During his heyday, in the 1970s, Hone was favourably compared with writers such as Len Deighton, Eric Ambler and John le Carré.
Hone had a varied career, including working as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop in London, as a teacher at Drogheda Grammar School in Ireland, and with the Egyptian Ministry of Education in Cairo, Heliopolis and Suez.
In 1960 he became co-founder of Envoy Productions, Dublin, and co-produced a number of plays and musicals at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, East London.
Hone's second book, The Sixth Directorate (1975), continues Marlow's story after his release from Durham jail, where he has been sent on a frame-up by his own department; it deals with his impersonation of an Englishman, a captured KGB agent living in London, his subsequent adventures as a fall-guy agent in the UN in New York, and his eventual encounter with the KGB in Cheltenham.
[5] Since 2000, Hone had been teaching creative writing and a course which looked at the history and culture of various countries, including India and China.
He taught at Wroxton College in Oxfordshire, part of Fairleigh Dickinson University based in New Jersey, USA.