Perhaps he was inspired by Alan Garner who, at 88, last year became the oldest ever person to be nominated for the Booker Prize. Maybe as “a life-long reader of thrillers” he thought, as most life-long readers of thrillers do at some point, that thrillers quite often seem formulaic and thus not that hard to knock out.
More likely, I think, having read Deadly Game, is that its author was thinking back to all the not-that-great maverick cop scripts he undoubtedly used to get sent by the truckload in his younger years and getting a little bit misty-eyed. Because rather than writing what he knows, Michael Caine is, in a debut work of fiction that arrives in his 90th year on Planet Earth, here very much writing what he is known for.
