Photo: Francesco Da Vinci/Getty Images (c.1992)
Sample of authors
Gardner, John (f. 1926)
John Edmund Gardner was a British novelist. He was born in the village of Seaton Delaval in Northumberland as the son of a clergyman. He briefly attended Cottham’s Preparatory School in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1931, and after the family had moved to Wantage in Berkshire in 1933, King Alfred’s School 1934–1943. He joined the Home Guard at the start of the Second World War and in 1943 the Royal Marin...
Literary figures
Nigel Strangeways
Gender: Male
He is tall and slim, has blond hair and blue, somewhat short-sighted eyes. He resembles the poet W.H. Auden, and his creator Nicholas Blake (pseudonym for the poet Cecil Day Lewis) has admitted that he had his good friend as model. Nigel Strangeways is a private detective in London, and at first lives together with his wife Georgia Cavendish, but after her death in the war, with the sculptress...