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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor to The Spectator.

And this week, it is 50 years since the Eagle has landed, landed. Jack Higgins's genre-defining thriller,

which has sold many, many squillions of copies, has been republished this very week, and with a

new introduction by the thriller writer Peter James, who is my new guest. Peter, this was a book

that just absolutely took off and took off, and it obviously

spawned in very quick order, you know, a film that became hugely well-liked and influential

and obviously helped.

But can you start by telling me about your first encounter with this book?

Because you say in your introduction that it kind of changed the game for thrillers.

Yeah, I really do.

I think 34-sized Day of the Jackal, which was published, I think, four years earlier, I think it was in 71, was a real first game change.

I think in the sense of could this have happened? And about, I think, in the sense of, could this have happened?

You know, could the assassination of Charles de Gaulle have actually happened?

But I think with the Eagle has landed, Jack Higgins took the whole thing quite a few steps further

because he's talking about a story that could have changed the course of the Second World War, the attempted assassination of Churchill.

...