Desmond Skirrow

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Desmond Skirrow was a British advertising executive and writer of thrillers. In the late 1960s he wrote three outstanding spy novels about a fictional British agent named John Brock. Like his creator, Brock works in advertising in London, but is also a part-time agent for an undercover department run by The Fat Man. The three novels, It Won't Get You Anywhere, I Was Following This Girl, and I'm Trying to Give It Up, are tough, irreverent, and witty. Punch called them "the Chandler formula, basically, but louder and funnier."

Desmond Skirrow also wrote a children's book, The Case of The Silver Egg , which was televised as The Queen Street Gang. It involves the adventures of a group of boys tracking down a gang of villains and is in the tradition of Emil and The Detectives with a dash of Roald Dahl thrown in.

Amongst Skirrow's other work is a poem, "Ode On A Grecian Urn Summarized", which was included in the New Oxford Book of Light Verse edited by Kingsley Amis. He was the Creative Director of a major London advertising agency, Masius Wynne-Williams, but died prematurely in 1976 at the age of 53.