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According to the bio on his website: "My parents were well-meaning Marxists who decided to have me home schooled. To do that they employed what my mother called a ‘governess’, a live in tutor-cum-factotum. While she tried to teach me the Greek alphabet, I was busy memorizing the parts of the gun, ancient weapons and studying Budo. I also bunked off at every opportunity and went to help out at the stables across the road, or practice Tae Kwon Do with my pal, Rafael. After two years the governess became an alcoholic and vanished one night without a trace. I still feel maybe it was my fault.

I got my first job at sixteen, breaking in wild horses. It wasn’t the only thing I broke. A few bones snapped and crunched along the way too. The next few years after that are a closed book. I traveled a lot, saw a lot of life, and death, had a lot of fun and made some good friends. Along the way I developed a passion for storytelling. Being dyslexic made me determined to master writing and with the help of NLP and Raja yoga, I did it – or at least I’m doing it. Reading was never a problem, but writing was.

Stone and Dehan, and the indestructible Lacklan Walker, were all born of my love of the noir genre. As a kid, when I wasn’t being forced to read Karl Marx’s Das Capital, I was usually reading Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett or the great Raymond Chandler. I loved detective stories of all types, but Marlow, Hammer and the Continental Op were always where it was at for me. They were my real mentors and tutors.

These days I live alone on a mountain with my cat. It’s peaceful up here, among the golden eagles, and that’s a good thing. And if the ghosts ever try to come and find me, I can see them coming from afar. When that happens, I pull out a pack of Camels, pop the cork on the Bushmills, and sit and wait for them to arrive."