the desk', to whom McGoohan's character is seen angrily handing his letter of resignation; and played the same, non-speaking character in the episode "Many Happy Returns". Markstein's view of the series was for a more-or-less conventional action/espionage story. However, as McGoohan controlled the series as Executive Producer and owner of Everyman Films, Markstein became increasingly dissatisfied as an employee and ultimately left the series after the conclusion of the initial block of thirteen episodes. A glimpse of Markstein's face remained in the opening credits, but it was without him that McGoohan took the series to its most surreal and existential levels in the final four episodes, and its bizarre conclusion. Later work After The Prisoner, Markstein joined the new Thames Television, initially as an in-house script editor, then as story editor for the first series of a counter-espionage drama Special Branch (1969); the third and final fourth series of spy drama Callan (1970, 1972); several episodes of Armchair Theatre (1969, 1971); and the first series of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971). He also acted as producer for the first series of Man at the Top (1970–71), a continuation of the story begun with John Braine's 1957 Room at the Top. Markstein became Thames's Head of Script Development, where he had input into the development of the 1974 Armchair Cinema season made by Thames's film subsidiary Euston Films, including one-off drama Regan and its celebrated successor series The Sweeney. Markstein again went freelance, and co-wrote the screenplay for The Odessa File (1974), based on the novel by Frederick Forsyth. In the same year, together with Jacqui Lyons, he co-founded the literary agency, Marjacq Scripts Ltd, initially to represent screenwriters, later also thriller writers and computer game authors. The name is a derived from Markstein's surname and Lyon's forename. In addition to his interests in Marjacq, Markstein also wrote several thrillers, including The Cooler (1974), The Man From Yesterday (1976), Chance Awakening (1977, basis of the screenplay Espion, lève-toi by Yves Boisset), the historical epic Tara Kane (1978), Goering Testament (1978), Traitor for a Cause (1979), Ultimate Issue (1981), Ferret (1983), and Soul Hunters (1987). He continued to write for television, including working on two series of Shades of Greene (1975–76) for Thames, a series of adaptations of short stories by Graham Greene, for which Markstein acted as script consultant jointly with Greene's brother, former director-general of the BBC, Sir Hugh