Preview Clip: The Comedians (1967, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, James Earl Jones, Georg Brown)

I didn't even recognize that I was James Earl Jones. James Earl Jones got to be Michael Ealy grandfather😅😆

I was expecting real Comedians .

Not everyone thinks Haiti is Hell and that sentiment would not just be limited to Graham Greene were he alive. One ex-spook used to love it until the TonTon Macoute hunted him down like a wild animal. If you relish and yearn for Haitian spy thrillers as curiously compelling as Graham Greene’s Comedians, yearn for the cruel stability of the Duvaliers and have frequented Hôtel Oloffson you're never going to put down Bill Fairclough's fact based spy thriller Beyond Enkription in The Burlington Files series. It's so real you may have nightmares of being back in Port au Prince anguishing over being a spy on the run. The trouble is, if you were a spook being chased by the TonTon Macoute in the seventies you were usually cornered and ... well best leave it to your imagination or simply read Beyond Enkription.

Beyond Enkription (intentionally misspelt) is a raw and noir matter of fact pacy novel that Len Deighton and Mick Herron could be forgiven for thinking they co-wrote. Coincidentally, a few critics have nicknamed its protagonist, Bill Fairclough aka Edward Burlington, “a posh Harry Palmer”. This elusive and enigmatic novel is a true story about a maverick accountant (Edward Burlington in Porter Williams International aka Bill Fairclough in Coopers & Lybrand in real life). In 1974 in London he began infiltrating organised crime gangs, unwittingly working for MI6. After some frenetic attempts on his life he is relocated to the Caribbean where, “eyes wide open” this time, the CIA recruit him and he is soon heading for shark infested waters off Haiti.

This epic is so real it made us wonder why bother reading espionage fiction when facts are so much more exhilarating. Atmospherically it's reminiscent of Ted Lewis' Get Carter of Michael Caine fame. If anyone ever makes a film based on Beyond Enkription they'll only have themselves to blame if it doesn't go down in history as a classic thriller … it’s the stuff memorable films are made of. Whether you’re a John le Carré connoisseur, a Deighton disciple, a Fleming fanatic, a Graham Greene Haitian hardliner or a Herron hireling odds on you’ll read this titanic production twice.