BOOK DETAILS
Trade paper ISBN-13: 978-1939140869 List Price: $16.99 U.S. Pages: 128 Published: 2013 |
The Bad Penny (1985)
John Blackburn Book Description
An inexplicable wave of murders has the country gripped with terror. Ordinary men and women are suddenly going mad, committing brutal and horrific killings before slaying themselves in equally gruesome ways. General Charles Kirk of British Foreign Intelligence thinks the case has something to do with the most evil man he has ever known: Tommy Ryde, a British spy who defected to the Nazis during World War II and who seemed to possess a strange hypnotic power. But Ryde died forty years ago – or did he? Kirk and his colleague Bill Easter are determined to find out. The trail takes them first to Berlin to seek answers from a notorious Nazi war criminal, then to an underwater search of a sunken U-boat off the Scottish coast, and finally to the torture chambers beneath a madman’s Gothic castle in Dartmoor, where they will come face to face with the living incarnation of evil . . . The last of the prolific John Blackburn’s twenty-eight novels, The Bad Penny (1985) features the trademark blend of mystery, adventure, and horror that made him one of the most acclaimed British thriller writers of his generation. One of the scarcest of Blackburn’s books and long unobtainable, The Bad Penny is reprinted here for the first time ever. |
reviews
‘John Blackburn is today’s master of horror.’ –Times Literary Supplement
‘He is certainly the best British novelist in his field and deserves the widest recognition.’ – Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural
‘[A] stylish, genuinely chilling author . . . undoubtedly one of England’s best practicing novelists in the tradition of the thriller novel.’ – St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers
‘He is certainly the best British novelist in his field and deserves the widest recognition.’ – Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural
‘[A] stylish, genuinely chilling author . . . undoubtedly one of England’s best practicing novelists in the tradition of the thriller novel.’ – St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
John Blackburn was born in 1923 in the village of Corbridge, England, the second son of a clergyman. He started attending Haileybury College near London in 1937, but his education was interrupted by the onset of World War II; the shadow of the war, and that of Nazi Germany, would later play a role in many of his works. He served as a radio officer during the war in the Mercantile Marine from 1942 to 1945, and resumed his education afterwards at Durham University, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1949. Blackburn taught for several years after that, first in London and then in Berlin, and married Joan Mary Clift in 1950. Returning to London in 1952, he took over the management of Red Lion Books.
It was there that Blackburn began writing, and the immediate success in 1958 of his first novel, A Scent of New-Mown Hay, led him to take up a career as a writer full-time. He and his wife also maintained an antiquarian bookstore, a secondary career that would inform some of Blackburn’s later work. A prolific author, Blackburn would write nearly 30 novels between 1958 and 1985; most of these were horror and thrillers, but also included one historical novel set in Roman times, The Flame and the Wind (1967). He died in 1993.
It was there that Blackburn began writing, and the immediate success in 1958 of his first novel, A Scent of New-Mown Hay, led him to take up a career as a writer full-time. He and his wife also maintained an antiquarian bookstore, a secondary career that would inform some of Blackburn’s later work. A prolific author, Blackburn would write nearly 30 novels between 1958 and 1985; most of these were horror and thrillers, but also included one historical novel set in Roman times, The Flame and the Wind (1967). He died in 1993.