I have been getting a lot of emails from readers about why my novels Getting Wired, Dead Letter Drop, Atom Bomb Angel and Billionaire are all out of print. I’ve now updated this website’s Books page with more info about all these books and my reasons for deliberately keeping all four books permanently out of print.
Here’s the background info if you’re interested:
Getting Wired:
This is the only children’s book I have written (apart from doing the English translation for a series of Biggles cartoon books a long time back.)
I enjoyed the experience of writing it and we had some wonderful reviews, and I had intended it to be the start of a series of stories about a group of school children getting into adventures and danger over the internet. I wrote the first one in 1995, in the very early days of the Internet. Yorkshire Television, now part of Granada, approached me, interested to buy the rights. Then some weeks later, they wrote to me, saying that after much deliberation, they had decided that children weren’t really very interested in anything to do with computers. I think that remark should go down in history!!!!
Ultimately, although I had fun writing the book, and did in fact complete a second manuscript, I found I preferred the freedom of writing my novels – and still an amazing amount of kids seem to enjoy my adult books – the darker the better!
Dead Letter Drop, Atom Bomb Angel and Billionaire
I wrote these three books in the early 1980s, after reading a newspaper article which said there was a shortage of spy thrillers! I was amazed that my first attempt, Dead Letter Drop got published,an I was even more amazed that it did not do well! It was published in hardback in the UK by W H Allen and in paperback by Star (now part of Virgin Books). My subsequent spy thriller, Atom Bomb Angel, fared no better, and nor did my financial thriller, Billionaire. Although they got some nice reviews, as they saying goes, they rose without trace. And sank without trace, too…
Writing them was a good learning experience, but I feel that my writing has improved a lot since then and that readers who have enjoyed my work since Possession onwards would be disappointed if they read these earlier ones. So I have withdrawn them, and keep them permanently out of print.