Deadly Game, the debut novel from Michael Caine, will be published in the UK and US in November, it has been announced.
The actor, 90, has long harboured the desire to write a thriller, and was inspired to do so by a news item, says his UK publisher, Hodder’s Rowena Webb, about “the discovery of uranium by workers on a dump in London’s East End”. The novel’s lead character is DCI Harry Taylor, who, according to the synopsis, is “called in when just such a package is found, mysteriously abandoned in Stepney and stolen before the police can reclaim it. As security agencies around the world go to red alert, it is former SAS man Harry and his small team from the Met who must race against time to find who has the nuclear material and what they plan to do with it.”
Key suspects in the case include “the aristocratic English art dealer Julian Smythe” and “mega-rich Russian Vladimir Voldrev”. The plot also involves “British neo-Nazis and Colombian drug cartels”, leaving Harry “just the man to cut through the red tape and get to the heart of an extraordinary criminal enterprise”.
Says Hodder fiction editor Nick Sayers: “When Rowena and I met Sir Michael last year, I discovered that he is not only a lifelong reader of thrillers, but also an author bursting with ideas for fiction of his own. Deadly Game is a cracking thriller with a real voice and a super twist.”
Caine discussed the novel, which he wrote during lockdown, in an interview with the Guardian in 2021, when the title was still If You Don’t Want to Die.
“I only read thrillers,” he told Xan Brooks. “I’m an adventure man, I’m not a literature person, so I’m not trying to replace Shakespeare here. But it’s based on something I once read about two dustmen, two rubbish collectors in the East End. And they find uranium in the rubbish.”
One of the best known and most beloved British film stars of the past 60 years, Caine has appeared in more than 130 films, including Zulu, Alfie, The Italian Job and Sleuth.
He won supporting actor Oscars for his performances in Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules, and more recently has collaborated with the director Christopher Nolan.
Caine himself hails from south-east London, and has six times played a character called Harry, most notably in The Ipcress File and its sequels, and in 2009’s Harry’s Game.
He will next be soon alongside Glenda Jackson in The Great Escaper, based on the real-life story of a second world war veteran who fled his care home to attend the D-Day anniversary in Normandy in 2014.
Other actors who have recently tried their hand at fiction include Ethan Hawke, David Duchovny, Hugh Laurie, Sean Penn and Tom Hanks.
