[4] He also wrote as Simon Rattray, Howard North, Roger Fitzalan, Mansell Black, Trevor Burgess, Warwick Scott, Caesar Smith and Lesley Stone.

[5] He did not attend university, having been apprenticed as a racing driver and then recruited by the Royal Air Force as a Flight Engineer for the duration of the Second World War.

The Quiller series focuses on a solitary, highly capable "shadow executive" (named after Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) who works (generally alone) for a British agency in Whitehall called "the Bureau".

[3] The series is very stylized, featuring intense depictions of spy tradecraft (especially "shadowing," the techniques of tailing and evading surveillance) and professional relationships, surprising jump cuts between chapters, and deep, self-critical, incisive, practically stream-of-consciousness, interior monologues highlighting Quiller's mental self-discipline.

Most of the novels feature a high-speed car chase, with Quiller as pursuer or pursued, and an extended, detailed scene of hand-to-hand combat.

It was filmed in 1966 under its US title with a screenplay by Harold Pinter and starred George Segal, Max von Sydow, and Alec Guinness.

[3] As "Simon Rattray," he wrote mystery novels featuring Hugo Bishop, a brilliant man who, like Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, solved crimes as a kind of mental challenge.

That Trevor could also be very effective in the straight, non-mystery genre is shown by The Billboard Madonna (1961): the protagonist accidentally kills a beautiful woman in a car crash, and is obsessively compelled to memorialize her.