BIOGRAPHY

Born November, 1946, Clacton-on-Sea, Essex.
Seaside childhood, punctuated by football, swimming, afternoons on the dodgems, run-ins with the police, multiple raids on the local library - plus near-total immersion in English post-war cinema classics including The Dam Busters, Ice Cold in Alex, The Wooden Horse, The Cockleshell Heroes, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. War-crazy? Sort of.....

Wins scholarship to London boarding school and then onward to Cambridge University. Reads English, volunteers for Six Day War (those films again!) and emerges three years later with five mercifully unpublished manuscripts, intent on pursuing career as full-time novelist. Yet more rejection slips (and hunger) compel a career-rethink.

Becomes promotion scriptwriter with Southern Television, then researcher, then director. Spends next twenty years directing and producing ITV documentaries, many of them networked. Films seabed wrecks of Titanic and Bismarck (with Bob Ballard), profiles the Brighton Bomber, produces ITV account of Richard Branson's near-fatal attempt to cross the Atlantic by balloon, wins number of awards....but dreams all the time of getting into print.

ITV commission for 6-part drama series, Rules of Engagement, successfully finessed into 2-thriller contract with Macmillan. Sacked after TVS loses the franchise, and embarks on new career as - at last - full-time novelist.

To date, 16 novels, one biography, plus Airshow, a fly-on-the-wall novel-length piece of reportage. Draws gleefully on home-town Portsmouth for the basis of an on-going crime series featuring D/I Joe Faraday and D/C Paul Winter. Contributes five years of columns to the Portsmouth News, pens a number of plays and monologues for local production, then decamps west to Devon for a more considered take on Pompey low-life.

Married to the delectable Lin, with three
grown-up sons (Tom, Jack and Woody),
a wayward cat (Rommie), and the best view in the world. Lifetime ambitions? To master colloquial French, the trickier bits of Word 2000, windsurfing without tears, and the perfect Chicken Bhuna......