The thriller writer Lionel Davidson was often mentioned in the same breath as Frederick Forsyth, both sharing the same love of in-depth technical and scenic detail. But his plots, in contrast to Forsyth’s, are much less violent, much more gnomic. Humour and love interest were salient features. The interaction of personalities was complex, yielding unexpected twists and turns in far-flung settings as a test of the reader’s wits.

His first novel, The Night of Wenceslas (1960), was published to critical acclaim and drew comparisons to John le Carré, Rider Haggard and Graham Greene; the latter rated him the world’s best writer of high adventure. This book was followed by The Rose of Tibet (1962), A Long Way to Shiloh (1966), The Chelsea Murders (1978) and Kolymsky Heights (1994). He received the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award three times and was presented with the association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement award in 2001.

The Jewish Chronicle regarded him as the “finest novelist” that Anglo-Jewry had yet produced, and some of his novels did have Jewish settings or characters: three occur in Israel, where he settled for a decade after 1967 before returning to London, looking for fictional stimuli after Israel ran dry. But others, including The Chelsea Murders and Kolymsky Heights, had no Jewish angles.

Lionel Davidson was born in 1922 in Hull, the youngest of nine children. He taught his mother to read; his father was a tailor and a union organiser. He began work as an office boy in London at The Spectator, which published his first short story when he was 15. He then moved to a features agency, honing his varied literary talents, which included fairytales and setting crosswords — a skill that resurfaces in his novels. He stayed in London after the outbreak of the Second World War, becoming a caption writer at the Keystone picture agency. He then volunteered as a submariner for the Royal Navy; oddly, this experience never reappeared in his fiction. He returned to Keystone after the war, then opted for photojournalism, visiting Prague, from which he was deported but which was later the scene of his first novel. In London again, he joined the magazine John Bull, doing interviews, including one with Oswald Mosley. He was also fiction editor, commissioning, inter alia, Neville Shute. He married Fay Jacobs in 1949.

In 1960 The Night of Wenceslas came out. A cash-strapped young Englishman is blackmailed by a creditor into a trip to Prague to investigate the glass industry. He goes nervously and runs haplessly into romance, intrigue and the secret police. Luckily, in sales terms, it was a “hit”, as Davidson, not unlike his hero, had only £11 at the time. Penguin snapped it up; it was later turned into the 1964 film Hot Enough for June, starring Dirk Bogarde. Davidson won the first of his Gold Dagger awards, and a prize for Best First Novel of the Year. The royalties also allowed him to move from Kew to Kensington.

Lack of money impelled him to write The Rose of Tibet (1962), an adventure set a dozen years earlier at the time of the Chinese invasion. Another young English hero goes there, searching for his lost brother and has to flee the invaders. Davidson sketched out a credible local terrain and culture from a public library; he was a great hoarder of reference books. Hatred for writing to a formula led to the inclusion in the book of a thinly veiled — and hostile — portrait of Victor Gollancz, his publisher, whom he later left for Jonathan Cape. A Long Way to Shiloh (1966), arguably his best-known work, centred on a hunt by Israeli archaeologists for the true Menorah from the ancient Temple. It meant a first trip to Israel for his groundwork. After the 1967 war an awakened Jewish commitment induced him to settle there.

He was also irked by the failure of American-Jewish writers, who had shown solidarity at the time of the war, to make the decisive break and emigrate. Thirty-seven of his relatives were murdered in Auschwitz — for a long time he banned German sales of his books — but he testified that he had never felt very Jewish in England.

The Israeli Government gave him a room in Jaffa as an office, from which he wrote film scripts, children’s stories (as before, under a pseudonym) and further novels. These included Making Good Again (1967), an espionage thriller, Smith’s Gazelle (1971), set amid a lost species of deer in a ravine sited between Jordan and Israel, and The Sun Chemist (1976), based on the life of Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel.

Despite a deep love for his new home, restlessness set in, accentuated by the anguish of nursing his wife, who later died of cancer. A classic murder story, The Chelsea Murders, followed his return to London. It revealed his flair for cryptic crossword-style clues, with seven victims each with the initials of a writer or artist who had been a Chelsea resident. Children’s stories emerged, including the novel Under Plum Lake (1980), but no adult novel for 14 years until Kolymsky Heights (1994), a Cold War-style tale set largely in post-Cold War Siberia when Western scientists, through a Canadian Indian envoy, try to capture Russian research findings. Code-breaking figured strongly.

Davidson’s first wife died in 1988. He is survived by his second wife, Frances Ullman, whom he married in 1989, and by two sons of his first marriage.

Lionel Davidson, thriller writer, was born on March 31, 1922. He died on October 21, 2009, aged 87