Manning O'Brine

Manning O'Brine was an Irish writer of thrillers and television screenplays about whom quite little is known. His date of birth is uncertain: at least one authoritative source gives it as 1915; a less authoritative online website gives it as 1913. The latter site also gives his date of death as 1977. All of his novels concern espionage and/or secret agents and often feature sadistic Nazis who have survived World War II. O'Brine began with a series of seven books about Michael the O'Kelly that had a certain lightness of tone to them. He then wrote four novels that were more realistic in nature than those featuring the O'Kelly and received a certain amount of critical praise. These books are: Crambo, Mills, No Earth for Foxes, and Pale Moon Rising, which is set in wartime France. A number of common characters appear in each of these books, such as Pavane and Crambo, but the most important one is Mills, who is obsessed, as apparently O'Brine himself was, with tracking down and killing Nazi war criminals.

The New York Times review of No Earth for Foxes, written by Newgate Callendar on April 20, 1975, closes with these lines: "The jacket copy has a sentence about O'Brine that is a real stopper. 'He killed his first Nazi in Heidelberg in 1937 and his last one in Madagascar in 1950.' Try to top that one."

The backcover blurb for the 1976 American paperback edition says in addition that O'Brine was a former British secret agent.

Novels

Killers Must Eat. Hammond, Hammond, 1951)
Corpse to Cairo. Hammond, Hammond, 1952)
Dodos Don't Duck. Hammond, Hammond, 1953)
Deadly Interlude. Hammond, Hammond, 1954)
Passport to Treason.Hammond, Hammond, 1955)
The Hungry Killer. Hammond, Hammond, 1955)
Dagger before Me. Hammond, Hammond, 1957)

Mills. (Lippincott, 1969) (Jenkins, 1969)
Crambo.(Joseph, 1970)
No Earth for Foxes (Delacorte Press, 1975) (Barrie and Jenkins, 1974)
Pale Moon Rising (St. Martin's Press, 1978)