David Bell

Born in Melton Mowbray in 1939, I now live in Ashby-de-la-Zouch in north-west Leicestershire.  I was a Primary school teacher for thirty years, including headships of village schools at Cauldon Lowe in Staffordshire and Sudbury in Derbyshire.  I escaped from teaching when I was fifty, tunnelling out from beneath a mountain of unnecessary paper, in order to write full-time.  My first stories were science fiction tales for children.  These were broadcast on BBC Radio Leicester, then published as a children's book.  I then started writing adult gory crime and horror stories under the pen-name Jack Wainer.  (I changed my name because my ten-year-olds at school thought any book with David Bell on the cover was for them).  Since then I have written twenty off-beat local history books, all published by Countryside Books.  (They are listed on another page).  I enjoy listening to New Orleans jazz and drinking cider (the preferred drink of teenage hoodies and rambling tramps).  Having been a conventional jacket-and-tie, short-back-and-sides teacher for so long, I am now the only pony-tailed seventy-year-old in my town.  I am a member of the Crime Writers' Association, and currently the convenor for its Midlands chapter.  (Like the Hells Angels, the CWA refers to its regional groups as chapters).  I am the programme secretary of Ashby Writers' Club, founded in in 1984, which originally grew out of some short story writing classes I was running at two local colleges.

Ashby Writers' Club: www.ashbywritersclub.com

        Crime Writers' Association: www.thecwa.co.uk