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Leonard Cyril Deighton (; born 18 February 1929) is a British author. His publications have included cookery books, history and military history, but he is best known for his spy novels.

After completing his national service in the Royal Air Force, Deighton attended art school in London, and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1955. He had several jobs before becoming a book and magazine illustrator—including designing the cover for first UK edition of Jack Kerouac's 1957 work On the Road. He also worked for a period in an advertising agency. During an extended holiday in France he wrote his first novel, The IPCRESS File, which was published in 1962, and was a critical and commercial success. He wrote several spy novels featuring the same central character, a working-class intelligence officer, cynical and tough.

Henry "Harry" Patterson, commonly known by his pen name Jack Higgins, was a British author. He was a best-selling author of popular thrillers and espionage novels. His novel The Eagle Has Landed (1975) sold more than 50 million copies and was adapted into a successful 1976 movie of the same title.

Elleston Trevor was a British novelist and playwright who wrote under several pseudonyms. Born Trevor Dudley-Smith, he eventually changed his name to Elleston Trevor. Trevor worked in many genres, but is principally remembered for his 1964 adventure story The Flight of the Phoenix, written as Elleston Trevor, and for a series of Cold War thrillers featuring the British secret agent Quiller, written under the pseudonym Adam Hall.

Geoffrey Archer (born 1944) is a fiction writer from London. He specialises in military adventures and spy thrillers and created the character Sam Packer.

Geoffrey Archer was born and grew up in north London and had an interest in fiction and drama from an early age. He attended Highgate School.

After several false starts in his choice of career, Geoffrey Archer moved into journalism. He started with a local television station in Southampton as a trainee researcher, then moved first to Anglia TV in Norwich and then to Tyne-Tees TV in Newcastle as an on-screen journalist. He started as a reporter with ITN in 1969. He covered the troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and the civil war in Beirut in 1976, was allowed to travel with a Polaris nuclear submarine, and eventually became Defence Correspondent for ITN. These experiences prompted him to begin writing stories with military and spy themes.

Henry Porter is an English author and journalist. He is a writer of award-winning thrillers and was, until 2014, a regular columnist for The Observer, focusing on civil liberties and the threat to democracy. He is also an activist, chairing the Joint Media Unit of the People’s Vote campaign and The Convention, which stages large scale political conferences. Until 2018, he was the British editor of Vanity Fair, a position he held for 25 years. He has written ten novels, including a children’s book. The third part of a quartet of thrillers, The Old Enemy, is due to be published in April 2021.

Alistair Stuart MacLean was a 20th-century Scottish novelist who wrote popular thrillers and adventure stories. Many of his novels have been adapted to film, most notably The Guns of Navarone (1957) and Ice Station Zebra (1963). In the late 1960s, encouraged by film producer Elliott Kastner, MacLean began to write original screenplays, concurrently with an accompanying novel. The most successful was the first of these, the 1968 film Where Eagles Dare, which was also a bestselling novel. MacLean also published two novels under the pseudonym Ian Stuart. His books are estimated to have sold over 150 million copies, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time.

Jeffrey Howard Archer, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare is an English novelist, life peer and former politician. Before becoming an author, Archer was a Member of Parliament (1969–1974), but did not seek re-election after a financial scandal that left him almost bankrupt.

David Baldacci is an American novelist. An attorney by education, Baldacci writes mainly suspense novels and legal thrillers.

Gerald Seymour (born 25 November 1941 in Guildford, Surrey) is a British writer of crime and espionage novels.

Gerald Seymour was born to William Kean Seymour and his second wife, Rosalind Wade. He was educated at Kelly College, now known as Mount Kelly in Tavistock, Devon, and took a BA Hons degree in Modern History at University College London.

Initially a journalist, he joined ITN in 1963, covering such topics as the Great Train Robbery, Vietnam War, The Troubles, the Munich Olympics massacre, Germany's Red Army Faction, Italy's Red Brigades and Palestinian militant groups. His first book, Harry's Game, was published in 1975, and Seymour then became a full-time novelist, living in the West Country. In 1999, he featured in the Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September, which portrayed the Munich massacre. He has been a full-time writer since 1978.

Dame Stella Rimington is a British author and former Director General of MI5, a position she held from 1992 to 1996. She was the first female DG of MI5, and the first DG whose name was publicised on appointment. In 1993, Rimington became the first DG of MI5 to pose openly for cameras at the launch of a brochure outlining the organisation's activities.

Ralph Hammond Innes (15 July 1913 – 10 June 1998) was a British novelist who wrote over 30 novels, as well as works for children and travel books.

Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, and educated at Feltonfleet School, Cobham, Surrey where he was head boy and later at Cranbrook School in Kent. He left in 1931 to work as a journalist, initially with the Financial News. The Doppelganger, his first novel, was published in 1937. In WWII, he served in the Royal Artillery, eventually rising to the rank of Major. During the war, his first books were published, including Wreckers Must Breathe (1940), The Trojan Horse (1940) and Attack Alarm (1941), the last of which was based on his experiences as an anti-aircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain at RAF Kenley. After being demobilized in 1946, he worked full-time as a writer, achieving multiple early successes. His novels are known for a fine attention to accurate detail in descriptions of places, such as in Air Bridge (1951), set partially at RAF Gatow, RAF Membury after its closure and RAF Wunstorf during the Berlin Airlift.

Bernard Cornwell (born 23 February 1944) is an English-American author of historical novels and a history of the Waterloo Campaign. He is best known for his novels about Napoleonic Wars rifleman Richard Sharpe. He has also written the Saxon / Last Kingdom stories about King Alfred and the making of England.

He has written historical novels primarily based on English history, in five series, and one series of contemporary thriller novels. A feature of his historical novels is an end note on how they match or differ from history, and what one might see at the modern sites of the events described. He wrote a nonfiction book on the battle of Waterloo, in addition to the fictional story of the famous battle in the Sharpe series. Two of the historical novel series have been adapted for television: the Sharpe television series by ITV and The Last Kingdom by BBC. He lives in the US with his wife, alternating between Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Charleston, South Carolina.

Robert Ludlum (May 25, 1927 – March 12, 2001) was an American author of 27 thriller novels, best known as the creator of Jason Bourne from the original The Bourne Trilogy series. The number of copies of his books in print is estimated between 300 million and 500 million. They have been published in 33 languages and 40 countries. Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.

Ludlum was born in New York City, the son of Margaret (née Wadsworth) and George Hartford Ludlum. He was educated at the Rectory School then Cheshire Academy and Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he earned a B.A. in Drama in 1951.

Prior to becoming an author, he had been a United States Marine, a theatrical actor and producer. In the 1950s, he produced shows at the Grant Lee theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey. From 1960 to 1970, he managed and produced shows at the Playhouse on the Mall at Bergen Mall in Paramus, New Jersey. His theatrical experience may have contributed to his understanding of the energy, escapism and action that the public wanted in a novel. He once remarked: "I equate suspense and good theater in a very similar way. I think it's all suspense and what-happens-next. From that point of view, yes, I guess, I am theatrical."

Adam Hamdy is a Sunday Times best-selling British novelist, screenwriter and film producer best known for his novels, Pendulum, Black 13, and Private Moscow, co-written with James Patterson.

Wilbur Addison Smith was a Zambian-born British-South African novelist specialising in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries.

David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré (), was a British author, best known for his espionage novels. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works. According to his son Nicholas, le Carré took Irish citizenship shortly before his death.

Following the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. His books include The Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), The Night Manager (1993), The Tailor of Panama (1996), The Constant Gardener (2001), A Most Wanted Man (2008), and Our Kind of Traitor (2010), all of which have been adapted for film or television.

James Follett (27 July 1939 – 10 January 2021) was an English author and screenwriter. Follett became a full-time fiction writer in 1976, after resigning from contract work as a technical writer for the Ministry of Defence. He wrote over 20 novels, several television plays and many radio dramas.

He died in January 2021 at the age of 81.

(AT indicates the play was heard on BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Theatre, a 60-minute slot; JBM that it was in Radio 4's Just Before Midnight 15-minute slot, and SNT: Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre of 90 minutes.)

An asterisk * after the year means the play has been repeated on BBC7 and/or BBC 4 Extra.