Victor E Knight
I was born in 1939 in Barking, which was then in Essex and is now in East London. This makes me either an Essex boy or an Eastender, and an impostor in either category. Barking Public Library provided at least as much of my early education as did Westbury Primary School.
My first serious ambition was to be a musician, and I obtained a Junior Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Music. But events took me to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where I obtained a degree in German and Russian. Then I held various posts in university libraries — Leeds, Malta, Edinburgh where I obtained a PhD in German, and Liverpool as Chief Librarian. I visited Indonesia as adviser to the National Library in Jakarta. After retirement I taught at a Further Education college.
Music stayed with me, however. I played the trombone in amateur orchestras, and worked for amateur operatic societies as piano accompanist and conductor.
My ambitions as a novelist are: to interpret and explain human behaviour and to make the reader want to know what happens to the characters.
I am a widower with three daughters and seven grandchildren. I was married for 48 years to Susan. We met as colleagues in Leeds University Library. She encouraged me with insight in all I did.
My latest novel, due to be published by AM Macauley soon at the time of writing, is ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’. Based on the popular song of 1893, it is a family chronicle set in London from the late 19th century to the mid-20th, passing therefore through both World Wars. A long-demolished pub in Spitalfields, ‘The Horn of Plenty’, which was run by my grandparents, is a recurring venue. The novelist HG Wells, whose work I have long admired, appears as a fictional character.
My previous publications are:
in book form by i2i Publishing and on Kindle, ‘Murder by Degrees’, in which a serial killer stalks universities;
on Kindle: ‘For the Greater Good’, a revenge tale set in Venice in 1922, in which a number of Blackshirts are found dead in the canals and Mussolini survives a final shootout (unfortunately!)
on Kindle: ‘The Witch of Glarus’, the tragic story of the last person to be tried on a charge of witchcraft in Europe (in Switzerland in 1782)
