William Haggard (born Croydon 11 August 1907, died Frinton-on-Sea 27 October 1993) was the pseudonym of Richard Henry Michael Clayton, the son of the Rev.
"[1] Like C. P. Snow, he was a quintessentially British Establishment figure who had been a civil servant in India, and his books vigorously put forth his perhaps idiosyncratic points of view.
During the years of the fictional spy mania initially begun by the James Bond stories, Haggard was considered by most critics to be at the very top of the field.
Keating, however, also observes that "...the books were fore-runners in a trend that was noticeable in both British and American crime writing from the late 1960's onwards, a turning of the tide to flow to the right.
A Colonel Charles Russell of the Security Executive, a not entirely imaginary British counter-espionage organization, while not a protagonist in the technical sense, holds the story line together in the background by his operations, while the characters in the foreground carry the action.