Ten Fascinating Facts About Me

 

1. I was born on October 14, 1964. (I should state at the outset that these facts are 'fascinating' only to me.) This makes me in astrological terms a Libran dragon. Other Libran dragons include Graham Greene and Friedrich Nietsche, whom character-wise I should resemble, along with Cliff Richard and John Lennon. Imagine!

 

2. I am adopted. I am tremendously grateful to my biological parents for making the hard decision to give me away and for my adoptive parents for bringing me up. When I was a baby, my mother used to sing the Doris Day song ‘Que Sera Sera’ to me. Having listened to this song on YouTube, I now realize that it’s about a girl asking her mum what she will be in the future. She then grows up to be a mum herself and has the same conversation with her children. No wonder I became a house-husband...

 

3. I hated school and once got the cane for ‘senseless vandalism’. This is because ordinary vandalism has never held any appeal for me. Unless it’s vandalism of the senseless variety, I really can’t be bothered.

 

4. I loved university. I met my wife Barbara at university and within two weeks of going out we knew we wanted to get married (to each other!). I obtained a 2:1 in history whereas Barbara obtained a 2:2 in German and Spanish. I’m glad to report that the fact that I did better than Barbara never crops up these days and has in fact been completely forgotten.

 

5. I like playing chess. This may make me sound as boring as an accountant or a librarian (see Fascinating Fact About Me Number Nine), but it’s true. My chess‑playing career reached its height at the age of 11 when I drew against Russian Grandmaster Evgeny Vasyukov and represented the YMCA in the national club championships – which we won. My party trick is to play chess blindfolded, i.e. calling out the moves without sight of the board. True, this has been the death‑knell of many parties…

 

6. Just a note to those readers who tell me that they find both the main characters in my first two novels weird and antisocial or words to that effect: Who do you think those characters are based on?!?!?

 

7. I decided to be a writer at the age of 25 after reading Francis Iles’s Malice Aforethought. Amazingly, I am not the first person to be so affected by this book. Richard Hull, a crime writer from the thirties and forties, gave up his day job after reading Malice Aforethought.

 

8. Between school and university I worked at the Ovaltine factory as a cleaner. Promotion would have led to me cleaning the toilets (in addition to the floor and the machinery) but, alas, I never achieved this goal.

 

9. After university I worked first as an accountant for KPMG, then as a librarian for The Independent, and then as a system administrator for The Times. On one occasion at The Times I deleted the entire – the ENTIRE – database of Times articles from previous years. This feat, with all the safeguards built in, is actually pretty difficult to pull off and can only be achieved by someone who is clever but not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.

 

10. I live in Harpenden in Hertfordshire. I am married to Barbara, who is Vice President of Sales in a library systems company, and am the proud father of Theo, aged 18, and Olivia, aged 17.