This was followed by a couple more, but it was Night of the Crabs in 1976 which really launched me as a writer. I wrote a horror novel for the New English Library in 1974 entitled Werewolf by Moonlight. Although we still have this business, writing came along and this proved to be the vehicle which gave me my freedom. Originally my intention was to concentrate on this and maybe build it up to a full-time business which would enable me to leave banking. In 1972 I launched my second hand bookselling business which eventually became Black Hill Books. I wrote regularly for most of the sporting magazines, interspersed with fiction for such magazines as the legendary London Mystery Selection, a quarterly anthology for which I contributed 18 stories between 1972-82. My writing in those days only concerned shooting. During 1960-67 I operated a small shotgun cartridge loading business but this finished when my components suppliers closed down and I could no longer obtain components at competitive prices. In 1961 I designed and made a 12-bore shotgun, intending to follow it up with six more, but I did not have the money to do this. Shooting (hunting) was my first love, and all my spare time was spent in this way. I would have loved to have served an apprenticeship in the gun trade but my father would not hear of it.

During the early years when I was working in Birmingham, I spent most of my lunch hours in the Birmingham gun quarter. I accepted it but never found it very interesting. My father was a dedicated bank manager and I was destined for banking from birth.

In 1990 I collated these into a book entitled Fifty Tales from the Fifties. Between 1952-57 I wrote 56 stories for them, many serialized. I was first published at the age of 12 in The Tettenhall Observer, a local weekly newspaper. Weale) and she always encouraged me to write. My mother was a pre-war historical novelist (E. I was born on November 21, 1939, in the small village of Hopwas, near Tamworth, Staffordshire, England.

The Slime Beast by Guy N. Smith