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Derek Raymond was born Robin Cook in 1931. His novels include A State of Denmark, The Crust on its Uppers, I Was Dora Suarez and How the Dead Live, which was made into a film. The son of a textile magnate, he dropped out of Eton aged sixteen and spent much of his early career among criminals and was employed at various times as a pornographer, organiser of illegal gambling, money launderer, pig-slaughterer and minicab driver. He died in London in 1994. John Williams was born in Cardiff in 1961.He wrote a punk fanzine and played in bands before moving to London and becoming a journalist , writing for everyone for The Face to the Financial Times. He wrote his first book, an American crime fiction travelogue called Into The Badlands (Paladin) in 1991. His next book, Bloody Valentine (HarperCollins), written around the Lynette White murder case in the Cardiff docks, came out in 1994. Following a subsequent libel action from the police, he turned to fiction. His first novel the London-set Faithless (Serpent's Tail) came out in 1997. Shortly afterward he moved back to Cardiff, with his family, and has now written four novels set in his hometown - Five Pubs, Two Bars And A Nightclub (Bloomsbury 1999); Cardiff Dead (Bloomsbury 2000); The Prince Of Wales (Bloomsbury 2003) and Temperance Town (Bloomsbury 2004). He has edited an anthology of new Welsh fiction, Wales Half Welsh (Bloomsbury 2004). He also writes screenplays (his ninety-minute drama, A Light In The City, was shown by BBC Wales in 2001). An omnibus edition of his Cardiff novels, The Cardiff Trilogy, is to be published by Bloomsbury in summer 2006. |
