I first met Mike Ripley at a beano in 1990 to celebrate Collins Crime Club, for which occasion a special collection of stories was published. I can prove my claim about my whereabouts on that nefarious occasion in 1990, and by way of evidence we present Exhibit #1, the bloodied corpse of my contemporary account of the assembly of (literary) killers for Collins Crime Club.
I barely escaped with my life!
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I still have that book (well, of course I do!), and it contains the story which was my first encounter with Fitzroy Maclean Angel. It says something about the story that I have a remarkably vivid recollection of it. Mike has written fifteen novels about Angel, and, in that quarter century, a handful of short stories. I have read the novels, of course, but the rest of the stories are new to me. Angels and Others is, so to speak, the Complete Short Stories (since it includes all Mike’s non-Angel stories as well.)
You’ll have noticed that I have not really categorised the Angel books, because while broadly in the genre of crime writing, I’m not sure exactly in which sub-genre they sit. Happily, Mike knows, and he was able to set me straight.
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