Michael Caine pens his debut thriller novel aged 90

Sir Michael Caine is to publish his first novel aged 90, as he moves from starring in thrillers to writing them.

The veteran actor began writing Deadly Game, which features a former SAS man turned Metropolitan Police detective as the hero, during lockdown.

“It’s been my ambition for years to write a thriller. It’s the genre I most love to read,” said Sir Michael.

“I hope readers enjoy getting to know Harry Taylor as much as I did.”

The actor said that he came up with the plot after coming across a news story about two rubbish collectors who discovered uranium on a dump in London’s East End.

His hero, Det Ch Insp Harry Taylor, is called in to investigate when a similar package is found mysteriously abandoned in Stepney, east London, but stolen before police can seize it.

Taylor and his team must race to find who has the nuclear material and what they plan to do with it.

The main suspects are an aristocratic English art dealer named Julian Smythe and a Russian oligarch, Vladimir Voldrev, based in Barbados.

Hodder & Stoughton, which will publish the novel in November, said the plot also involves British neo-Nazis and Colombian drug cartels.

“Harry is just the man to cut through the red tape and get to the heart of an extraordinary criminal enterprise,” said the publisher.

Nick Sayers, fiction publisher at Hodder & Stoughton, said that when he met Sir Michael last year “I discovered that he is not only a lifelong reader of thrillers, but also an author bursting with ideas for fiction of his own”.

He added: “Deadly Game is a cracking thriller with a real voice and a super twist.”

The publishing house is billing this as Sir Michael’s first thriller, raising the prospect of a Harry Taylor series.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2021, Sir Michael said his working title had been If You Don’t Want To Die.

He said: “I only read thrillers. I’m an adventure man. I’m not a literature person, so I’m not trying to replace Shakespeare here.”

The Oscar-winning star of Zulu, The Ipcress File and Get Carter was reported to have quit acting in 2021, which he swiftly denied.

“I haven’t retired and not a lot of people know that,” he said on Twitter.

He recently filmed The Great Escaper, which opens this year, the story of a Second World War veteran who escapes from his care home to attend a D-Day commemoration.

The film was made entirely in England, rather than moving to France, to minimise travel for the older cast.

Sir Michael stars alongside Glenda Jackson, 87, who plays his wife.