Mark Hodder

Mark Hodder is the creator and caretaker of the Blakiana: The Sexton Blake Resource web site, which he designed to celebrate, record, and revive Sexton Blake, the most written about fictional detective in English publishing history. A former BBC writer, editor, journalist, and Web producer, Mark has worked in all the new and traditional medias and was based in London for most of his working life until 2008, when he relocated to Valencia in Spain to de-stress and write novels. He can most often be found at the base of a palm tree, hammering at a laptop. Mark has a degree in cultural studies and loves British history (1850 to 1950, in particular), good food, cutting-edge gadgets, cult TV (ITC forever!), Tom Waits, and a vast assortment of oddities. Winston Churchill once asked a party guest what he was up to these days. "I'm working on a novel," the guest replied. "Ah," Winston responded. "Neither am I." I spent a lot of my life not being a novelist. I wasn't one during my teens, when I was reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Mike Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, etc. Nor was I one in my 20s, when I read Dickens and Thackery and H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In my 30s, I moved on to modern literary greats for a while before happily drifting back to sci-fi and fantasy and horror. I still wasn't a novelist. Then along came my 40s and finally I thought to myself: "You've wanted to write novels since you were 11; you'll never do it until you actually sit down and start writing!" So that's what I did.