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Phil Rickman is the author of the successful Merrily Watkins crime thrillers, as well as a variety of other thrillers under various pseudonyms. Born in Lancashire, he has spent most of his adult life in Wales and the Border country. He was a journalist on the local evening paper, then switched to radio and television, winning awards for BBC news and current affairs reporting in Wales. His first novel was a Welsh political ghost story, Candlenight (1991). It received considerable acclaim and his second novel, Crybbe (1993), led to comparisons with Stephen King, who called the book “remarkable… something new and creepy”. Phil wrote three other thrillers, including The Chalice (1997), before turning to crime and mystery.
Phil is best known for his Merrily Watkins series of mysteries, featuring a down-to-earth female Church of England priest and exorcist, the first of which was The Wine of Angels (1998). The book proved a considerable critical and popular success, and since then he has written eight more books in the series, with a tenth on the way. These books include The Smile of a Ghost (2005), The Remains of an Altar (2006), and most recently, The Fabric of Sin (2007). The series has recently been sold to Germany, where it will be published by Rowohlt.
Phil continues to present programmes for BBC Radio Wales, including the book show Phil the Shelf. He has written two crime novels as Will Kingdom, The Cold Calling (1998) and Mean Spirit (2001), and recently started a new series with Marco’s Pendulum (2006), written under the name Thom Madley and aimed, though not exclusively, at a slighter younger readership. After superb reviews, a second book called Marco and the Blade of Night was released in 2007.
Phil lives with his wife Carol, also a former journalist and now his most frank and ruthless editor, in a medieval farmhouse in the Welsh border country. He is currently working on the latest addition to the Merrily Watkins series, due to be published by Quercus in 2009.
Recent books:
Untitled Merrily Watkins novel (Quercus: due 2009)
The Fabric of Sin (Quercus: 2007)
The Remains of an Altar (Quercus: 2006)
The Smile of a Ghost (Macmillan: 2005)
The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (Macmillan: 2004)
The Lamp of the Wicked (Macmillan: 2003)
The Cure of Souls (Macmillan: 2002)
A Crown of Lights (Macmillan: 2001)
Midwinter of the Spirit (Macmillan: 2000)
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