In “Sion Crossing” (1984), a character named Oliver Latimer, a sort of rival of Audley’s, travels to the United States and gets involved in a mystery in Georgia related to the Civil War. “A New Kind of War” (1988) begins in Greece in 1945, then shifts to the Teutoburg Forest in Germany and makes reference to a battle the Romans fought there 2,000 years earlier.

If Mr. Price’s books never became blockbusters, they did garner critical praise.

“He does not yet enjoy the same degree of fame as John le Carré, Len Deighton or Frederick Forsyth,” John Gross wrote in The New York Times in 1986, reviewing “Here Be Monsters,” “but he can more than survive comparison with any of them. He is far more subtle than Mr. Forsyth and much less gimmicky than Mr. Deighton, and if he can’t quite match Mr. le Carré’s doomy intensity, he has the compensating virtues of (relatively speaking) greater directness and solid good sense.”

Anthony Price was born on Aug. 16, 1928, in Hertfordshire, north of London, where his mother, Kathleen (Lawrence) Price, a commercial artist, had returned from India during her pregnancy while his father, Walter, remained there, working as an accountant. Anthony rarely saw his father during childhood, and after his mother died when he was a boy, he was raised by an aunt in Canterbury.

After doing his national service from 1947 to 1949, first in the Royal Signals and then in the Royal Army Educational Corps, he attended Merton College, Oxford, studying history and earning a master of arts. In 1953 he married Ann Stone. About the same time, he took a job at The Oxford Times; by 1972 he had worked his way up to editor, a position he held until he retired in 1988.