A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Sam Peffer at one of the annual UK Vintage Paperback and Pulp Fairs held in a hotel in London’s Victoria. Peffer, who signed his work Peff, was one of the UK’s foremost paperback cover illustrators of the 50s and 60s. Later on he’d turn to…

He wanders through the covers of historical novels, forlornly seeking his missing hearse… Serious point. Nothing makes an author’s heart sink faster than the realisation that the work they sweated to make original is to be marketed as an also-ran to someone else’s. In this case I believe the imitation stems from The Alienist, but…

You know about StoryBundles, right? From their web page faq: We take a handful of books—anywhere from six to nine—and group them together to offer as a bundle. Then you, the reader, can take a look at the titles we’ve chosen and decide how much you’d like to pay. Think of us like a friend…

There’s this: From tomorrow, Thursday April 16th, for three nights at Camden’s Etcetera Theatre. I didn’t have a hand in the show but there’s some DNA in there somewhere. Details here

Hey look, the kid’s all growed up.

A happy find in Keswick today – Meet the Tiger was the first novel to feature Simon Templar, aka The Saint, and it’s been out of print for some time. Charteris was unhappy with his tyro work viewed in the context of his mature prose, and withdrew the book. His widow continues to respect his…

Upcoming anthology from Tor Forge… I’m in it

It was back in the early 90’s. I was at a meeting with Debra Allanson down in Soho Square. Her boss at the time was David Cunliffe, and he did a drop-by. He said they had access to The Prisoner TV rights and would I be interested in tackling a new version? I didn’t even…

I was looking for something in the archives when I came across this little snippet, and thought I’d share. It fairly counts as contemporary, since the episode seems to air every other week on ITV3… Of The Cup of Silence, December 23rd’s feature-length Rosemary & Thyme Christmas Special, Victoria Segal wrote in The Sunday Times:…

I’ve put together a second blog in which I’ve pulled together all my material on the Sebastian Becker books and short stories. This is what it’s currently looking like: Click here to go to the Bedlam Detective blog