Christmas Horror Picks

Christmas is a time for gathering your friends and family around a blazing fire, sipping brandy as you listen to the wind howl outside and the rain beat against the window panes. Then someone clears their throat and starts to tell tales of ghosts and ghoulies, of strange crazed men scuttling along alleys lit only by the full moon, of werewolves and of vampires. David J. Howe presents his pick of horror and fantasy books published in 1994.

Title / Publisher / Format / Author	Plot	Shocks	Character	Imagination	Gross Outs	Entertainment Value
The Ghosts of Sleath (HarperCollins h/b) James Herbert	Haunted psychic investigator checks out a ghost-infested village and finds more than he bargained for.	Subtle and varied. Hauntings include an eerie burning haystack, a small drowned boy, a bleeding gibbet. The ending is guaranteed to leave you squirming.	This is a sequel to Herbert’s novel Haunted and features the same lead characters. The people come over as very real with believable problems and anxieties. It might help to have read Haunted first.	Very much a ‘traditional’ ghost story told in Herbert’s unique voice. A modern-day fireside chiller.	Herbert is fairly restrained in this novel. However scenes in which a man has his face planed off with carpentry tools are pretty nasty.	A classic story by Britain’s master of horror.
Caliban’s Hour (Legend h/b) Tad Williams	Caliban, anti-hero of Shakespeare’s The Tempest returns to extract his revenge on Prospero and Miranda. But first he must tell his story.	This is a superb short fantasy novel taking recognised characters and revealing their hidden past. Biggest shock is when Caliban’s mother dies.	Caliban comes alive in this novel. He is portrayed as a tragic and sensitive character, full of true human regrets and passions. A superb prequel/sequel to The Tempest.	Williams is a natural storyteller and his fertile imagination transports you effortlessly to Caliban’s verdant isle. A totally believable and convincing tale.	Emotional rather than visceral horror. The slow realisation that the beast Caliban is more human than those who would teach him to be like them. Revulsion at man’s vanity and pomposity.	Superb character study by one of the finest Fantasy writers working today.
Nocturne (Gollancz h/b & p/b) Mark Chadbourn	New Orleans: the dead start to appear on the streets as a young Englishman, David Easter, searches for his lost love, Fermay, and his lost memory. The key to all these strange happenings is buried in Fermay’s past, but can David discover the truth before it is too late.	Many and varied as the plot twists and turns, keeping you guessing as to how all the pieces fit together. The realisation of what Fermay has to do with the horrific killings is a classic.	Fermay is a wonderful creation with whom you instantly fall in love. David Easter is also very believable as are the assorted crooks and villains who populate New Orleans’ seedy underbelly.	Chadbourn’s love of jazz music, New Orleans and horror are mixed together into a potent brew of suspense and terror. David’s amnesia slowly clears and as he remembers precisely why Fermay left him, we realise that he is in deep trouble.	An attack by a half-man half-bird creature is powerful stuff. Fermay’s role in the proceedings and why she left England also provide a stomach-churning scenario.	Spooky jazz/horror mix with a keen edge. Incredible pulling power.
Feersum Endjinn (Little Brown h/b) Iain Banks	In a future world where reality exists as levels of Virtual Reality in a massive super-computer, the rulers realise that someone is spreading a computer virus through the chaotic levels of the software, resulting in rampant instability and chaos in life’s infrastructure.	The beauty and effectiveness with which Banks draws all his disparate plot threads together into one seamless tapestry. There are many shocks along the way as the characters realise what is going on and how it affects them.	The novel follows three main characters and all are varied and colourful. Most distinctive is Bascule the Teller, a minor prophet who can only write in phonetic English making for challenging reading.	Banks’ imagination is awesome. This is a science fiction tour de force involving computers, virtual reality and altered states of existence. All rolled up in a triumbrate plot involving the saving of civilisation. Incredible, breathtaking stuff	When a soldier, digging in the ground, breaks through to find he is several miles above another ‘ground’ and falls to a rather messy death. Also, several attacks on Bascule by a disembodied skinless face which gibbers at him.	Science Fiction for people who think they don’t like science fiction. Superb storytelling from a great writer.
Lost Souls (Penguin p/b) Poppy Z. Brite	A rites of passage story involving vampires, death-rock musicians, and unrequited love.	Brite’s vampires are incredible, sensuous creatures. Fatally attractive to human females, once impregnated, the unborn foetus literally devours the mother from inside. There aren’t many female vampires keen to have kids!	The lead human characters, Steve and Ghost, are sensitively characterised and totally believable. The vampires are eternal, lonely, vicious, violent and ultimately tragic. The book is a literary and sensual feast which works on many levels.	It takes guts and certainty to put a new spin on vampires these days and Brite manages it in a pervasive and evocative debut novel which feeds all our senses. Taste the blood, smell the cloves and spices, sip the green Chartreuse. Never has a hidden world been better realised.	When the new vampire Nothing kills his schoolfriend. Vicious and loving, brutal and understanding. A twisted love story of epic grandeur.	Incredible sensory overload. A novel to be experienced and savoured.
The Sleepless (Heinmann p/b) Graham Masterton	An ancient life-force sucking evil has been manipulating events since the dawn of time. An accident investigator stumbles onto the secret and comes face to face with the terrifying ‘Mr Hillary’.	A brilliant twisting tale of an evil insidiously entwined throughout our history. Shocks aplenty.	Masterton’s characters are realistic and identifiable. We know these people and the situations with which they are confronted stretch their human abilities to the very limits.	With over 24 horror novels to his name Masterton still writes a fresh tale. This book takes as its premise the children’s rhyme ‘Green grow the rushes-oh’ and imbues it with a sinister and horrifying meaning. Not for the squeamish	Masterton is king of ‘squirmy’ fiction. Here we have multiple murder by pneumatic bolt-cutters and felines found in unnatural places. Gross, great fun and completely terrifying.	A superb chilling story from an accomplished writer. Not for the weak hearted.
Host (Penguin p/b) Peter James	A college professor invents a ‘learning’ computer called ARCHIVE which will, it is hoped, eventually mimic human behaviour. A student discovers how to download memory onto computer disk and then upload it to another host. When the student dies, her memory and personality gets uploaded to ARCHIVE with horrific results.	A novel dealing with cryonics and sentient computers. Numerous nervous moments: the discoveries, the science, the intrusion of a stranger into a formally happy family life. The ending.	James handles his characters with care and attention and they become effective as a result. Both the older professor and the young student with whom he forms a liaison are well written. The computer is cold, as is the cryonics. It all works well together.	James’ work is often based on real life fact and this is no exception. The skill is in projecting it just far enough ahead to be terrifyingly real with the ‘scientific breakthrough’ scenario that is both effective and plausible. These fictions of today may well be the fact of tomorrow.	Some superb set pieces. The dropping of a cryogenically frozen head has shattering results. The kidnap of the professor’s son and what his eventual fate might be. Chillingly effective.	Detailed research gives this novel a ‘true life’ edge which leaves the reader wondering if what they have just read is really fiction. Very enjoyable stuff, especially for those who consider  computers to be an unknowable force. You are being watched!
The Pan Book of Horror: Dark Voices 6  (Pan p/b) Edited by David Sutton and Stephen Jones	This annual collection of horror is still going strong and proves that short stories are just as popular and effective as their longer counterparts. This volume features multiple personalities, mythic terrors, Mexican ghosts, man-eating plants, medical experiments, metamorphosis, maggots, maniacs and loads more brilliant stuff starting with the letter ‘m’.	There are shocks aplenty in its 19 stories. A Roman curse rebounds on its modern day initiator with devastating results; a son finds the ideal base material for his maggot farm; a multiple murderer discovers that his latest intended victim is not as helpless as he thinks. There are too many to list but you are bound to find something here to touch a personal nerve.	Imagination …? A supergroup comprised of Elvis, Joplin, Hendrix, Lennon, Moon and Bonham … making love with a dolphin …  a comedian who makes his big entrance from inside another comedian … a husband who discovers that you shouldn’t two-time your wife if she is a seamstress … all from the cream of todays short horror story writers.	With stories by John Brunner, Michael Marshall Smith, Kim Newman, Nancy Holder, David Case, Nicholas Royle, Daniel Fox, Kathe Koja and others, the characters who populate these tales of terror are either bitter, twisted or dead. Sometimes all three … and before the end of the stories. Hardly a duff one in sight.	There are several wincingly good denouements to the stories but I can’t tell all here or there would be no point in reading them. Trust me on this.	If you like your chills to be short and sharp then this collection delivers. Superior horror fiction.

 

David J Howe

1994

Deny Everything

DENY EVERYTHING

Best-selling writer Peter James talks to David J Howe about films and thrillers.

Peter James is a quietly spoken man, friendly and unassuming. He burst onto the genre scene with his novel Possession in 1988 and since then has written a further eight novels, each bringing him greater acclaim as one of the top British thriller writers of his generation. With his latest novel Denial about to be published in paperback, and a television adaptation of one of his earlier novels, Alchemist, about to hit the small screens, I visited him at his gorgeous Sussex home to find out more about the man and his work.

‘Writing and film-making was what I always wanted to do, right from a really early age,’ explains Peter once we are settled down with tea and cakes. ‘In the early seventies I met up with the producer/director Bob Clark who was finishing off Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (released in 1972), and was trying to raise the money for a film called Dead of Night. I helped him with this and we shot the film in Florida and it was eventually released in 1973. I’m still quite proud of that. We also made a number of initially low budget horror movies, and also a huge underwater adventure movie, The Neptune Factor, which featured Ben Gazzara, Walter Pidgeon, Yvette Mimieux and Ernest Borgnine in the cast.’

Peter is however best known for his supernatural and scientific thrillers, but before these were published he had written several other books: spy thrillers and a movie novelisation. The path of his writing was changed when, having become bored with the spy books, he turned his attention to something which he believed was easier to research: the supernatural. ‘The 20 year old son of some very good friends was killed in a very bizarre car accident in France,’ he explains. ‘His parents started to go to a medium and became convinced that they were making contact with their dead son and then asked if I would be interested in writing a non-fiction book about their experiences.

‘I started reading as much as I could on the subject and also spoke to mediums and people who went to them. I became fascinated by the question of “evil” spirits and even went to Broadmoor jail to observe some of the really evil prisoners. I spent a morning in an assessment room with Dennis Neilson and a few others, including a very nice-seeming man who I later learned wanted to be a woman and so had cut the breasts off his girlfriend so he could wear them himself. I thought it would be very interesting to turn the whole myth of spirits around on its head. Suppose someone goes to a medium expecting to make contact with their late son, who’s going to say I’m alright here, Auntie Doris sends her love and so does Aunt Maud, but instead they discover that he was a total murderous creep in his life and not the nice boy that they thought. Or alternatively that they’d been listening to an evil spirit masquerading as their son. This then formed the basis for Possession which was the fastest book I’d ever written. It was quickly picked up and suddenly I went from being totally unknown to being in print in twenty-two languages within about two months.’

The majority of Peter’s early books meld supernatural subjects with those of science and medicine, and all present their subjects in the context of an effective thriller. It’s not really surprising then, that many of them have been picked up as film and television projects with, to date, two having been realised and transmitted, and a third due for transmission in the not too distant future. I wondered what themes Peter was exploring?

‘What I’m trying to do is to examine the world around us as it’s something that fascinates me. Why are we here? What happened before we were born? What happens after we die? I’m fascinated by science and what it means to us. These are the domains that I want to explore and with each book I pick a subject that interests me and learn about it and then find a way to incorporate that into a story. With Prophecy – made as an episode of the TV series Chiller and starring Sophie Ward and Nigel Havers – it was an interest in ouija boards, spirits, and the idea that buildings can “remember” stressful events from the past. With Host it all started in 1970 when I went to MIT to make a TV documentary for a Canadian station and interviewed Marvin Minsky, who was at the time a lecturer in computer science. He said “we’re close to replicating human consciousness in computers and when we do that’ll prove by definition that God does not exist.” That started me thinking about the whole area of computers and artificial intelligence. I had also been interested in the science of cryonics ever since I heard that Walt Disney had been frozen when he died in 1966. Some time later I realised that if you married those two things together: the AI aspects of computers, and the preserving of physical bodies through freezing, then you really could live forever: freeze your body and take a back-up of your brain onto a computer. That was the basis for Host.’

Host was picked up by the American Broadcasting Company and developed as a mini-series directed by Mick Garris – who had at the time just finished an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. ‘There were simultaneously two approaches about Host,’ reveals Peter. ‘One from ABC television and one from William Friedkin (The Exorcist) to do it as a feature film. We went with the TV mini-series in the end as we felt that if you sell a book to a film company – and I’ve sold every book I’ve written! – then they end up in development hell and you never see an end product. Whereas with television there is a far better chance of it actually happening and thus being able to sell more novels off the back of it.’

The most recent of Peter’s novels to get the TV treatment is Alchemist which blends black magic elements with a story of intrigue and corruption in a large drugs company. ‘I was talking to someone who used to work for one of those companies and I thought about the power that they have: the power over life and death. It apparently costs something like 300 million pounds before you can start trials on a new drug. What happens if you get to third stage trials, and you discover that one in fifty people might die from the drug … what do you do? You’ve spent all that money …

‘When I first wrote the novel, I did it as a straight thriller, with no supernatural or black magic elements at all, but my then editor at Gollancz, the late Richard Evans, felt that it needed something to make it acceptable to my readers so I added in those sub-plots. Then, when film rights in the book were offered to America, I was asked to take all the black magic stuff out as it would be easier to sell. So I did a version of the book as I had originally intended, as a straight thriller. Then the original book was sold to Red Rooster Productions in the UK and I heard nothing from them until about half way through shooting in 1998 when they sent me a script. To my amazement all the black magic plots had been removed. I phoned them up and said that if they’d spoken to me a year ago, I could have saved them time and sent them a more appropriate version of the novel.’

Alchemist marked a turning point in Peter’s writing. Not only did he move publishers for his next novels (to Orion Books) but he also decided to move more towards the mainstream thriller than the supernatural horror story. The Truth dealt with the topic of surrogate babies while his latest novel, Denial, concerns the kidnapping of a psychiatrists’ wife and the police’s battle against time to find her.

‘I wanted to get away from the more visceral horror,’ Peter muses. ‘Not that I’d done a lot of that, but I wanted the horror to come more from the circumstances and plotting, and I also wanted to write thrillers rather than horror novels. I hope it worked. In Denial for example, the tension comes from the fact that the reader knows more than the characters do – like who the kidnapper is, for example.

‘They seem to be successful as I’ve had more fan mail from these two books than before, and they seem to be selling really well. I still love the supernatural but I don’t think I have anything new to say about it. At the moment science is turning me on more. I also think some of the issues that are emerging are terrifying in themselves: people being able to design their own children … what’s happening with research into disease and organ replacement … anti-aging developments … decisions as to where we’re going as a species. These are big issues and I’m not sure we have all the right answers. I’m fairly convinced that sometime soon, death is going to become an option rather than a certainty. Think about it … now that’s scary.’

David J Howe
1999

The Alchemist PR

HUBBLE BUBBLE

Towards the end of 1998 Red Rooster Film and Television filmed Alchemists, an adaptation of Peter James’ effective black magic thriller Alchemist in and around London, but apparently removed all the witchery in the process leaving a story about genetic malpractice and dark deeds centring about a huge and mysterious pharmaceutical company called Bentik-Lange. Originally planned to be transmitted on Channel 5 in February, the four-part drama has been delayed for reasons unknown and is now being promised for Autumn/Winter 1999.

The story begins when Nobel prize-winning geneticist Dr Richard Bannerman (Edward Hardwicke) reluctantly joins Bentik-Lange in order to continue his work. His daughter, Dr Julia Bannerman (Ruth Gemmell) is a strong supporter of her father’s work, and when she uncovers a link between a series of unexplained deaths of women during childbirth, and the pharmaceutical giant, she is forced to investigate further. In this she is helped by Dan Simpson, an American patent lawyer (Grant Show), who is working undercover to try and discover Bentik-Lange’s hidden secrets – a cover-up of shattering proportions.

Edward Hardwicke, playing the elderly Doctor Bannerman, is no stranger to the screen, having appeared as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes in ITV’s popular series of the detective’s adventures. He also appeared in Escape from Colditz in 1971, as well as the BBC’s 1970s series Colditz, and latterly featured in the acclaimed film Shadowlands, and in Red Rooster Television’s production Richard III in 1996.

Ruth Gemmell shot to fame in the film of Nick Hornby’s best-selling football novel Fever Pitch in 1996, but has also appeared in several notable television series, including Silent Witness, The Bill and the controversial series about vice girls, Band of Gold.

Grant Show is a popular American actor who made his name first as Officer Rick Hyde in the daytime serial Ryan’s Hope and then as biker Jake Hansen in the soap opera Melrose Place. Show has also appeared in several films including A Woman Her Men and Her Futon in 1992, Texas in 1994, and, in 1997, The Price of Heaven and Mother Knows Best.

Alchemists also features John Vine as Rowley, Bentik-Lange’s sadistic head of security. Vine is a veteran of many televison series including the epic Knights of God, and also appears in the forthcoming remake of Doomwatch.

Peter James’ novel has been adapted for the screen by Laura Lamson, who also wrote the award-winning drama series The Men’s Room and has been directed by Peter Smith, who previously directed episodes of The Sweeney in the mid-seventies, The Price in 1985, Between the Lines in the early nineties and more recently episodes of Kavanagh QC.

Smith elected to film Alchemists using a technique of single mobile camera shots and minimal editing. It is hoped that this will add an extra dimension to the production, but it also serves to unsettle the actors who, as a result, receive limited opportunities for close-ups and are also denied the opportunity for reaction shots. Filming was, as a result, quite stressful for all concerned.

Although many of the fantastical elements from James’ novel have apparently been excised from the final teleplay – no scripts or material to view has been supplied so it is hard to tell how much of the original novel remains intact – there are still some moments of horror remaining, censors notwithstanding. These include scenes featuring animals undergoing various forms of vivisection, a man dissolved in a cloud of acid, and some computer-generated material in which the exterior of London’s second tallest building, the Nat West Tower in the heart of the City, is transformed into the high-tech headquarters of Bentik-Lange.

Whether the thriller still works as well without the supernatural elements which made James’ novel so engrossing remains to be seen. Viewers can decide for themselves this autumn …

David J Howe
1999

The Alchemist

THE ALCHEMIST

David J Howe reports from the location of a new science-fiction thriller which investigates the murky world of corruption at a large pharmaceutical company.

Based on Peter James’ 1996 novel Alchemist, Red Rooster Film and Television Entertainment’s television adaptation went before the cameras at the end of 1998. The story, a tale of black magic and commercial intrigue, shot through with a vein of company paranoia, has been adapted for the screen by Laura Lamson, who also wrote the award-winning drama series The Men’s Room, and in the process has been re-worked, losing all of the black magic angle, and changing the ending.

During filming, I visited one of the locations for the shoot, a luxurious and well appointed artist’s studio flat, overlooking the river Thames in central London. This was being used as the apartment given to legal eagle Dan Simpson (played by Grant Show) by the mysterious pharmaceutical company Bentik-Lange. Also on set on this day were Ruth Gemmell playing biologist Julia Bannerman, veteran actor Edward Hardwick playing Doctor Bannerman, Julia’s father, and John Vine playing the evil head of security, Rowley.

The Alchemist’s director is the quietly-spoken and understated Peter Smith, who previously directed episodes of The Sweeney in the mid-seventies, The Price in 1985, Between the Lines in the early nineties and more recently episodes of Kavanagh QC. Smith came to this project simply by being suggested for it by his agent. ‘Presumably all the other directors they asked were too busy or not interested,’ he comments wryly.

‘I thought with questions of genetic engineering coming up every day in the newspapers, that this project was relevant to those concerns.’

Although James’ novel is a thriller shot through with black magic and horror, Smith seems keen to underplay the impact and importance of the effects angle, and when asked, responds by talking about the visual aspect of the locations and sets being used.

‘I’m not sure what the budget for the design department was, but I’m sure it was quite large. That was in order to build the interior of the futuristic pharmaceutical headquarters, and to make it as ultra-modern as it could be, as well as sterile and strange. There are buildings in Kuala Lumpur which were used as the basis for our building. We used the NatWest tower in London and panned down it and then treated the footage in the computer to change it into a different sort of building. We’ve tried to avoid shots of London, strangely enough, given that that’s where we’re filming. The Germans who put some money into the project didn’t really want to see red London buses or identifiable London landmarks. The feel of the production is modern and international. It could be set in Stuttgart or Bonn or anywhere, really. It’s not important where it is set.’

But what about the effects? For example, in the book there is a gripping sequence where a man – a worker at the pharmaceutical plant who has learned too much – is stripped down to the bone by a blast of powerfully corrosive acid…

‘Yes, a man is melted down in acid. The Germans saw the rushes of that sequence and were a bit worried. There was lots and lots of burning flesh. They were very worried, but what they saw had been taken by a second unit who had all day to do the effect. So they saw the unedited footage.

‘It’s a personal thing. I’ve always tried to make things reasonably realistic, although that’s a silly thing to say as if you see someone squashed by a car, you’re not going to make it totally realistic if you intend to shock someone, at least to the extent of engaging someone’s interest and stopping them going to make a cup of tea. You may not succeed but you try.’

I wondered if there were any other spectacular effects sequences, and Smith, again, seems almost laconic in talking down his production. ‘Not really. It’s a plot driven thing. There’s a car accident – someone drives into a lorry at 60 miles an hour and the car goes up in flames – but aside from standard things like that, there’s not really anything that stands out.’

So what about challenges. Surely there have been some challenges in bringing what is, after all, a complex thriller to the screen. What has been the most challenging part?

‘Today, actually, but you wouldn’t believe that as you’ve only been here for today. This is the first day that the producer hasn’t been here. She was so happy that she went away and … little does she know …’

Smith is referring to two occasions earlier when, for no discernible reason that I could see, one of the principals stopped working and started loudly complaining about something being wrong, and the entire crew – around 30 people – asked to leave the room being used for recording until the actor could be calmed down and persuaded by Smith to carry on.

‘It’s all quite challenging in a way …’ said Smith, once again being infuriatingly non-committal.

Changing tack, I wondered what Smith was most proud of in the production, and here, at last, was something he could enthuse about.

‘I’m not very good at answering questions directly,’ he apologised. ‘I’m a pessimist. Someone said to me once, “Do you know what the secret of film-making is? The secret of film making is to stop a disaster becoming a catastrophe.” And every day, something will be shot, but … and you’ve seen some of it today … things do go wrong. You’ve got something like 50 people working on the crew, if someone is sick … for example, one of the grips fell off the back of the van yesterday and twisted his ankle and isn’t with us today. That was a disaster yesterday because every shot moves and we needed him.’

This reference to every shot moving is something that I had noticed myself and wanted to raise. It certainly gave the actors problems, in that an entire scene is recorded in one continuous shot, with the single camera being wheeled along, panning and zooming to capture the action. There are no close-ups and few cut-aways. Why had this approach been adopted?

‘It was a collective stylistic decision. It has advantages. If you have a plot driven story, it works within that. It can be tricky, though. You can’t cut a scene in the middle and start again, and also you miss out something that’s very crucial, and that’s the close-ups of people. The actors get a little upset about that. It’s another concern for them. They have to face the way the camera wants them to face rather than what might feel right to them. Furthermore, the traditional structure of a scene is that you have a wide shot and then you have close-ups, and that’s how it’s happened since films were invented. In a way, it still is. Maybe like any art it reaches a plateau and doesn’t go any further than that. In cinema, people are desperate for you to go further. But it’s logical, you show what the scene is, what the setting is, and then you show the reactions on the artists’ faces. But if you do what we do, you do miss that because, for example, if someone is in shock, you see them in the background with shock on their faces.

‘With a plot driven story, however, there aren’t all that many crucial moments of people being in shock. It’s usually information that is being delivered – they’re talking about science for example – and you animate the scene by moving the camera. It’s interesting to see the background moving in relation to the people, and you choreograph the people to move in different directions. It’s tiring for everyone, especially the actors.’

Finally, I wondered if Smith had an overall feeling about the production. What was he trying to achieve? His reply was somewhat typical of this self-effacing man, who simply gets on with the job of creating television without trying to oversell what he is doing.

‘I don’t think there is any sense other than what the script is about. The concept of a company introducing and marketing a drug which carries a disease for which the company has the only cure, is feasible, although I’d hope that no-one is actually doing that at the moment. We know how things can become corrupt, however … and it’s possible, one imagines.’


THE STORY

Nobel prize-winning geneticist Dr Richard Bannerman (Edward Hardwick) reluctantly joins the pharmaceutical giant Bentik-Lange in order to continue his work. His daughter, Dr Julia Bannerman (Ruth Gemmell) is a strong supporter of her father’s work, and when she uncovers a link between a series of unexplained deaths of women during childbirth, and Bentik-Lange, she is forced to investigate further. In this she is helped by Dan Simpson, an American patent lawyer (Grant Show), who is working undercover to try and discover Bentik-Lange’s hidden secrets – a cover-up of shattering proportions.

THE CAST

Edward Hardwick is no stranger to the screen, having appeared as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes in ITV’s popular series of the detective’s adventures. He also appeared in Escape from Colditz in 1971, as well as the BBC’s 1970s series Colditz, and latterly featured in the acclaimed film Shadowlands, and in Red Rooster Television’s production Richard III in 1996.

Ruth Gemmell shot to fame in the film of Nick Hornby’s best-selling football novel Fever Pitch in 1996, but has also appeared in several notable television series, including Silent Witness, The Bill and the controversial series about vice girls, Band of Gold.

Grant Show is a popular American actor who made his name first as Officer Rick Hyde in the daytime serial Ryan’s Hope and then as biker Jake Hansen in the soap opera Melrose Place. Show has also appeared in several films including A Woman Her Men and Her Futon in 1992, Texas in 1994, and, in 1997, The Price of Heaven and Mother Knows Best.

John Vine is a veteran of many television series including the epic Knights of God, and appears in the forthcoming remake of Doomwatch.

David J Howe
1999