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Books

Before we were famous: Tom Stoppard describes sharing a bedsit in Sixties London with Derek Marlowe

Derek was straight out of Scott Fitzgerald, recalls Tom Stoppard, and his idea for a thriller about a double agent ordered to kill himself was absolutely brilliant

2 May 2015

9:00 AM

2 May 2015

9:00 AM

A Dandy in Aspic Derek Marlowe

Silvertail Books, pp.250, £9.99

I wonder what happened to my first edition of A Dandy in Aspic. I must have been careless about lending it when it could no longer be bought. Derek’s succeeding novels, from The Memoirs of a Venus Lackey (1968) to The Rich Boy from Chicago (1979), are in their place on my bookshelves; seven titles, lacking the first and ninth.

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This is a foreword to Derek Marlowe’s A Dandy in Aspic. Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £9.49 Tel: 08430 600033

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