As you may know, Sexton Blake was recently reborn, his first new adventure being Mark Hodders` The Silent Thunder Caper, available from Obverse books via their website.
Mark was kind enough to let me interview him for this blog recently, and I am posting the details here in instalments.
In the first part of the interview (this blog, 8 Oct 2014), Mark told us that his intial encounter with Sexton Blake was far from encouraging. Still, this plucky young chap persevered. His investigations were both ardent and intrepid and soon he became The Blakiana Guy.
But let him tell his own tale...
Q) Clearly you were not discouraged for long and eventually set about amassing a fairly impressive Blake collection and running the much-missed (by me, anyway) Blakiana website. Tell us about that.
A) The first thing you need to know is that the Blakiana site is alive and well, here ; www.mark-hodder.com/Blakiana .
The site came about through a mix of boredom and fascination. The boredom was caused by me working at an office job in which I completed my assigned daily tasks so quickly and satisfactorily that I was finished by lunchtime. I knew that if I admitted this to my manager I`d end up with a bigger workload but the same pay, so I kept my mouth shut...better to hand in my work at the end of the day and pretend my time had been filled by it !
Next problem ; what to do with the spare hours ? By this point I was hooked on Blake , so it felt natural to build a website about him. Blakiana was thus created in office hours behind my boss`s back. I can confess to that now since i can`t be fired in retrospect !
The site was fine - and ever-expanding - for about five years but then got infected by malware and had to be taken offline.
This happened at the same moment I got my first publishing deal, and I was so consumed by writing novels that I had no time to restore it. However, earlier this year I took time out to rebuild it and move it to a new server. So Blakiana is back and I`m very happy about it.
That`s the end of this exciting episode. The next instalment will be along as soon as it can be done, so remember, Watch this Space for more musings from the Blakianas Guy as he takes up the tale of how he went from fansite geezer to bona fide Blake author.
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