Dead Letter Drop

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Welcome to my first published novel, which crept, unseen and unnoticed, onto the bottom shelves at the rear of a handful of bookshops kind enough to stock it back in 1981 — and remained there, mostly unsold. I remember WH Smith, out of the goodness of their hearts, taking a grand total of thirty copies — a far cry from the 30,000 they would take of books that were destined for the bestseller lists! But I am still hugely grateful to them for giving a total unknown the kudos of being able to say, ‘Ah, yes, WH Smith stock it, actually!’

It was rejected by the first publisher who read it, New English Library, headed by Nick Webb. Seven years later, in 1988, he was to surprise me by outbidding all other UK publishers for my supernatural thriller Possession. The second publisher, to my joy and delight, bought it. WH Allen paid a princely £2,000 — not a lot of money even in those days.

It was not the first novel that I had written — I wrote three between 1967 and 1970 which, luckily, were never published at all, much to my dismay back then. The first was titled Ride Down a Roller Coaster and it was inspired by my hero at the time, a young writer called Adam Diment who wrote three massively successful, racy, spy thrillers — The Dolly Dolly Spy, The Great Spy Race and The Bang Bang Birds — which enabled him to live a Champagne lifestyle in his mid-twenties and drive an Aston Martin, a car I coveted above all others. Roller Coaster wasn’t a spy thriller; it was a kind of rake’s progress to disaster through the pop and drug world of my own teen era, the 1960s.

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