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A beautiful Cornish coastal village is the setting for a highly sinister conspiracy involving a kidnapped baby, mysterious monks and an almost irresistible new perfume…

‘Joan Aiken’s triumph with this genre is that she does it so much better than others’ New York Times Book Review

Martha works for an advertising agency, filming a TV commercial on location on the stunning Cornish coast. The client is the eccentric owner of a chemicals company that has invented a new, almost irresistible perfume, and Martha is in charge of shooting the romantic ads – unfortunately starring his beautiful but highly manipulative daughter-in-law.

Before long, Martha finds herself embroiled in the conspiracy over the perfume’s true origin – to say nothing of a kidnapped baby, sinister monks, her own long-since vanished ex-husband and a series of exploding soup cans. And what of her own floundering love life…?

‘Witty and acute … a nice romantic thriller’ Punch

When scientist Jim Marshal disappears from work, leaving only a mysterious letter saying that his research assistant Deidre will know what has happened, Deidre and Jim’s distraught wife Beryl try to find where he has gone.

Their search flings them across space and into the power of sinister aliens – a beam that can transport them to another planet. These powerful aliens have collected people from Earth, and are studying them, putting them through strange experiments. Is it just scientific curiosity, or are there darker designs behind it? And, stranded on an alien planet, is there anything Deidre, Beryl and Jim can do?

GAMMA PRODUCT is one of Denis Hughes’ works under his many pseudonyms. It has been out of print in the UK for decades and is now available for the first time as an eBook!

Billy Byrne was a product of the streets and alleys of Chicago’s great West Side. From Halsted to Robey, and from Grand Avenue to Lake Street there was scarce a bartender whom Billy knew not by his first name. And, in proportion to their number which was considerably less, he knew the patrolmen and plain clothes men equally as well, but not so pleasantly. His kindergarten education had commenced in an alley back of a feed-store. Here a gang of older boys and men were wont to congregate at such times as they had naught else to occupy their time, and as the bridewell was the only place in which they ever held a job for more than a day or two, they had considerable time to devote to congregating. They were pickpockets and second-story men, made and in the making, and all were muckers, ready to insult the first woman who passed, or pick a quarrel with any stranger who did not appear too burly. By night they plied their real vocations. By day they sat in the alley behind the feedstore and drank beer from a battered tin pail. The question of labor involved in transporting the pail, empty, to the saloon across the street, and returning it, full, to the alley back of the feed-store was solved by the presence of admiring and envious little boys of the neighborhood who hung, wide-eyed and thrilled, about these heroes of their childish lives. Billy Byrne, at six, was rushing the can for this noble band, and incidentally picking up his knowledge of life and the rudiments of his education. By the time he became an adult, he was another thing entirely. . . .

Is there a Destiny? Does Fate impose a limit? What Barrier stands between man and the creation of life?

Since the legendary failure of the ill-fated Frankenstein, man has tried time and time again to pass those limits. He has created androids, clumsy robots of flesh and blood. He has made men of metal and servants of plastic, with wheels for limbs and magnetic tapes for voices. Man has made things by cross breeding the animal kingdom and destroying Nature’s intentions…but man has never yet made man. Or has he?

Forbisher thought that he had the answer. It wasn’t a clumsy Synthetic. It wasn’t an Android, or a Robot, it was a real flesh and blood human being.

The beautiful woman in his arms was the product of a laboratory experiment, not the result of a natural biological process. But how could he prove it?

One star-chained evening in a Manhattan bathroom, Carl Schirmer spontaneously combusts! His body transforms into light, mysteriously snatched from his banal life by an alien intelligence 130 billion years in the future. There, all spacetime is collapsing into a cosmic black hole, the Big Crunch – and a bold, cosmic destiny awaits Carl. Rebuilt from the remnants of his light by extraterrestrials for a cryptic purpose, he awakens in time’s last world, the strangest of all – the Werld.

At the edge of infinity, Carl discovers the Foke, nomadic humans who travel among the floating islands of the Werld. The Foke teach him how to live – and love – at the end of time, and he loses his heart to his plucky guide, the beautiful Evoë. Their life together in this blissful kingdom that knows no aging or disease brings them to rapture – until Evoë falls prey to the zotl, a spidery intelligence who hunt the Foke and eat the chemical by-products of their pain. In order to save his beloved from a gruesome death, Carl must return to Earth – 130 billion years earlier – where he is shocked to discover that the Earth he’s come back to is not the one he left.

Can he meet the harsh demands of his task before the zotl find him and begin ravishing the Earth?

Author’s Note: The volumes of this series can each be read independently of the others. The feature that unifies them is their individual observations of science fiction’s sub-genre: “space opera,” which the editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer define as “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.”

The human personality had been defined by leading psychologists as the integrated and dynamic organisation of psychical, mental, moral and social qualities. A personality is the product of heredity and environment. Every experience records itself in the neurons of the brain producing an almost infinite number of possible combinations. Brains are as individual as fingerprints.
In an infinite universe, however, there is a possibility that somewhere – separated by vast distances of Time and Space – two exactly similar brains exist. The strange telepathic bonds between identical twins could operate between identical minds.
Melinda Tracey was a practical, intelligent, modern girl who didn’t believe in dreams – even recurring dreams – but her odd sleep experiences of the ruined city, and the strangely suited figure who searched it, disturbed her considerably.
What incredible psychological bond linked Melinda to the lonely stranger, probing the wreckage of an alien metropolis?

More than any other series, THE AVENGERS typified the Swinging Sixties – beginning in 1961 with Patrick Macnee starring with Ian Hendry in a grainy, realistic spy thriller, and ending in 1969 with Macnee and the glamorous Linda Thorson blasting off into space in a surreal episode appropriately entitled ‘Bizarre’. Meanwhile we had seen the memorable Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg in roles unusually progressive for British television.

THE NEW AVENGERS in the mid-seventies reflected changing times but retained the essence of the show – as Macnee returned to play alongside another strong, independent heroine in the form of Joanna Lumley’s Purdey. And then there was the film…

THE AVENGERS DOSSIER is a uniquely comprehensive yet humorous survey of all the show’s incarnations. As well as a remarkably detailed episode guide to both series – even covering the kinkiness factor and champagne count in both – this volume gives behind the scenes insights and revelations about every aspect of the programme. The film and its production are examined, and critical essays look at the history behind the cult.

Until he became an alcoholic, Murray Douglas was one of Britain’s leading actors. Now, after treatment, he’s ready to resume his career, but his first come-back part isn’t exactly what he thought it would be.

The idea was to create an avant-garde play where the actors made up the script as they rehearsed. Unusual but hardly frightening. What was frightening was the rest of the cast. Like Murray, they all had some kind of craving. And each of them was given access to whatever had addicted them.

It was doubtful if the play would ever entertain the public. But it seemed to entertain the director . . .





(First published 1967)