The Pass Beyond Kashmir

"Oil - all the oil in the world; on top of the bloody Himalayas!" - Start a rumour about oil being found in the most unlikely spot and they'll bite at it... even if the rumour stems from the ravings of a delirious survivor of an ill-fated wartime surveying expedition to the foothills of Tibet. Years later, finding the missing papers of that expedition becomes a high priority for spies, mercenaries, oil companies and governments. Former army intelligence officer, unorthodox insurance assessor and freelance investigator Idwal Rees, an experienced Far Eastern hand operating out of Bombay, is drawn in to the search which soon becomes a race across India and Pakistan attempting to stay one step ahead of the opposition all the way to the pass beyond Kashmir, where the invading Chinese army - and Rees' personal nemesis - are lying in wait. A decade or more before he himself became one of Britain's leading thriller writers, Anthony Price wrote: "You only get one or two thrillers a year - if you are lucky - as good as Berkely Mather's The Pass Beyond Kashmir" and he was far from alone in his praise of Berkely Mather. American mystery superstar Erle Stanley Gardner said of him: "This man has a remarkable gift for thrills and suspense" whilst Ian Fleming put him in "the small category of those adventure writers whose works I, for one, will in future buy sight unseen" and insisted on Mather's appointment as one of the scriptwriters on the film Dr No.


Genre: Thriller

"This man... has a remarkable gift for thrills and suspense." - Erle Stanley Gardner