He served in RAF Bomber Command during World War II, flying thirty-seven sorties as a bomber-aimer, and completed 40 missions over enemy territory.
[1] He initially recorded his wartime experiences in a fictionalised memoir, Faith is a Windsock, before exploring them more deeply in the non-fiction title The Eighth Passenger.
After the war, Tripp studied law and worked as a solicitor, and started to write fiction during his spare time.
For example, in Extreme Provocation the narrator is a man who says in the very first six words of the first chapter "After killing my wife I telephoned..." and the entire story is about how and why the character came to find himself in that situation, exactly what his state of mind was, how the law courts would treat him, and how his life thereafter would continue.
[4] (Titles marked § are in the series about Tripp's creation, the private detective John Samson)[2]