Anthony Masters

Anthony Masters: obituary

Anthony Masters certainly produced his share of stylish literary fare, writes Jack Adrian [further to the obituary by Moris Farhi, 14 April]. But at the same time he was something of a spilt personality, spawning a rather less high- falutin line of thrillers and shockers under his own name as well as the pseudonym Richard Tate.

The "Tate" novels were all written in the early 1970s for the publishers Constable, who at the time were gaining an impressive reputation for turning out high-voltage thrillers and detective stories that were consistently literate, intelligently plotted, pacey, and infuriatingly unputdownable. Masters/Tate fitted into the Constable Crime imprint's ethos perfectly.

He wrote four, including The Donor (1970: murder and heart-transplants), Birds of a Bloodied Feather (1974: gruesome goings-on – including the frenzied decapitation of the school captain – at an isolated progressive private school), and the splendidly chilling The Dead Travel Fast (1971), in which grisly murders transform the film set of Dracula into what appears to be a real vampire's killing-ground, and which I finished in two hours flat.

Masters's fascination for the macabre was highlighted in the horror anthology Cries of Terror he edited as a paperback original for Arrow Books in 1976, and his unnerving novelette "The Cracked Smile" appeared in Haunting Christmas Tales (1991).

His final foray into pulp fiction took place in the early 1980s when he took on the mantle of Leon Griffiths, pounding out a short series of paperback originals for Sphere Books featuring Griffiths's popular TV ducker-and-diver Arthur Daley, and his "minder", Terry McCann. Masters, handed a wad of Griffiths's original teleplays for Minder, transformed them into neat, amusing and fast-moving 12,000-word tales, four per book: Minder (1984), Minder – Back Again (1984) and Minder – Yet Again (1985). Each short story-stuffed volume was shamelessly labelled "A Novel by Anthony Masters".