The Boss of Tweed

British thriller writer Raymond Harold Sawkins, who was best known among readers by one of his pseudonyms, “Colin Forbes,” died last week at age 83, following heart failure and pneumonia. His 33rd novel, The Savage Gorge, which stars Forbes’ series character Tweed, deputy director of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6), is due to be published by Simon & Schuster in November.

According to Publishing News Online, Sawkins/Forbes’ longtime editor, Suzanne Baboneau, “whom he followed from Macmillan to Simon & Schuster, had, only the previous day,” she said, “crossed the last ‘t’ and dotted the final ‘i’ to put the script into production. Our November publication of The Savage Gorge will be a fitting tribute to his long career as a major thriller writer.”

Sawkins, who worked in publishing and printing before becoming a full-time author, issued his first novel, Snow on High Ground (1966), under his own name. He later penned books under various noms de plume, including Richard Raine, Harold English, and Jay Bernard, but he was most prolific behind the Forbes guise. His first Forbes novel was Tramp in Armour (1969). He introduced Tweed in Double Jeopardy (1982), and during his lifetime, continued that series through last year’s The Main Chance. Despite the popularity of his books, only one of them was made into a film: Avalanche Express (1979), which starred Lee Marvin, Linda Evans, and Robert Shaw (who died during its production) and was poorly reviewed.

Baboneau described Forbes as a “consummate professional, astute, intensely private, intensely loyal,” who was “in every way, unashamedly old-fashioned. Not for him the world of mobile phones, computers, Internet and answerphones even. He still typed his scripts single-spaced on an IBM Selectric typewriter.”