In a carefully co-ordinated pattern of explosions both on the Tube and on the bus system, they were able to bring the whole city to a halt and gain maximum publicity at a time when the world's leaders were meeting in Britain, and London was celebrating its Olympic victory. Unlike the Irish campaign, Britain is this time facing a threat that is not peculiar to us nor unprecedented.Nor, whatever one's feelings about the invasion of Iraq, would it be right for Britain to take its decisions about the future of its troops there on the basis of this attack on its citizens back home The invasion of Iraq was a mistake. It has helped to radicalise the Middle East and much of the Islamic world against us. But Tony Blair was undoubtedly right in asserting British determination not to be thrown by such attacks and, in being pictured with the other leaders attending the G8 summit, reminding the world that "each of the countries around the table have some experience of the effects of terrorism". But for a people who have already suffered from a generation of bombings and alarms from the IRA and the years of the Blitz in the Second World War, this was the worst single atrocity on civilians in half a century and a desperate reminder of just how vulnerable a modern metropolis is to the assault of those without concern for human life. "It is important," declared a visibly rattled Prime Minister from Gleneagles, before returning to London, "that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world". A degree of political hyperbole is understandable on these occasions - although it was noticeable that the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, projected a more sober and better pitched tone in the Commons yesterday morning. Ever the professional, he turned the experience of having most of his oesophagus cut out and a prosthetic voice-box replacing it into Let's Talk, a quirky and dispassionate account of what happened to him, which was published this May.

The final 87th Precinct novel, Fiddlers, is due out in September, and a new volume of short stories, so far untitled, will be published in 2006.Jack Adrian. The terrorist attack all had expected finally came to London yesterday, to the shock of everyone. Just as the city was still glowing from the success of its bid for the 2012 Olympics, and the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was leading the opening session of the G8 summit in Gleneagles, a sequence of four co-ordinated explosions was set off across London, killing scores of ordinary commuters, wounding more than 700 and paralysing the city's transport system The precise death toll was still not known last night One hopes it will prove mercifully less than that of Madrid. He always wrote compellingly - his early pulp work is just as involving as later material - and seemed able to juggle three or four literary balls in the air with the same kind of relish as his readers felt on reading him (latterly, he added another series alongside his 87th Precinct books, featuring the Florida attorney Matthew Hope) And he never seemed to rest on his laurels.

Only three years ago, at the age of 76, he published The Moment She Was Gone, an extraordinarily gripping and suspenseful novel which touched on schizophrenia, sex, psychiatry, and appalling mothers. In 1982 Kon Ichikawa turned the 1961 87th Precinct novel Lady, Lady, I Did It! into Kofuku (a.k.a Happiness or Lonely Heart).Never afraid to attack a new area of storytelling, Hunter wrote a sprawling western saga, The Chisholms, in 1976, and then sold the book as a series to television, scripting most of the hour-long instalments himself (1978-79).Hunter's body of work is impressive and wide-ranging. And only this year he began an entirely new suspense series with Alice in Jeopardy; a second book, Becca in Jeopardy, is due next year.Evan Hunter was awarded the title "Grand Master" in 1986 by the Mystery Writers of America, and the Crime Writers Association "Diamond Dagger" for lifetime achievement in 1998.Towards the end of his life he suffered three heart attacks, was given a triple bypass, and then was hit with throat cancer. Claude Chabrol made Blood Relatives (1975) in 1977 with Donald Sutherland, as a co-production in Canada, Les Liens du sang; Philippe Agostini turned Killer's Wedge into La Soupe aux poulets (1963), fudging over the novel's "impossible crime" aspect; William Berke made The Mugger (1956), only the second 87th Precinct thriller, in 1958 with a screenplay by the pulp-writer Henry Kane; The Pusher (1956) was produced in 1960 by United Artists with a so-so script by Harold Robbins.The Japanese took to Hunter with enormous enthusiasm, especially his McBain books. Heaven and Hell, High and Low or The Ransom, 1963) with the great Toshiro Mifune as the bewildered shoemaker who has to part with a fortune to save someone else's child from kidnappers. Akira Kurasawa (with a small posse of writers) transformed King's Ransom (1959) into Tengoku to jigoku (a.k.a. Halfway through the latter assignment Hunter discovered the normally unflappable director had taken against him, "for no reason I could ever think of", and the film ended up with a screenplay by Jay Presson Allen.Other directors fell on Hunter's novels over the years.