Christopher Fowler

So my mother always had books by Josephine Tay and sort of romantic historical writers and the boys dismissed them anyway as female froth romance because they had these terrible pastel covers.

In fact, a lot of these were written by very good historians who chose to write in this genre.

And they sort of fell from fashion and the books vanished.

But if I would mention them to someone of my mother's age, she would instantly know them and be able to tell me all the titles.

So partly it was an act of reclaiming these books.

Well, one of the shocking things was how many writers in the book had written upwards of 100 books.

People are always shocked that writers can write so much, but I always say to them, well, look at your job.

If you put together all the projects you've worked on in a lifetime, you'll probably come to the same amount, so...

This is, you know, career authors do this.

I left out the one hit wonders because heavens, it will be three times as long as a book.

And as it as it was, I started with 450 authors.

And to get them down to 99 had lots and lots of arguments with my editor and publisher.

Well, Charles Hamilton turns out to be one of the most prolific authors in the world.

He had many, many other alter egos and wrote those sort of tales, those dashing tales of schoolboys and swashbucklers.

They're not terribly good, but they appeared regularly in periodicals of the time, like The Gem and The Magnet, which were very, very popular books amongst kids.

They were sort of tended to have school settings

or they were about pirates or cowboys.

So it's not great writing, but he wins in the stakes of turning out the most number of books, really.

The one famous thing he did was he created Billy Bunter, who was a fat schoolboy.

It's interesting to note that these books, the Billy Bunter books, I think were 14 or 15, they're hugely, hugely popular, filmed over and over again, televised.