Böcker av Julian Mitchell

After a relatively quiet few months, an outbreak of serious headline-grabbing crimes confronts Inspector King and his team of detectives.

Investigative journalist, Dan Morris, was a man on a mission. He had already disrupted the illegal drugs trade in Bristol and was now determined to uncover a so-called County Lines gang operating in South Devon. Anecdotally, huge amounts of cocaine and other drugs were flooding into Devon by land, sea and air.

Mary Cranson had done the walk many times before, but now had simply vanished from Dartmoor near the prominent landmark called Haytor. Her boyfriend raises the alarm when she doesn't meet him as arranged in the local pub.

Imaginary Toys (1961) marked the literary debut of the then 26-year-old Julian Mitchell, who would eventually set aside his prizewinning career as a novelist and achieve wider renown as a dramatist, most famously with Another Country (1981). Imaginary Toys is a novel of Oxford after World War Two, where class consciousness has become newly acute, and a quartet of narrators wrestle with their studies and their more personal difficulties - among the four a coalminer's son and the daughter of a solid bourgeois family, who fall in love to the discomfort of their respective friends.In the first of a sequence of reflective, autobiographical new introductions composed especially for Faber Finds' reissues of his early novels, Julian Mitchell recalls the atmosphere of mid-1950s Oxford, and the path he took to a literary vocation.

Julian Mitchell's fifth novel, first published in 1966, is the story of Martin Bannister, whose lonely bachelor life in Manhattan is transformed by a meeting with desirable redhead Henrietta Grigson and her husband Freddy, with whom he embarks on a heady social whirl. But Martin has a surprise in store - a plot twist the real-life inspiration for which Julian Mitchell divulges in his new preface to this Faber Finds edition.'A comedy that is delightfully human, played by characters who have the edgy vitality of real life.'Evening Standard'Mitchell is a writer of the most supple technical accomplishment.' Telegraph'Ingeniously constructed and excellently written.' Listener

As Far As You Can Go was Julian Mitchell's third novel, first published in 1963. Its protagonist is Harold Barlow, a young stockbroker, on his way up in the world - but easily bored, desiring adventure. He accepts a commission to travel to America; and the further west he goes, the more he discovers in the way of wide open spaces and freedoms. There is, however, a limit.In an introduction written especially for this edition, Julian Mitchell describes his interest in writing 'a reverse Henry James novel, about a European discovering America rather than vice-versa.''Like Nabokov, but without his cynicism, Mr Mitchell sets the geography of the United States in motion.' Anthony Burgess, Observer'This raid on the American psyche, so hilarious, yet so horrific in its implications, proves Mr Mitchell a first-rate satirist.' Telegraph

'[The White Father] was to be a State of the Nation novel, about the end of Empire, contrasting the last generation of men who'd served it, and the new one which was just breaking out from the long dullness of the post-war years, but didn't really know where it was going...' Julian Mitchell, from his new PrefaceMitchell's fourth novel, published in 1964, earned him both the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. Its protagonist Hugh Shrieve is District Officer in charge of the Ngulu, a small tribe in an African colony on the verge of independence. Fearing 'his' tribe will be overlooked in the politics of a constitutional conference set to take place in London, Hugh returns to England for the first time in years. But there he soon feels lost in his own country.

A Disturbing Influence was Julian Mitchell's second novel, first published in 1962.The setting is the small, utterly English town of Cartersfield, where the very quietness of life causes trouble. The young and old are preoccupied alike with their own affairs, to the exclusion of the world. Tetchy schoolmaster Mr Drysdale sums it up: 'We don't care much for change in Cartersfield.' But change comes regardless, in the shape of a rootless young man who finds Cartersfield a fine place in which to recuperate after an illness, and a fine place, too, to indulge his appetite for destruction.In a fascinating new preface to this reissue Julian Mitchell describes how he drew on his Cotswold childhood and the town of Cirencester in order to invent his fictional Cartersfield and populate it with a cast of characters.