Showing results by narrator "James Thomson" in All Categories

Described by Len Deighton as ‘a classic writer of espionage fiction’, Ted Allbeury based his many acclaimed spy novels on his own real-life experiences. In World War II, he served as an intelligence officer with Special Operations Executive, and subsequently ran agents across the border between East and West Germany during the Cold War. He began writing in his fifties, and went on to pen over 40 bestselling books, five of which are dramatised here alongside three plays specially written for BBC Radio and two bonus documentaries.

That old door had been standing there for many years. Just a solid timber door and a frame. Just a door...an ordinary door....

It was that door, that solitary door. The door was somehow connected to an event that had occurred one hundred years ago. Somehow it was a portal to another time and place. And that made it worrying, frightening even. Was it even possible for someone, anyone, to exist in two time periods at the same time?

Talon is returning to the Holy Land to search for his beloved Ravan, but Fate has other plans for him. When his ship is wrecked off the coast of North Africa in a storm, Talon and Max, his sole surviving companion, escape captivity and the threat of execution, only to risk their lives preventing a massacre. Barely surviving the ambush they interrupted, they find themselves in the care of a wealthy Egyptian family in a region known as the Fayoum.

As a child, Zachary Downes survived a vicious attack at the hands of his own father. His brother Kenny perished in the same attack, as did his father, apparently killed by Zachary in self-defense. Traumatized and grief-stricken, Zachary has no memory of the events of that day. At the time, police believed that Zachary’s father was The Woodsman, a serial killer responsible for a number of murders in the area.

Imprisoned for brawling in Acre, a coastal city in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Talon and his longtime friend Max are freed by an old mentor from the Order of the Templars and offered a new mission in the fabled city of Constantinople. There Talon finds that winning the emperor's favor obligates him to go to war to free Byzantine lands from the Seljuk Turks.