Manning Coles was the pseudonym used by a pair of British writers, Cyril Henry Coles (1899-1965) and Adelaide Frances Oke Manning (1891-1959). They produced a long series of popular and entertaining spy stories featuring Thomas Elphinstone (Tommy) Hambledon, who worked for British Intelligence against first the Germans, then the Russians. The first two of these were selected as Haycraft-Queen cornerstones for what Anthony Boucher described as their 'good-natured implausibility'.

Coles himself was an intelligence officer in WWI and lived in Australia from 1919 to 1928. He married Cordelia Smith in 1934. Manning, who worked at the War Office during WWI, became his neighbour in 1929. Their collaboration lasted until a year before Manning's death in 1959. After her death Coles wrote a novel on his own and then two more in collaboration with Tom Hammerton.

Not detective stories but entertaining fictions about 'real' people involved in the nasty world of espionage.

Bibliography

Drink to Yesterday (1940)

Pray Silence (1940)

They Tell No Tales (1941)

A Toast to Tomorrow (1941)

This Fortress (1942)

Without Lawful Authority (1943)

Green Hazard (1945)

The Fifth Man (1946)

Let the Tiger Die (1947)

A Brother for Hugh (1947)

Among Those Absent (1948)

Diamonds to Amsterdam (1950)

Not Negotiable (1949)

Dangerous By Nature (1950)

Now or Never (1951)

Night Train to Paris (1952)

Alias Uncle Hugo (1953)

A Knife for the Juggler (1953)

Not for Export (1954)

The Man in the Green Hat (1956)

Basle Express (1956)

Three Beans (1957)

Death of an Ambassador (1957)

No Entry (1958)

Crime in Concrete (1960)

Search for a Sultan (1961) with Tom Hammerton

The House at Pluck's Gutter (1963) with Tom Hammerton