Photo: Björn Gustafsson / Forflex
Sample of authors
Billingham, Mark
The British author Mark Philip David Billingham was born in Solihull, Warwickshire, and grew up near Birmingham where he attended King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys at King’s Heath. His father left the family when Mark was six years old. When his mother remarried eight years later, she and her husband moved away. Mark Billingham was then seventeen years old and found accommodation near his s...
Literary figures
Johnny Métal
Gender: Male
Hardboiled crime reporter, based in New York, where he is also busy infiltrating organised crime. He usually acts more as a private detective than as a journalist. Métal is the main character in half a dozen detective stories packed with cliches and written by Frank Harding, a pseudonym of the French author Léo Malet, who was strongly inspired by Dashiell Hammett when he wrote the novels.