Michael Brett

Miles Barton Tripp (1923–2000) was an English writer of thirty-seven works of fiction including crime novels and thrillers, some of which he wrote under noms de plume Michael Brett and John Michael Brett. He served in RAF Bomber Command during World War II, flying thirty-seven sorties as a bomber-aimer, and completed 40 missions over enemy territory. He initially recorded his wartime experiences in a fictionalised memoir, Faith is a Windsock, before exploring them more deeply in the non-fiction title The Eighth Passenger. After the war, Tripp studied law and worked as a solicitor, and started to write fiction during his spare time. He lived in Hertfordshire, England.

Some of his novels, although they are about the themes of the law, crime, and retribution, are not in the classic crime fiction mould in that they are not whodunnits. For example, in Extreme Provocation the narrator is a man who says in the very first six words of the first chapter "After killing my wife I telephoned..." and the entire story is about how and why the character came to find himself in that situation, exactly what his state of mind was, how the law courts would treat him, and how his life thereafter would continue. It is thus not a conventional crime novel but is all about an event that may or may not be deemed a crime. The interest for the reader is in the gradual revelation of the narrator's state of mind and his motivations.