G D Sanders has previously worked in academia. He is now retired and enjoys writing contemporary crime fiction, as it allows much more creativity than writing scientific research articles. He is based in London. The Taken Girls is his first novel.
I had a manuscript, I found an agent and we got a two-book deal. It happened overnight, didn’t it? Not quite.The first time I remember writing something to entertain, I was in the 5th form. It was early February, a chemistry practical class, and I was caught talking to a friend about what I intended to do for the 14th. My punishment was to produce two sides on Saint Valentine’s Day. I spent a morning in the local library reading about the mating habits of various animals and discovered that the mating act is more prolonged in the English frog than in the French species. This stimulated an essay on the looser mating habits of frogs across the channel.
Many years later, I wrote a comedy sketch based on the moment when two AM radio presenters confused the then Pope with two of the Beatles. It’s probably still in the bottom draw where it languished because I had no idea what to do with it. With a keener commercial eye, I switched back to amorous themes and wrote two episodes of a TV sitcom based on Lonely Hearts ads and posted them to a major television company. The Head of Comedy invited me in for a chat and explained why he could not commission a series. To soften the blow, he told me he was the man who had turned down Fawlty Towers.
