ABOUT Robin Squire

Renting a room in a house near Portobello Road in London I met a fellow-tenant who used to run a pop group, so I borrowed a tape recorder and many beery sessions later had the material for what turned out to be my first novel, Square One, about a 1960s boy band, which was published in hardback by W.H. Allen (paperback by New English Library as The Big Scene), which caused me to ditch the sales job, at which I was useless anyway. This book, about which I was interviewed by a youthful Terry Wogan, led via a truly bizarre set of circumstances to being attached to BBC TV for six months in the Doctor Who office, during which I found myself playing the first monster (an Auton) to move across our TV screens in colour, pursued by a suave Jon Pertwee, and inadvertently terrifying many a watching child (oops, sorry kids!).

Other novels followed, including A Portrait of Barbara, published by Bachman & Turner and Sphere Books in London and St. Martin’s Press in New York; and, after meeting film director Norman Cohen, I found myself working on a script in South Africa.

Since then I’ve written and rewritten numerous rewritten rewrites of rewritten versions of earlier rewrites of my rewritten screenplays, and the experience of shaping and reshaping these into their final form has created an intriguing portfolio (well, it intrigues me); while a film on which I was an increasingly isolated writer – which featured a rather pompous British actor who has since become internationally famous, and a brilliant classical actress I can only assume was being kind – inspired my diary-based memoir The Unmaking of a Britflick, which retains the power to make me chuckle into my whisky mac at the day’s end. More recently, Little, Brown Book Group published my novel The Mystery of the Stolen Brides on their Crime Vault site, which began life as a ‘horror’ film script with Christopher Lee in the main role, I even met him and we chewed the fat about the character he was to have played, so I continue to have filmic visions for that too, even though the great man is no longer around.

Meanwhile I’ve just completed a novel about a paranormal investigator, which could be the first of several; also, having joined forces with a media lawyer and film producer, a screenplay of mine is currently being realigned by a dynamic young director, about which more soon.