Sea Eagle, Aldridge won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Aldridge's most successful and most widely published novel The Diplomat was released in 1949. An espionage and political drama set amidst the Azerbaijan Revolution in Iran, the novel received mixed reviews. The Anglo-Soviet Journal called it "absorbing and impressive". An American review for Kirkus, however, while acknowledging the book's premise to be promising and original, labelled it as slow, repetitive and awkward in style. His 1950 novel The Hunter proved that Aldridge was willing to attempt a variety of genres and settings. A drama about fur-hunters living in the wilds of the Ontario bushlands in Canada, the novel was, according to Walter O'Meara in the Saturday Review, written in a "flat direct prose that just when you decide to be bored straightens you up with an incisive and revealing word or phrase." He went on to say it was "a sincere and occasionally penetrating study of man against the eternal odds". Aldridge's next book appeared in 1954, a novel entitled Heroes of the Empty View, depicting an English hero-adventurer in the Middle-East in the vein of T. E. Lawrence and Charles Gordon. Mervyn Jones writing in Tribune magazine criticised the novel's shortage of action, the un-convincing lead character and the book's lack of passion. Jones said that Aldridge had "impressive gifts" as a novelist but needed to find a subject that "really fires him". The novel got a better response from Walter Havighurst, writing in the Saturday Review, who called it "a provocative novel...written with authoritative knowledge of men, machines and politics". A review for Kirkus Reviews praised the novel as being "perhaps his most important work, and implicit in its picture of the conflicts, the contradictions, the dilemmas of the Arabs....There is a wider view of the battle for freedom in a world where a machine-ruled society is becoming the norm". Aldridge returned to the Second World War with his next novel, I Wish He Would Not Die (1957), a drama set in the Desert Air Force in Egypt. Kirkus Reviews labelled it as an effective work, dealing with "men living under stress and with a heightened sense of humanity present the issues that haunt them..." Aldridge's direct experiences of Egypt, where he lived for much of the Post-War era, both as a Foreign Correspondent and later as a novelist, inspired the 1961 novel The Last Exile, set amidst the