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Tim Heald,
and the USA...
The Eureka Times Standard
of California
said, describing one of his books as pure entertainment, that Tim Heald has:
"accomplished what Graham Greene says he often has tried to do."
The New York Times said that another of his books, Stop
Press, was: "Almost as good as the all-time classic along these lines,
Evelyn Waugh's Scoop." |
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Tim with a firm grasp on another good story, as usual...
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The Chicago Tribune admired "the light-hearted
but lethal goings on in a Heald novel which demonstrated Crime with a P.G.
Wodehouse flair."
And the Chatanooga Times summed up by
saying that "Heald writes in the best, slightly mad British tradition."
Perhaps the greatest American
accolade for this English author, however, came from his friend and admirer, Dorothy B. Hughes, who, in the
Los Angeles Times, described his prose as "dazzling and star-spangled."
In the 1980s Hughes lent Heald and
his family her house in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, for a whole year while he wrote two books and took the train regularly
from Lamy to Los Angeles, where he wrote for the London Press on such Californian
figures as the writer Judith Kranz and the actress Tippi Hedren, as well as contributing a monthly column on American life to
London's Daily Telegraph.
In his Chevrolet Caprice Wagon, Heald traversed the States from Detroit to San
Diego and from
San Francisco to Cape Cod.
All ten of Heald's Simon Bognor
mysteries have been published in the United States (Stein and Day, Scribners and Doubleday), as were his
non-fiction books on Prince Charles (Arbor House) and Prince Philip (Dutton), as well as his
thriller Caroline R, (Arbor House) and his study of Old Boy Networks (Ticknor and
Field)
Heald's short stories have appeared in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and the Strand Magazine; his manuscripts and other papers are collected in
a Tim Heald archive at the Mugar Memorial Library in Boston, Mass; and he has lectured
to exclusively or mainly American audiences on the Cunard liner QE2 and Caronia, as well as
in a number of American locations from Richmond, Virginia to Santa Fe.
The first American
citizen he ever met was Dwight D. Eisenhower at Claridges Hotel, in London, in 1951.
Heald has been visiting the
United States as often as possible since competing in the 1968 trans-atlantic air race from the top of the Post Office Tower in
London to the top of the Empire State Building in New York. He has also interviewed at least two
other American legends from opposite parts of the political spectrum - Martin Luther King and
Barry Goldwater.
His most recent American
visit was to Miami where his eldest daughter, Emma, is a curator at the South Florida Museum of History. While there he spoke at
the Miami International Book Fair and even sold a copy of his History of the Royal
Warrant to the owner of a down-town McDonald's Restaurant.
While remaining English to the bone,
Heald regards himself as enjoying a genuinely special relationship with the United States.
see also: ANOTHER PART OF
THE FOREST (article extract)
ROYAL OBSESSION
(Los Angeles Times
Magazine)
Tim Heald at
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How
to contact Tim Heald
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