Gordon Honeycombe

Gordon Honeycombe was born in Karachi, in the British Raj, and educated at the Edinburgh Academy and read English at University College, Oxford. (His degree was later raised (automatically) to an MA). He completed National Service with the Royal Artillery, mainly in Hong Kong, where he was also an announcer with Radio Hong Kong. Returning to the UK, he embarked on an acting career which led to television and public prominence as a national newscaster with ITN. He later settled in Perth, Western Australia, where he continued to work in radio, television and theatre, and was regularly engaged in voice-over work for radio and television, and in documentary narrations. From 1965, as well as his own books, Honeycombe wrote for television, radio, stage and films. One of his best-known books is the horror novel Neither the Sea Nor the Sand. Early in his career, Honeycombe wrote two horror novels, described by horror historian Stefan R Dziemianowicz as "atmospheric modern gothics whose rugged natural northern English settings resonate with their unsparing supernatural horrors." The first of these, Neither the Sea Nor the Sand, tells the story of a woman whose dead lover returns to life. It was followed by Dragon Under the Hill, where a history professor in Northumberland finds himself re-enacting a tragedy that took place in the Viking era. Dziemianowicz noted that since Honeycombe's books were published before the horror boom of the 1970s, they have been "greatly overlooked as a result".