Registering for the giveaway will definitely not trigger any surveillance programme, domestic or otherwise.

You can enter the giveaway until 17 February, but if you can’t wait until then to find out if you’ve won, you can buy a copy via Lulu.com (£7 plus P&P) or get ebook versions at thomascauldron.com.

Can any readers shed any light on le mystère? Many Cauldron works feature medals, knives, hens, rivers and women, but – as far as we know – never in the same book.

Get the ebook of A Shot Rang Out and extra material at thomascauldron.com! Paperback now available at Lulu.

It’s hard to believe that an experienced British spy could – for 18 chapters – be secretly tailed through the streets of Aberdeen by three Chinese assassins on horseback. But it’s only when Farncliffe’s mission takes him to a North Sea oil rig that he begins to notice ‘an eerie metallic clattering, echoing round every corner’. He puts this down to ‘Highland tinnitus’, but reappraises the situation after finding a steaming heap of manure outside his cabin.

However, the reader soon forgives Cauldron  these credulity-stretching elements as the book builds to a genuinely thrilling conclusion. The final 10 pages see Farncliffe disable the oil rig’s secret pipeline (which was diverting crude oil to Murmansk), blow up a shortbread factory, employ reverse psychology to force the Chinese assassins into a suicide pact – and then ride all three of their horses to victory in the Ayr Gold Cup.

Get the ebook of A Shot Rang Out and extra material at thomascauldron.com! Paperback now available at Lulu.

You can still get ebook versions (£3.50) and free extra material at thomascauldron.com.

Shoot Them In Their Stupid Faces details the systematic assassination of the entire British Cabinet by a spymaster who has ‘had enough’. Cauldron wrote it in 1973 after receiving nine parking tickets in one week.  ‘I got five of them when I was parked outside my own bloody house!’  he explained to an enthralled Richard Madeley on This Morning  (5 February 1991). ‘I was livid! I had all sorts of violent fantasies about those faceless bureaucrats in Thetford Town Hall.  I think I wrote the book as a sort of political catharsis.’

Cauldron didn’t just write a book in his rage. As he told Madelely, he ‘dialled a certain ex-directory number, quoted a couple of pertinent codewords, and Thetford Council… Well, let’s just say I had my very own disabled parking bay within the fortnight’.

This sounds like braggadocio, but declassified materials show that at least three MI5 operatives were active in the Thetford area at the time. One document identifies the roof of WH Smiths opposite the town hall as an ideal sniper position; another shows vulnerabilities in the electrical wiring of the Mayor of Thetford’s teasmade.

Since essentially nothing happened in Thetford in the entire 1970s, Cauldron must have cooled down and cancelled his revenge operation. But some anger resurfaced when he briefed the cover artist for the first edition as pictured above – for those are reasonable likenesses of genuine Thetford councillors (from top left: Donald Kybird, Christopher Quadling, Sean Dent, Maxwell Spencer-Solent, Corinne Robotham, Robert Skull, Harold Mortimer, Jack Lamb).

Get the ebook of A Shot Rang Out and extra material at thomascauldron.com! Paperback now available at Lulu.

You can still get ebook versions (£3.50) and free extra material at thomascauldron.com.

As you can imagine, I was flabbergasted. A bus with an upstairs! ‘Tom, you’re a bona fide marvel!’ I cried, as I pressed my nose to the window, watching the funny little multitudes as we hurtled above them along Baker Street. ‘I thought I knew London, but this is a whole new world. I feel like quite the Zeus!’

A quiet smile of satisfaction twinkled across my old chum’s forgettable face. ‘And if look to your left now,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘You can see into what was Sherlock Holmes’s bedroom.’

I gasped. ‘The Sherlock Holmes?’ Tom tipped his hat. ‘I can’t believe you know all this,’ I cried. ‘The capital is your very own garden of secrets! You must share your knowledge, Tom. Oh, write me a book!’

And two weeks later, there it was on the table in  Hatchards.
(Another Rummage in the Noggin Hamper, Rollins-Rollins, 1984)

The book’s famous ‘keyhole’ cover is enigmatic:

On opening, all is revealed:

Inside, much of London Briefing is standard fare – listings for some of Cauldron’s favourite pubs and restaurants, a reasonably accurate map of the Underground, the number of Beefeaters that would fit along the Mall if laid end-to-end etc. About 60% of it is material directly lifted from Cauldron’s guide to Berlin (Thomas Cauldron’s Zeit Berlin, 1951) with the street names changed. But a few sections give at least a little taste of Cauldron’s idiosyncratic, secret London world:

Day trip #34: A Stroll in the Park
There’s nothing better, on a crisp, autumn day, than a stroll through a lovely park – especially when one thinks one is being tailed, and wants plenty of open space in which the rascal will reveal himself. London has many parks to offer the connoisseur, but I favour the regal elegance of St James’s Park.

Start from the north gate. There’s a little stall where you can buy an excellent ice-cream cone – very refreshing, of course, but also useful should an assassin jump you (disorient him by tipping the ice cream down his back, then simply invert the cone and jam the wafery spike forcefully into his eye).

Go south onto the bridge: my favourite ‘duck feeding station’. Have you brought some bread? It doesn’t matter, they’ll eat anything. Biscuit crumbs, bus tickets, pennies – they have special stomachs.

Now take the south-west path, past the flower beds. It’s here you’re most likely to be approached by a squirrel. Charming little fellow, isn’t he? Or is he? Would you credit that a squirrel could be wired for sound? Just like in my book, Traitor In A Nutshell.^* Horrible thought. You can make it to The Two Chairmen on Old Queen Street in less than a minute if you run.

^* The first edition of which got Cauldron in hot water with the RSPCA, thanks to his inclusion of instructions for making a tiny gallows.

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Of the three dozen or so of these books written during Cauldron’s brief Oxford rowing career, The Boat Punchers was his most successful – possibly because he abandoned the favourite stroke techniques, breathing exercises and oar-waxing methods that many readers felt weighed down titles such as The Coxless Connundrum and Steady As She Sculls, and focused more on precarious English Channel-based fist fights and breathless descriptions of stylish deck shoes.

Come to think of it, have any other authors ever written a rowing boat adventure?

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Here’s an extract:

Rough hands pulled the sack from Gullthorpe’s head. He blinked in the anglepoised light that dimly illuminated his captor.

‘Ahh. Madam Gunface, one presumes.’

The face – a suprisingly comely and well-preserved one – smiled. ‘Indeed.’

‘I was expecting more…’

‘More of an actual gun working gun?’

‘The rumours…’

‘Can’t be done, I had my best Swiss surgeons on it. The barrel never “takes”.’ ^* Madam Gunface lit a cigarette with an expensive-looking match. ‘But you will notice I do have a birthmark in the shape of a gun.’

‘A Reisberg, if I’m not mistaken,’ said Gullthorpe. ‘.45 gauge?’

‘Very good, Gullthorpe.’ Madam Gunface exhaled smoke mysteriously. ‘In other circumstances, I think we would get on.’

Madam Gunface’s handsome head gave a barely perceptible nod to the unseen thugs behind Gullthorpe’s chair. Immediately, the wire around his neck tightened like the coils of a possessive snake. He felt the cold mouth of a revolver against his ear.

‘But these are not “other circumstances”. These are atomic circumstances.’

Gullthorpe heard the unmistakeable snick of a safety catch being taken off, inches from his face. Or was it a safety catch being put on? The latter was unlikely, he concluded ruefully.

‘Now.’ Madam Gunface crushed her barely-smoked cigarette into the delicately jeweled porcelain of the Fabergé ashtray. ‘Tell me.’ She yanked on a cord and slatted blinds rolled into the ceiling. The room filled with daylight. Startled, Gullthorpe looked out onto the unmistakeable vista of Bristol Zoo.

‘In which of these unfortunate animals did you hide the clip of uranium bullets?’

^*A lengthy correspondence between Cauldron and several Harley Street physicians about the medical feasability of implanting a working gun in a human face can be seen in the British Library. It’s one of the few examples of Cauldron actually doing some research; presumably Meet Madam Gunface would have been quite a different book if he hadn’t.

Get the ebook of A Shot Rang Out and extra material at thomascauldron.com! Paperback now available at Lulu.

But on actually reading L’Ennui de L’Espionage (which is written in English and takes place chiefly in the Netherlands), only the most self-deceiving pundits managed to hold on to the view that Cauldron had something to say about the human (or even the spy) condition. To everybody else, it was clear by chapter four at the latest that Cauldron was simply labouring under the apprehension that ‘ennui’ is a medical term for indigestion.

Still, the scene where Bockholt hides in a barrel and has to try and stop his stomach gurgling drips with tension, and the final barge chase has moments of surprising exhilaration.

(Speaking of ennui, the Existential Ennui blog has an interesting post about the works of Thomas Cauldron.)