God spare us another millionaire actor who fancies themself as a bestselling author –unless the actor is Michael Caine, in which case good on him, raise your glass. The 90-year mainstay of British cinema spent lockdown writing his first novel, tapping away at his iPad every day, toiling to master the intricacies of the craft. “Paragraphs,” he said. “Punctuation, all that.” The book might be awful. It won’t trouble the Man Booker panel. But in finally completing the thing, Caine has indirectly written himself a happy ending of sorts – the most knackered and lovely writer’s cliche of them all.
According to Caine’s publishers, Deadly Game is “a cracking thriller with a real voice and a super twist”, although quite frankly, what else would they say? Specifically, it’s about a London DCI, Harry Taylor, who’s on the trail of a stash of uranium. Potential suspects include a posh art dealer called Julian Smythe, and a dodgy oligarch, Vladimir Voldrev. Also in the mix: a couple of neo-Nazis, a Colombian drug cartel (possibly several, going from the press release) and a pair of cockney refuse collectors. Caine says he got the basic idea from a newspaper story he once read about two East End blokes who found uranium on the rubbish tip. Everything else (the Nazis, the Colombians, dodgy Vladimir) is 100% uncut Michael Caine.
In publishing Deadly Game, the actor turned novelist joins a line of other actor turned novelists. This Grand Hotel-style ensemble ranges from Ethan Hawke to Marlon Brando to Carrie Fisher to Gene Hackman to Caine’s erstwhile Dirty Rotten Scoundrels co-star, Steve Martin. I confess that I’ve avoided reading any of the books written by these actors for much the same reason I wouldn’t go to them to have my brake cable fixed or my filling repaired, because I figure that there are other, trained people who would almost certainly do a better job. Earlier this year, Tom Hanks also published a debut novel. I did wade through that one and wouldn’t recommend the experience. It was like being trapped in a lift with a garrulous bore.
So let’s take it as read that Deadly Game will most likely be rubbish, in the same way that most vanity projects are rubbish (in the same way that plenty of traditional novels are, come to that). I’m still delighted that Caine has finished the thing and is now getting it published, because I had been invested in this story and was awaiting an update. When I interviewed the actor in late 2021, he explained that he had basically retired from acting and was keeping himself busy writing instead. He added that the two great loves of his life had always been the cinema and the library. He’d covered the cinema, up and down, back and forth. Finally, at the end, he was circling back to the library.
Caine didn’t want to talk about movies that day. He wanted to talk about books. “Oh, I read books like wildfire,” he said. “There’s an American author called Tom Clancy. He’s my favourite. Anything and everything by him.” He said he liked Lee Child as well. “I’m an adventure man. I don’t do literature. I just do fun. Gangs, guns and war, that sort of thing.”
When the interview was over, I played back the recording. It was like listening to two separate conversations with two separate men. The first man was old. He complained about his gammy leg and his failing memory. He said he was having to sell his big house in Surrey and move somewhere smaller near his daughter. He talked about the friends who had already died (Roger Moore, Sean Connery) and the others who were clinging on but wouldn’t last much longer. “We all got so old,” he kept saying, as though life had played a horrid trick.
The other man was different and the contrast was striking. Time and again, Caine brought the subject back around to his book. The years fell away. He was lively, enthusiastic, self-deprecating. The publishers, he admitted, had gone over the manuscript and sent it back for a major rewrite. “They’re telling me, ‘Do this, don’t do that. That bit’s not true’.”
He told me the book’s plot in some detail and explained that he mostly wrote propped up in bed. Film acting involves standing around for days on end, which he was now unable to manage, not on his dodgy leg. Whereas writing he could do when he liked, how he liked. “I’m just having the best time doing it,” he said.
The title, Caine said, was If You Don’t Want to Die. That’s since been changed. I think he should have kept it. It seemed to sum up the spirit behind the book, as if the act of writing itself was somehow death-defying, possibly even regenerative and never mind the finished product. Here it was in his comfortable Surrey bedroom: a fresh challenge for the actor who held the line at Rorke’s Drift and battled bandits in the Khyber Pass. A new adventure for the adventure man.
