Thompson, Arthur Leonard Bell

Francis Clifford is the pseudonym of Arthur Leonard Bell Thompson, a major British author of crime fiction and spy thrillers, according to some on par with Len Deighton and John le Carré. The reason he is less well known is that he was a shy man who would rather talk about his books than about himself. Thompson had, however, experienced some of the events he included in his books since he served with a special operations unit that specialized in infiltration, sabotage and organizing resistance movements in the Far East during the war.