James, Donald
Entry updated 12 February 2024. Tagged: Author.
Working name of UK scriptwriter and author Donald James Wheal (1931-2008), who also wrote as James Barwick and Thomas Dresden. His work as a scriptwriter for Television series began about 1964; of sf interest were scripts for programmes like Space: 1999, and for individual films like Gerry Anderson's Doppelganger (1999). His first novel of sf interest, The Fall of the Russian Empire (1982), is a Near Future thriller about the end of the USSR. The Inspector Vadim sequence, comprising Monstrum (1997), The Fortune Teller (1999) and Vadim (2001), is less riskily set – as regards the actual course of history to come – rather further into the future (circa 2015 and later), in a Russia subsiding into an uneasy calm after the end of a savage civil war; Inspector Constantin Vadim becomes involved in criminal investigations with political implications. He is a complex and intriguing figure, evocative for some of the kind of explorer of the interstices between crime and power found in authors like John Le Carré (1931-2020) and Martin Cruz Smith. [JC]
Donald James Wheal
born London: 22 August 1931
died London: 28 April 2008
works
series
Inspector Vadim
- Monstrum (London: Century, 1997) [Inspector Vadim: hb/Greg Clark]
- The Fortune Teller (London: Century, 1999) [Inspector Vadim: hb/Michael Mascaro]
- Vadim (London: Random House/Century, 2001) [Inspector Vadim: hb/]
individual titles
- The Fall of the Russian Empire (New York: G P Putnam's Sons, 1982) [hb/]
links
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