Böcker av Arnie Wilson

On 6 May 1903, twelve men sat down to dinner at the Café Royal in London and started a ski club. It would become the most famous in the world - the Ski Club of Great Britain. Exotic places like Val d'Isère and Courchevel had yet to be invented. Zermatt was a climbing village famous for the Matterhorn (conquered for the first time less than 40 years previously) but not for its skiing. In those days, to the British, skiing was little more than a slightly odd sport practised by English eccentrics. There were no ski lifts or resorts, but nevertheless the British pioneered Alpine skiing so that they could indulge their passion for a craze that was about to grip the world of Winter sports. Over the years, the Ski Club published an almanac, which became a document of fascinating, amusing and downright bizarre anecdotes of the Brits on the slopes as the sport went from being a minority diversion to the worldwide obsession it is today.

Thanks to the late Peter Tory's encouragement, who used almost 100 of my limericks in his Diary columns in the Star and The Sunday Express in the '80s and early '90s, I seem to be addicted to writing limericks. Or trying to. As often as not for friends. I do think a book of them might make good stocking fillers. Unlike Edward Lear's, the last line of my limericks is NOT a repeat of the first line and the last line also usually contains a (hopefully) funny pay off. What's more - my limericks do usually scan! "e;As someone who specialises in mysteries of all kinds and at all levels, it remains something of a mystery even to me how my old friend Arnie Wilson manages to write such daft but undeniably amusing limericks. In fact they're Dead Funny! (Regular readers of my Roy Grace thrillers will get that pun-ishing joke.)"e; Peter James, author of the Roy Grace thrillers

Arnie Wilson started hunting down "big names" after being hired by a news agency to telephone titled people and charm them into divulging stories he would sell to Fleet Street gossip columns. But the 'celebrity' landscape was changing. Instead of targeting lords, baronets knights and their ladies, he was determined instead to find 'real' celebrities, persuading them with a combination of cheek, charm and chutzpah to divulge funny and intimate anecdotes for publication.