A film company on location at Griff Towers, a Sussex country house whose master keeps an ape called Bhag, and a killer the newspapers call the Head Hunter — twelve heads in seven years, each left in a box for the police to find. Wallace was illegitimate, raised by a Billingsgate fish porter and out of school at twelve; at his height a quarter of all books borrowed in England were his, and he could finish a thriller over a long weekend.











