Colin Watson was educated at the Whitgift School in South Croydon, London. During his career as a journalist he worked in London and Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he was a leader-writer for Kemsley Newspapers. His book Hopjoy Was Here (1962) received the Silver Dagger Award. He was married, with three children, and lived in Lincolnshire. After retiring from journalism he designed silver jewellery. As well as a series of humorous detective novels set in the imaginary town of Flaxborough, featuring Inspector Purbright, Watson also wrote and later revised a study of detective stories and thrillers called Snobbery with Violence.

Tom Hart is a critically acclaimed Eisner-nominated cartoonist and the Executive Director of The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) in Gainesville, Florida. He is the creator of Daddy Lightning, and the Hutch Owen series of graphic novels and books. The Collected Hutch Owen was nominated for best graphic novel in 2000. He won a Xeric Grant for self-publishing cartoonists. He teaches sequential art at SAW and at the University of Florida and taught at NYC's School of Visual Arts for 10 years.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. Steve Taylor is a senior lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. His latest books in the US are The Calm Center and Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of the Human Mind. He is also the author of The Fall, Waking From Sleep, and Out Of The Darkness. His books have been published in 19 languages. His research has appeared in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, The Journal of Consciousness Studies, The Transpersonal Psychology Review, The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, as well as the popular media in the UK, including on BBC World TV, The Guardian, and The Independent.

James Swallow is a New York Times, Sunday Times and Amazon #1 bestselling author and scriptwriter, a BAFTA nominee, a former journalist and the award-winning writer of over sixty books, along with scripts for video games, comics, radio and television. DARK HORIZON, his new stand-alone thriller, is out now from Welbeck; OUTLAW, the 6th Marc Dane novel, is published by Bonnier, and the 4th book in the series - SHADOW - is available in the USA from Forge. His writing includes the Marc Dane action thrillers, the Sundowners steampunk Westerns and fiction from the worlds of Star Trek, Marvel, Tom Clancy, Warhammer 40000, Doctor Who, 24, Deus Ex, Stargate, 2000AD and many more. For information on new releases & more, sign up to the Readers’ Club here: www.bit.ly/JamesSwallow Visit James' website at http://www.jswallow.com/ for more, including ROUGH AIR, a free eBook novella in the Marc Dane series. You can also follow James on Twitter at @jmswallow, Bluesky at @jmswallow.bsky.social, Mastodon at @jmswallow@mstdn.social and jmswallow.tumblr.com at Tumblr.

D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd, is a publishing company based in Dundee, Scotland, best known for producing The Dundee Courier, The Evening Telegraph, The Sunday Post, Oor Wullie, The Broons, The Beano, The Dandy and Commando comics. It also owns Friends Reunited, Parragon, and the Aberdeen Journals Group which publishes the Press and Journal, the Evening Express, the Aberdeen Citizen and the North Scotland edition of ScotAds. The company began as a branch of the Thomson family business when William Thomson became the sole proprietor of Charles Alexander & Co., publishers of Dundee Courier and Daily Argus. In 1884, David Coupar Thomson took over the publishing business, and established it as DC Thomson in 1905. The firm flourished, and took its place as the third J in the "Three Js", the traditional summary of Dundee industry ('jam, jute and journalism'). Thomson was notable for his conservatism, vigorously opposing the introduction of trade unions into his workforce, and for refusing to employ Catholics.

There is more than one author with this name. For the economist, please see Richard Davies My teaching and research have evolved over a career that began nearly fifty years ago with a traditional graduate education at the University of Missouri in American political history. After completing a dissertation on the politics of urban redevelopment and public housing in 1963, I developed a teaching and publications portfolio emphasizing twentieth century political and urban history. Early publications included: Housing Reform During the Truman Administration (1966), an anthology edited with Frank Mitchell on political and social history since 1900 entitled America’s Recent Past (1968), and an examination of the Eisenhower Administration’s creation of the Interstate Highway System: The Age of Asphalt; The Automobile, the Freeway, and the Condition of Urban America (1975). After a seventeen-year hiatus in the higher echelons of academic administration, I returned to a professorship in 1987. After completing a political biography of a mid-twentieth century political conservative icon, Defender of the Old Guard: John W. Bricker and American Politics (1993), I turned my attention to two areas of social history, small town America and American sports history. In 1994 America’s Obsession; Sports and Society Since 1945 appeared as a companion to my creation of what has become a heavily-enrolled senior level course in American sports history. This research interest was extended with an examination of a topic that resonates within the state of Nevada, Betting the Line; Sports Wagering in American Life (2002, with Richard G. Abram), and in 2007 Blackwell Publishing released my most demanding writing endeavor, a comprehensive text that seeks to interpret the role of sports in American history from the colonial times to the present. Sports in American Life; A History is intended for classroom use in the rapidly expanding field of sports history. During the 1990s I also turned my attention to the history of America’s small towns by examining the small town Ohio birthplace of novelist Sherwood Anderson from its founding in 1803 until the time the book was published in 1998; Main Street Blues; The Decline of Small Town America apparently struck a sensitive nerve because of the depressing story it told, and the book attracted considerable attention from professional historians and lay readers. Main Street Blues was followed up by an anthology edited with two excellent scholars of the same subject, Joseph Amato and David Pichaske, A Place Called Home, Readings on The Midwestern Small Town (2003). In 1999, I edited a series of original essays that sought to connect my interest in post World War II America to the unique history of my adopted state, and derived great satisfaction from the success of The Maverick Spirit; Building the New Nevada. All of these books have been accompanied by a substantial number of academic articles and encyclopedia entries, and I would like the believe that my research efforts have enriched my teaching efforts in the University’s core curriculum humanities course as well as my upper divisions and graduate courses in twentieth century American history. Current research builds upon previous work with a book-length project on the fascinating saga of major sports rivalries, and more long-term, I envisage an examination of the ambivalence with which Americans have viewed gambling throughout American history.