Adrian Baldwin is a Mancunian now living and working in Wales. Back in the Nineties, he wrote for various TV shows/personalities: Hale & Pace, Clive Anderson, Brian Conley, Paul McKenna, Smith & Jones, Rory Bremner (and a few others). Wooo, get him.

Since then, he has written three screenplays, one of which received generous financial backing from the Film Agency for Wales. Then along came the global recession to kick the UK Film industry in the nuts. What a bummer!

Not to be outdone, he turned to novel writing - which had always been his real dream - and, in particular, a genre he feels is often overlooked; a genre he has always been a fan of: Dark Comedy.

Barnacle Brat (a dark comedy for grown-ups) is his first novel.

He is currently working on two more novels - Stanley McCloud Must Die! & The Snowman and the Scarecrow - to complete what will be his 'Let's all Laugh at Death' trilogy; three separate stories loosely linked by theme.

A second trilogy: 'Let's all Snigger about Sex and Chortle at Crime' has been proposed as a follow-up. If it happens, it will no doubt be an orgy of filth and depravity and far-fetched characters (criminals and perverts, most likely!) all smothered in copious amounts of distasteful black humour. If that's the kind of thing that appeals to you, you sicko, you're probably just the type of reader he's looking for.

For more information, check out: adrianbaldwin.info (*You can read the first five chapters of Barnacle Brat there, in full.)

Adrian cites his major writing influences as Kurt Vonnegut, Monty Python, Bruce Robinson, Christopher Moore, David Mitchell, Robert Rankin, Colin Bateman, Irvine Welsh, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to name just a few.