Mike Ripley
Michael Gregorio (the pen name of Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio), who live in Spoleto, Italy, recently put some questions to novelist Mike Ripley on behalf of The Rap Sheet, including:
MG: Regarding your novels ... Angel Touch (1989), the second installment in your Angel series, won The Last Laugh Award for “best humorous crime novel first published in the--Marshal ZeringueBritish Isles.” Angels in Arms (1991), your fourth entry, picked up that very same commendation. That’s an amazing run of successes.
MR: Angel Hunt also won something called the Angel Award for Fiction--though no one believes that--and one of [the books] was voted “Shot of the Year” (at least I think that’s what they said) by readers of Shots magazine. I was very lucky in the early days. Readers and reviewers were very kind.
MG: The series features Fitzroy Maclean Angel, who has been described as “one of the best creations in modern crime fiction.” Would you care to tell us something about the character and that series?
MR: Angel was always meant to be an outsider, so that he could better observe the lunacies of life, particularly life in London in the late 1980s, when Thatcherism ruled, greed was good, and all people worried about was where the next BMW was coming from. He didn’t get a back-story and a family history until book number seven, and he is never physically described. The early books...[read on]
