There’s more than one occasion reading Michael Caine’s thriller, DEADLY GAME, that one thinks of his immortal phrase in the film, The Italian Job, “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”

DEADLY GAME reads like the movie Michael Caine would have starred in forty five years ago, or if he was half his age now. A movie more Guy Ritchie than Christopher Nolan starring a 45 year old Michael Caine. Got the picture?

DEADLY GAME’s protagonist is an old school copper, named Harry Taylor. He heads up a special ops security detail within Scotland Yard called SO22.

Before he was a copper he had served Queen and Country in Helmand and Columbia, Georgia and Myanmar. By the way he talks, he is as much a protector of East London lingo as subjects of the realm.

You could argue that Harry Taylor shares some character DNA with other Harrys that Caine has played – Harry Palmer and Harry Brown – with a dash of Charlie Croker from The Italian Job and a right side of the law Jack Carter.

DEADLY GAME starts bizarrely, with a Steptoe and Son operation in Stepney the setting for a violent smash and grab of a metal box containing radioactive material.

Harry and his unconventional team, a female sniper and a nuclear scientist forensic officer, are leading the investigation, trying not to be tripped over by MI5 and MI6 and other sundry security services.

They soon have two very distinct suspects, a Russian oligarch and a British aristocrat, the former owning an island in Barbados the other a estate lair in the English countryside.

The caper leads them from the Caribbean to Manchester with South American drug cartels sticking in their two bobs worth.

DEADLY GAME is brimming with contemporary concerns, but it is also a throwback to Sixties sensibilities, a nostalgia for some of the traditional babies that have been thrown out with politically correct bathwater.

Michael Caine was immortalised in song by Madness, and he returns the favour by including their song, Return of The Los Palmas 7, in an always look on the bright side anthem at a colleagues funeral. It’s just one of the brilliant little nods and winks that pepper this pacy thriller.

DEADLY GAME by Michael Caine is published by Hachette.