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Veronica Stallwood is the author of a dozen crime novels set in Oxford, and of two other suspense novels. She came late to writing, waiting until her children had left home before taking a five-day Arvon course in novel-writing. Novel-writing, she was told, was something she could do. And after a further two of terms of evening classes she completed her first book (a romantic novel) which was immediately snapped up by a minor publisher, as was her second some six months later. Unfortunately, these brought her neither the fame nor the fortune she was looking for, so she turned to thoughts of crime. This was much more fun: she could explore the dark -even violent - corridors of her mind and describe characters as nasty and manipulative as those she had met in real life. (It is a sad fact that the virtuous are as dull for the writer as they are to the reader.) There followed no long years of rejection. Deathspell, the first novel written under her own name, was picked off the slush pile by a senior editor at Macmillan just four weeks after Veronica posted it off. The phone call of acceptance came while she was working at the Computer Help Desk in the Lower Reading Room of the Bodleian Library. Fame and fortune still failed to follow, but she had set out on a career that saw the publication of a new book every year - greeted with modest acclaim by the crime-reading public. |
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