions on Hadrian’s Wall, the Camelot of King Arthur, Napoleonic warships and the battlegrounds of the American civil war and the first world war. In his research for Other Paths to Glory he visited western front battle sites well before there was an established visitor trail there, and taped interviews with survivors in the Oxford area.
The second world war got the Price treatment in two thrillers: The Hour of the Donkey (1980, Dunkirk) and Here Be Monsters (1985, D-day). Price also used military history in his cold war spy thrillers as, in effect, long diversions, – almost “shaggy dog stories” – providing red herrings for the characters, and for readers. The actual espionage in his plots, which Price always insisted were straightforward and simple, would be resolved in last-minute flurries of action and recrimination. It was a technique which, as one reviewer pointed out, put him “in the upper IQ spy story bracket”. With such praise, and the constant use of the adjectives “ingenious” and “intelligent” by the critics, Price’s books were never likely to appeal to a mass readership, which preferred more blood with their thunder.
Even so, it was no surprise that television took an interest, although the result was far from satisfactory when Granada produced a short series in 1983 under the title Chessgame, with Terence Stamp woefully miscast as Audley. In an interview in 2011, Price described the series as “dreadful” but by then, as he himself declared, his days of writing fiction “were not so much history as archaeology”.
In 1989, with the publication of his 19th novel, his retirement from the Oxford Times and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Price announced he was going to stop writing fiction. There were howls of protest from reviewers, readers and his editors at Gollancz, but Price was adamant and retired to the Oxfordshire countryside. There was, at one point, a plot masterminded by the Oxford don (and crime writer) Tim Binyon to lure Price into the wine cellars of Wadham College where other writers, including Colin Dexter and Michael Dibdin, would press him to return to the crime fiction fold. The plot, perhaps fortunately for the college’s stock of claret, never materialised.
With no new books, most of Price’s backlist went out of print with indecent haste, but he is still rated among connoisseurs of spy fiction alongside Le Carré, Deighton, Ted Allbeury and Ambler. His storytelling technique and authorial voice were unique. Price novels are unmistakable and all featured historical backgrounds because Price felt the past was lying in wait for the present.
Following the death of his wife in 2012, Price moved to Blackheath in London. He is survived by two sons, James and Simon, and a daughter, Katherine.
• Alan Anthony Price, journalist and author, born 16 August 1928; died 30 May 2019
Our Man in Camelot is one of Anthony Price's cold war espionage novels, all of which have some connection to (much older) history or archaeology. This one is populated by academics and amateurs who are, or become, caught up in Arthurian legend or history (as Price himself clearly is.) This is a actually a good book to explain to the novice reader the essential historical details of Arthurian Britain (c.500). It also features a romance between two of the main characters, and there are self-conscious Arthurian resonances in the roles some of the characters adopt. Most of it takes place within a few days, and with a cold-war setting the twists and turns are quite gripping, but seem plausible to me. It hinges on a search for a famous Arthurian locale: Badon, supposedly the site of Arthur's decisive victory over the Anglo-Saxons. I won't spoil the ancient mystery of finding Badon, or how it relates to the cold war, but it was surprisingly satisfying to me.
Finally, I want to add his obituary as GoodReads will be a good source for seeking it at a future date.
Mike Ripley
Sun 9 Jun 2019 11.07 EDT
Anthony Price juggled careers as newspaper editor, book reviewer and author. As a cub reporter on the Oxford Times in the early 1950s, Anthony Price, who has died aged 90, was asked if he fancied reviewing a book for its sister paper, the Oxford Mail. It was, he was told, “only a children’s book but it’s by a local author”. The local author turned out to be a Prof JRR Tolkien and the book was The Fellowship of the Ring. Price’s career as a reviewer was off to an auspicious start.
He was to specialise in crime fiction, and his reviews in the Oxford Mail made him one of the most highly regarded commentators on, and judges of, the genre, so much so that in 1968 the publisher Livia Gollancz asked him to consider writing a history of the crime novel. Price turned down the offer, feeling it would involve too much work, but added he did have an idea of his own for a novel, if Gollancz might be interested.
They were; and when The Labyrinth Makers was published in 1970, it was to ecstatic reviews (from Edmund Crispin and Marghanita Laski among others) and won the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger award. The book introduced Dr David Audley and Colonel Jack Butler, respectively an academic and a solid military man working for British counter-intelligence, who were to feature in many of Price’s 19 novels over the next 19 years.
Anthony was born in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, his parents having recently returned from India where his father, Walter, had been a civil engineer. His mother, Kathleen (nee Lawrence) died when he was seven and he was brought up first by an aunt and then, when his father remarried, a stepmother from whom he was quickly estranged.
He as educated at the King’s school, Canterbury, where he prospered academically and came to the attention of the headteacher, Canon Frederick Shirley. When Anthony’s stepmother wouldn’t pay his last year’s school fees, Shirley’s wife paid and Anthony returned her faith in him by winning a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford. Oxford had to wait until after national service, 1947-49, first in the Royal Signals, then the Education Corps, where Price achieved the rank of captain. After reading history at Merton he remained in Oxford, where he met Ann Stone, a nurse, and opted for a career in journalism with the Oxford Times, becoming editor in 1975.
While reviewing crime fiction, he became a friend of the literary editor, Brian Aldiss. He treated thrillers with the respect reviewers usually only showed to traditional detective stories and was an enthusiast for the early Bond books of Ian Fleming, though he did add the caveat when reviewing Dr No in 1958 that the villain was 30 years out of date and belonged more to the era of Fu Manchu.
In the 1960s he welcomed the arrival of writers such as Len Deighton, Dick Francis, Gavin Lyall and John le Carré, the last of whom he particularly admired. It was a source of wry amusement that his favourite Le Carré novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, was pipped to the 1974 Gold Dagger award by his own Other Paths to Glory.
For two decades Price juggled careers as a newspaper editor, book reviewer and author, with Ann acting as his unofficial business manager. The success of his first novel resulted in rapid election in 1971 to the Detection Club, where he met and befriended many of the authors he admired, including Eric Ambler, and gained international recognition with the Martin Beck award from the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy in 1978.
All his novels reflected his deep interest in military history, and sub-plots and background settings could contain elements of Roman legions on Hadrian’s Wall, the Camelot of King Arthur, Napoleonic warships and the battlegrounds of the American civil war and the first world war. In his research for Other Paths to Glory he visited western front battle sites well before there was an established visitor trail there, and taped interviews with survivors in the Oxford area.
The second world war got the Price treatment in two thrillers: The Hour of the Donkey (1980, Dunkirk) and Here Be Monsters (1985, D-day). Price also used military history in his cold war spy thrillers as, in effect, long diversions, – almost “shaggy dog stories” – providing red herrings for the characters, and for readers. The actual espionage in his plots, which Price always insisted were straightforward and simple, would be resolved in last-minute flurries of action and recrimination. It was a technique which, as one reviewer pointed out, put him “in the upper IQ spy story bracket”. With such praise, and the constant use of the adjectives “ingenious” and “intelligent” by the critics, Price’s books were never likely to appeal to a mass readership, which preferred more blood with their thunder.
Even so, it was no surprise that television took an interest, although the result was far from satisfactory when Granada produced a short series in 1983 under the title Chessgame, with Terence Stamp woefully miscast as Audley. In an interview in 2011, Price described the series as “dreadful” but by then, as he himself declared, his days of writing fiction “were not so much history as archaeology”.
In 1989, with the publication of his 19th novel, his retirement from the Oxford Times and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Price announced he was going to stop writing fiction. There were howls of protest from reviewers, readers and his editors at Gollancz, but Price was adamant and retired to the Oxfordshire countryside. There was, at one point, a plot masterminded by the Oxford don (and crime writer) Tim Binyon to lure Price into the wine cellars of Wadham College where other writers, including Colin Dexter and Michael Dibdin, would press him to return to the crime fiction fold. The plot, perhaps fortunately for the college’s stock of claret, never materialised.
With no new books, most of Price’s backlist went out of print with indecent haste, but he is still rated among connoisseurs of spy fiction alongside Le Carré, Deighton, Ted Allbeury and Ambler. His storytelling technique and authorial voice were unique. Price novels are unmistakable and all featured historical backgrounds because Price felt the past was lying in wait for the present.
Following the death of his wife in 2012, Price moved to Blackheath in London. He is survived by two sons, James and Simon, and a daughter, Katherine.
• Alan Anthony Price, journalist and author, born 16 August 1928; died 30 May 2019
May 18, 2012
Authurian legend casts a long shadow over this hyper-cerebral Cold War spy tale. Hidden histories and evolving cover stories conceal lost legend and misplaced honor! Heavy on Intelligence. Weak on action. Rules!
June 1, 2019
Another dash of David Audley as he finds himself drawn in to a CIA operation that is not what it seems. Anthony Price includes so many in sights that I have to Google them to prove they are true. Who knew the CIA sank 80 double decker buses in the Thames in 1964. I don't want to give any of the plot but the use Camelot and King Arthur at one point felt like I was living the Brexit nightmare and it began in the 1970s.
May 13, 2019
Preposterous, in Price's patented way. An extremely fragile chess puzzle built of abstractions. CIA actors who fool Audley on his home turf?!? No way.
April 9, 2020
Anthony Price's novels are stunning, mixing modern-day espionage, with historical details. The twists and turns are worthy of John Le Carre at his best.
January 29, 2022
The CIA, British Intelligence and Russian spies search for the site of Mt Badon, scene of King Arthur's victory over the Saxons. Yes, really.
March 26, 2025
Not my idea of a good espionage spy story.
This is my first and last book by Anthony Price.
John Le Carré still is the best!
This is my first and last book by Anthony Price.
John Le Carré still is the best!
June 25, 2024
I'm actually listening to the audiobook version, but that's not available on Goodreads. The audiobook suffers from a bad American accent. Once again, we see Audley and Butler through the eyes of another character. I do wonder if the Russians were ever as clever as the plot of the book.
August 22, 2011
OMG this is painful. Its a dull history lesson. But I have to keep going to see if I'm right. And if I skip some I might skip something that actually is interesting.
Wow. I was more than halfway through the book before I was able to pick it up without dread. It eventually started to get interesting. I realized that my ideas on where it was going were way off - and I think it would have been more interesting if I'd been right. The ending was a serious let-down.
It may be just not my genre - could be a great book for someone who likes history tied into political intrigue. Maybe.
Wow. I was more than halfway through the book before I was able to pick it up without dread. It eventually started to get interesting. I realized that my ideas on where it was going were way off - and I think it would have been more interesting if I'd been right. The ending was a serious let-down.
It may be just not my genre - could be a great book for someone who likes history tied into political intrigue. Maybe.
September 26, 2014
Not as bad as I feared from reading other reviews. I love history of all kinds, and this story has lots about Arthur, battles he fought, when he may have lived and where he may have been buried. As not much has survived in written form out of the early medieval times, the period is ripe for storytelling. The author tells quite a neat little cold war yarn, weaving in Arthur, one particular battle, and "the great game" as played by the CIA, KGB, and MI5. A bit dated now, but topical when it was first written in the 79s. Reading it now is a bit like archaeology, still it was fun.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews