John Paxton Sheriff

Born in Liverpool, 1936. The war years spent in North Wales, followed by teenage years in Liverpool then fifteen years in the Royal Engineers. Married, with three children (now a widower), spent five years as a motor mechanic in Sydney and Queensland, five years as a computer operator with the then Midland Bank, followed by ten years as one of the world’s finest makers of toy soldiers (bragging!).

A writer from my army years. Short stories sold internationally – Alfred Hitchcock magazine has just accepted my latest, which is the fourth with that magazine. Then books, and in the past twenty-five years I have published sixty-two, many of those westerns, plus nine crime novels in two series, and five non-fiction books. One of those is Modelling Toy Soldiers, and the other four are on fiction writing techniques. My Practical Short Story Writing was published in the UK, then in the USA by Barnes & Noble.

But after two years as a pastel portrait painter, I have put book writing on the back burner and am concentrating on crime short stories – hence my return to the CWA