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Working name of UK scriptwriter and author Donald James Wheal (1931-2008), who also wrote as James Barwick and Thomas Dresden. His work as a scriptwriter for Television series began about 1964; of sf interest were scripts for programmes like Space: 1999, and for individual films like Gerry Anderson's Doppelganger (1999). His first novel of sf interest, The Fall of the Russian Empire (1982), is a Near Future thriller about the end of the USSR. The Inspector Vadim sequence, comprising Monstrum (1997), The Fortune Teller (1999) and Vadim (2001), is less riskily set – as regards the actual course of history to come – rather further into the future (circa 2015 and later), in a Russia subsiding into an uneasy calm after the end of a savage civil war; Inspector Constantin Vadim becomes involved in criminal investigations with political implications. He is a complex and intriguing figure, evocative for some of the kind of explorer of the interstices between crime and power found in authors like John Le Carré (1931-2020) and Martin Cruz Smith. [JC]
born London: 22 August 1931
died London: 28 April 2008
works
series
Inspector Vadim
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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight.
Accessed 02:08 am on 24 April 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/james_donald>