Dean Vincent Carter

I was born in July, 1976 in the West Midlands and spent the first six years of my life in Bewdley near Kidderminster, before moving to Tenbury Wells, Shropshire where many members of my family still live.

At around thirteen years of age I spent one bored Summer afternoon sitting in the back garden of a restaurant where my mother worked, reading a book my aunt had ordered by mistake from a book club. Stephen King’s Misery, wasn’t exactly her cup of tea, but it was, as I was soon to find out, mine. I devoured the novel and found within its pages the inspiration to write my own stories. The first, Revenge, was very much a tentative footstep in the general direction of storytelling, i.e. it’s not exactly my finest piece of work. The story lasted only six pages, (luckily) was very Misery-derivative, and more than a little contrived and predictable. But we all have to start somewhere, and there was as good a place as any.

During my last few years of high school I tried a few more short stories, then attempted a book, Carnival, which eventually ended up as a large short story, possibly a novella, about a travelling carnival of genetically modified animals and freaks. I still have a copy of it, typed out on an old Olivetti typewriter given to me by an uncle. Even now the smell of typewriters (a heady mix of ink and metal) brings back memories. Personal Computers will always be my weapon of choice when it comes to word-processing, but they have none of the excitement, the romance, the immediacy of typewriters.

Like Revenge, Carnival hasn’t really stood the test of time, but I was young… At least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Since 1991 I’ve written pretty much constantly. Through my college years in Worcester (1992-95), my university years (1995-98) and the years since, I’ve found it difficult to leave a keyboard alone.

The Hand of the Devil began as a short story entitled Epicure in the Terrible, which had a length of about eleven thousand words. The two stories are very similar in tone, but with notable differences. In the short story the main character is shipwrecked on the island after accidentally murdering a sailor, and is little more than food for the Ganges Red. Mather is present, though he has none of the depth he has in the book, and the ending of the short story is left open unlike the novel.

In 1999 I spent six months working as a temp for Transworld Publishers in Ealing, London. I worked in the post-room, and found the company, and indeed the industry, very much to my liking. I had ambitions back then to eventually write a book and submit it, but I had no idea of what was to come. In fact it would be four more years before I had my lucky break. I returned to Shropshire for a couple of years and worked for Hammicks Bookshop in Worcester, before being offered a permanent job back at Transworld, an opportunity I jumped at. So in 2002 I returned to London, having already begun adapting Epicure in the Terrible into a book, and a year down the line at a Transworld/Random House Children’s Books Christmas party I happened to sit at the same table as the wonderful, talented, and highly respected editor, Charlie Sheppard. A colleague and I were lingering at the bar, waiting for our drinks, and because of this ended up grabbing the last available table as people sat down to eat. A few other people joined us, including Charlie, and it soon became clear to her that I was the ‘Dean Carter’ who had been sending silly emails around the company. She asked if I’d written anything… And the rest is history.

The Bookseller Email has been in existence for over three years now, and began at the behest of my boss, to inform many members of staff that the trade magazine The Boookseller had arrived. For some reason, possibly because of general boredom and a writer’s irrepressible urge to make anything written more interesting, whether it be a letter, email or greetings card message