Lionel Davidson has won three Crime Writers' Association Golden Dagger Awards, one for his first novel, The Night of Wenceslas (1960), which also won an Authors' Club Award for best first novel of its year. His other award-winning novels are A Long Way to Shiloh (1966; published in the United States as The Menorah Men) and The Chelsea Murders (1978), the latter a Book Society choice in Britain and a Book-of-the-Month Club choice in the United States, where it was published as Murder Games. Perhaps none of these novels is his best, however, which may be The Rose of Tibet (1962), Making Good Again (1968), Smith's Gazelle (1971), or Kolymsky Heights (1994). Although his output has been relatively small, Davidson's consistently high quality ranks him among the best thriller writers, and in the 1960s, critics often compared his writing to that of Graham Greene or Kingsley Amis. He is distinctive in his versatility and in...