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The Sunday Mirror wrote: “Philip McAlpine, the latest Instant Hero
of Fiction. He is the contemporary Bond. McAlpine is a Secret Service
agent, too. He also has an obsessive interest in sex. But about there
they part company.”
McAlpine was the hero of four books and ‘The Dolly Dolly Spy’ was
followed the same year by the publication in March of ‘The Great Spy
Race’ and in September of ‘The Bang Bang Birds.’
Young, blonde-haired Diment seemed the ideal successful Sixties man.
Atticus in the Sunday Times wrote: “Adam Diment is 23; his hero, Philip
McAlpine, is based on himself. That is to say he’s tall, good-looking,
with a taste for fast cars, planes, girls and pot. One of the most
interesting characters in the book (‘The Dolly Dolly Spy’) is his
loathsome British Secret Service chief, Quine, who talks camp and
calls McAlpine ‘luv.’ “Quine,” says Diment, “is God. A sort of non-caring
vicious God. He’s the Establishment rolled into one. He’s all authority.”
Writing in the New York Times in November, 1967, Anthony Boucher commented,
“Adam Diment, who is only 23, is a happy answer to my recent plaint
about the lack of really young writers in the suspense field. ‘The
Dolly Dolly Spy’ introduces Philip McAlpine, an agent who smokes hashish,
leads a highly active sex life, kills vividly, uses (or even coins)
the latest London slang and still seems a perfectly real (and even
oddly likeable) young man rather than a reflected Bond image. His
first effort as a double agent, kidnapping a monster of the Waffen
S.S. is slow in starting, but well plotted and brightly coloured.
Several critics suggested that he was the successor to Ian Fleming.
In a review of John Le Carre’s ‘A Small Town In Germany,’ Richard
Boston wrote: "The short step from Bulldog Drummond to Ian Fleming's
James Bond consisted in giving the hero a sex life. Adam Diment -
who, with three books published at the age of 24, looks set fair as
Fleming's successor - has once more brought the hero up to date by
making him less snobbish and more promiscuous than Bond. Furthermore,
he smokes pot (Sherlock Holmes took cocaine)." Yet despite critical
acclaim and best-selling books, after his fourth McAlpine adventure
‘Think Inc’ in 1971, nothing else has been heard of him.
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