About the Author
I was born in Hull, East Yorkshire, where I spent the first twenty-two years of my life. In January 1967, armed with a Higher National Certificate in Chemistry, I moved to Thurso, Caithness, to work for the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Dounreay on the north coast of Scotland. I worked there for two years, before attending Salford University to complete a degree in Applied Chemistry. Following that, I was employed for thirty-five years by Kellogg Company, the global breakfast cereal manufacturer, latterly in the role of Human Resources Director with responsibility for Pay and Benefits policy across the company’s European operation. I retired from the company in December 2005, just a couple of weeks after my sixty-first birthday. Since then, my wife, Carol, and I have indulged our passion for hill-walking, completing many of the national long-distance trails, including the 180-mile Offa’s Dyke Path, and the 100-mile West Highland Way, twice.
Even so, retirement from such a fulfilling job left a significant gap in my day-to-day existence, but provided me with the opportunity to pursue a life-long ambition to become a writer. The saga of Hotel St Kilda actually begins with a short story I wrote over sixty years ago whilst at Hull Grammar School. The story drew critical acclaim from the English teacher and my peers in the third form (I guess that’s year nine in modern English) and was included in a school magazine. I’m not sure whether that already established me as a published author. I think probably not. That short tale, spanning a few hand-written pages, forms the basis of Chapter Two of the first book, Catalyst, and from there the story developed as I wrote it around the skeleton of the plot.
In fact, my intention was to write a book – one book - until the words seemed to develop lives of their own, multiplying as they went, to produce a surprisingly long saga. The climax of the third book, Lost Souls, is based on another short story which I have had in my mind – though never put down on paper – for a good many years. My fourth book, The Blue Men, is a sequel to the trilogy.
For the last fifty-two of my seventy-six years, I have lived in Manchester, fifty of them married to Carol. We have two children, and two grandchildren. Incidentally, Carol is an artist and is responsible for the cover design of all my books.