Actor, raconteur, cockney legend, Christopher Nolan muse, impersonation magnet and now… novelist. Even aged 90, Sir Michael Caine’s mighty, mercurial career is still taking unexpected turns – the latest being the news that he’s writing a novel.
Caine, star of such thrillers as The Ipcress File and Get Carter, will be delving into that same murky terrain with his first fiction book, ‘Deadly Game’.
He started work on the novel, which follows an ex-SAS trooper-turned-Met-policeman called Harry Taylor, during lockdown.
According to publisher Hodder & Stoughton, British neo-Nazis and Colombian drug cartels are also involved in the plot.
‘Harry is just the man to cut through the red tape and get to the heart of an extraordinary criminal enterprise,’ says the publisher.
‘It’s been my ambition for years to write a thriller. It’s the genre I most love to read,’ says Caine. ‘I hope readers enjoy getting to know Harry Taylor as much as I did.’
Caine says that the plot was inspired by an incident in which two rubbish collectors stumbled upon a batch of uranium on an East End refuse dump. In ‘Deadly Game’, Harry Taylor and his team are called in to investigate a similarly deadly package in Stepney, only to find it stolen before they can get to it.
‘Deadly Game’ will be in a bookshop near you from November.
The great man, meanwhile, says that rumours of his retirement from acting have been wildly overstated.
Next, he’ll be starring alongside Glenda Jackson in The Great Escaper, a real-life caper about a World War II veteran who busts out of his retirement home to attend a D-Day commemoration.
‘You don’t retire from movies, movies retire you.’ Michael Caine on life in the movies.
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