Tim Heald R.I.P.

I was truly sorry to learn that Tim Heald died last Sunday, at the age of 72. Tim was a man of many parts, and novel writing was only one of the strings to his bow. He worked as a journalist, wrote biographies, cricket books, and books about royalty, and was a popular public speaker on a wide range of topics. He was also an entertaining crime writer, best known for the Simon Bognor books, which were televised, and he chaired the Crime Writers' Association. He was immensely convivial.

I'd been in touch with Tim by email for several years before I first met him in person, whilst he was on tour in the north, speaking at various cricket society functions. I took him for lunch at Liverpool's Athenaeum Club, where he regaled me with tales of his experience of the TV world (enough to make you want never to have your books televised) before presenting me with inscribed copies of several of his books, which I treasure. I also had the pleasure of including a couple of short stories he'd written in anthologies I edited. Years earlier, he'd edited a first rate anthology, A Classic English Crime.

Most memorable of all was a weekend I spent with him in July 2012. This was at the Kidwelly e-Book Festival, an extraordinary event where attendance figures did not exactly match the organiser's laudable ambitions. Most of the time, authors outnumbered attendees, but Tim's company was one of the things that made the whole weekend remarkably pleasurable. The photo shows him in the beer garden of the Red Lion in Kidwelly, where we recovered from the experience of the festival before enjoying a good many laughs over dinner..

The last time I saw Tim was in March last year, at the CWA conference in Lincoln. By that time, sadly, he'd been stricken with illness, and was not very well at all. Some years earlier, Tim had seconded the nomination that I be elected to the Detection Club, and he expressed his delight that I was to become the Club's President later in the year.. I asked if he thought he might be able to attend and he shook his head. But with a twinkle in his eye, he said, "I'll be there in spirit." And so he was.