At college, Marlowe was a contemporary of the poet Lee Harwood, and after leaving he shared a flat with fellow writers Tom Stoppard and Piers Paul Read.

A 1962 work entitled A Slight Misfit featured fragments of a portrait of actress Marilyn Monroe that Marlowe had painted then torn up.

Alex Hamilton believes that "the notion of the successful man who loses his way is the key preoccupation in Marlowe's books.

The idea for the book began when he travelled to Berlin on a Ford Foundation grant to attend a "colloquium on creative writing" with Günter Grass and Uwe Johnson.

[7] Marlowe wrote the books in four weeks while working as a clerk at National Benzole and struggling with a play that he'd been attempting to write.

[11] Marlowe returned to the world of espionage in his 1970 novel Echoes of Celandine which was subsequently filmed as The Disappearance starring Donald Sutherland.

"[2] Nicholas Royle finds it baffling "that a writer of Marlowe's quality, his style and sensibility setting him apart from all competition, has been out of print for so long.

"[9] His first work for the screen was as co-author with Larry Kramer of a semi-documentary about swinging London called Reflections on Love (1966) which featured some of the Beatles.

Around this time Marlowe and Joe Massot – who had directed Reflections of Love – collaborated on a story for a film project called The Mercenary.

[13] In 1968 he wrote the screenplay of his own novel A Dandy in Aspic, directed by Anthony Mann and starring Laurence Harvey as the double agent ordered to assassinate his own alter ego.

Marlowe felt Harvey was miscast and did a terrible job finishing the film after director Mann died during production.

[2] He wrote four episodes of the BBC television series The Search for the Nile in 1971, which subsequently won him an Emmy[1] and a Writers' Guild of Great Britain "Best British Documentary Script" award.

[1] Other screenplays include Jamaica Inn, Nancy Astor, A Married Man, The Two Mrs Grenvilles, and Grass Roots.