A. P. Handley

Peter (‘A. P.’) Handley was born in the West Midlands in 1950 and studied chemistry at UMIST in Manchester. On discovering that chemistry was just ‘poisonous cookery with occasional explosions’ and after hearing Glen Campbell sing Wichita Lineman, he felt a calling to the great wide world, quit university and ran away to sea.

After 11 years in the Merchant Navy and with a fund of stories at the back of his mind, Peter came ashore and held down a number of jobs in the emerging computer industry. But family life and demanding jobs just kept getting in the way of his writing career.

He published his first ‘Danny Rook’ novel, Bunkeya, in 2021 which puts forward a secret history of how Red China… er… ‘obtained’ its nuclear weapons in record-quick time. Peter’s secret history novels all have an underlying theme – for instance, chemical pollution in Kola, chemical warfare in Tabarin, and a long list of international cover-ups in his latest novel, Kantubek; (The Real Press, 2023).

Peter now lives in West Sussex with his lovely wife, not far from his wonderful grandchildren and is torn between which of two secret histories he should tackle next.