Welcome to the Frederick Nolan website.
(a sort of autobiography in the making...)
biographical details on the left,
autobiographical musings on the right ...
By that time he had quit his job as a highly-paid publishing executive
and signed a contract to write eight (!) full length novels in a year. The
first of these, The Oshawa Project
(published in the US as The Algonquin
Project), was a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, and was later
filmed by MGM as Brass Target,
starring Sophia Loren, John Cassavetes, Max von Sydow, Robert Vaughan and
George Kennedy. Two years later came The
Mittenwald Syndicate, also a major international bestseller.
"Let's start at the very beginning ..."
First, the golden oldies (or some of them, anyway) ...
The first job I ever had in publishing was as a "reader of Bantam Books. That in turn came about because in 1954 I had founded the English "Corral" of The Westerners, an American organisation of history buffs interested in the true history of the American West. For something like six years I edited, printed, published, mailed out a monthly magazine called The Brand Book to, first, ten founder members, then gradually to a larger audience.
In the process of trying to attract new members I contacted Corgi's editorial director, Michael Legat, who with enormous generosity donated advertising pages in the end pages of many of the western novels and non-fiction Corgi then published (That was in the days when westerns were one of the top-selling genres of fiction and most nights there were American western series like Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wyatt Earp, Cheyenne and many more on TV). The result was a massive surge in membership for the English Westerners and a warm friendship that has lasted to the present day.
When some time later Michael contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in being a reader, I could hardly believe my ears -- you mean you could get paid for reading books? I remember particularly that Michael was apologetic that Corgi could only pay fifteen shillings (75p) per title--only!!! It was like being tapped on the shoulder by God.
At that time I was working as a salesman for Remington Rand, the typewriter manufacturers (notice that even in that there was a distant 'western' connection!) and was able to read everything Corgi sent me on my daily commute from Liverpool to Manchester. I did that for four or five years, I think, until one day Michael contacted me and asked me whether I would be interested in a job as an assistant editor at Corgi Books. Whaaaaat? I mean, would a donkey eat strawberries?
I joined Corgi in January, 1960, and I loved it from Day One. Although my "specialty" was still westerns, I was allowed later to spread my editorial wings into all the other genres then being published: crime, nurse romances, science fiction, war books and general fiction, not to mention writing all the back jacket "blurbs". My big coup, in those early years, was to propose the publication in paperback of a series of westerns about a gunfighter called "Sudden" which had been written in the late 1930s and early 1940s by an Englishman named Oliver Strange.
The publication of the "Sudden" books had two remarkable effects--first, their incredible success in paperback, and second, their opening the doors for a new brand of English western writers to make a name for themselves. They would become known, not unaffectionately, as "Piccadilly cowboys" (because none of them had ever been further West than Piccadilly Circus). Oliver Strange was one of the first but there would be many, many more --Terry Harknett, the creator of "Edge," Laurence James, Angus Wells, John Harvey (yes, the award-bedecked crime writer), Mike Linaker and even J. T. Edson, although he was a whole different proposition. If you'd like to know more about the Piccadilly cowboys, try
http://gggandpcs.proboards33.com/index.cgi
The day inevitably came, of course, that all ten of the Oliver Strange books had been published. They had all sold so well--a quarter of a million copies each--that I proposed we get the Strange heirs (Oliver Strange had died in the 1940s) to allow us to continue the series, written in the Strange style. They agreed, but finding the writer was another matter--the Piccadilly cowboys hadn't saddled up yet--and as the deadline loomed, my boss (Michael Legat again) suggested that I take a shot at it. However, to avoid accusations of nepotism, it was decided I would have to use a pseudonym. The one we came up with was "Frederick H. Christian," concocted from three first names: mine, my wife Heidi's, and my son's. And in 1966 ...
with the deathless opening sentence "Back off, mister, or I'll blow you to hellangone!" Sudden rode again. And again, and again, and again...
and all of a Sudden I was a bestselling author, for each of these modest little three-weeks-to-write westerns went on to sell a couple of million copies in paperback and remained in print for more than twenty years.
Those were the days, my friend. But although I didn't know it then, there were even better ones to come ...
