William Haggard was an English writer of fictional spy thrillers set in the 1960s through the 1980s. 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. The principal character in most of his novels was Colonel Charles Russell of the fictional Security Executive. 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.