Paul Ferris (author)

Paul Ferris is a British biographer and novelist.

Born in Swansea, Wales, in 1929, he was educated at the Bishop Gore School (Swansea Grammar School). His contemporaries included David Rees, author of the standard work on the Korean War of 1950–1953, and Sir Sam Edwards, physicist.

After serving as a conscripted pay clerk in the Royal Air Force, Ferris worked on Swansea's evening newspaper before moving to London in 1953, where the magazine Woman's Own employed him to edit readers' letters and invent some of his own. He was briefly on the staff of The Observer; and thereafter contributed feature articles to it as a freelance and became its radio critic. Radio was a medium he knew about from the inside, since for a few years the money he earned from writing radio 'talks' and 'features' – the backbone of broadcast speech in the 1950s – helped pay the bills, and enabled him to write his first book, the novel, A Changed Man (1958). This was variously reviewed as a 'brilliant, often riotiously funny tour de force' and as 'yet another version of the [Kingsley] Amis-hero banging about full of lust and discontent. In 1960 his second novel, Then We Fall, was widely praised: 'comic, tragic and cunningly irrelevant.'

Much of Ferris's later fiction has its origin in 'true stories.' Infidelity (1999) revisited the real-life disappearance, in 1920, of a young wife from a lonely seaside house near Swansea. Her dismembered skeleton was found in a mine-shaft decades later. 'The sad, desperate atmosphere of Crippen hovers. Good stuff.'Cora Crane (2003) reworked the life of Cora Stewart Taylor, lover of Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage, the outstanding fiction of the American Civil War. Cora, daughter of a field-marshal, had been Crane's flamboyant mistress; at one time she ran a brothel in Jacksonville, Florida, the Hotel de Dream. 'Ferris's creation of Cora – her method a "mixture of grace and expediency" – is achieved with the lightness and honesty that characterise this book in general'.

Ferris began his non-fiction writing with The City (1960), a popular account of London's financial district. His first biography was of Northcliffe, the newspaper magnate (1971). A reviewer wrote: 'His theme, caustically written, is an old one: whom the Gods wish to destroy, they previously make mad.

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