Biography

The self-educated son of a British factory worker, he achieved literary celebrity at the age of 24 with the publication of his first book, "The Outsider" (1956). He was hailed as one of the "Angry Young Man" group. Within the same year, the mass media and the literary establishment that had built up his rags-to-riches story and created his reputation as a prophet of his generation, turned around and set out to tear him down, following him around and invading his privacy. After many misadventures, Colin and his second wife Joy left London forever, and he was able to make his living as a writer.

An enormously prolific writer, having written to date over 80 major works on a wide variety of subjects: philosophy, religion, occult and supernatural phenomena, music, sex, crime and critical theory. His biographies include works on George Bernard Shaw, David Lindsay, Hermann Hesse, Wilhelm Reich, Jorge Luis Borges, Ken Russell, Rudolph Steiner, Aleister Crowley, and P. D. Ouspensky.

I suspect that I am probably the greatest writer of the 20th century.

Murder is the meaninglessness of life become dynamic: a dramatization of the hidden futility of life. It is the human act, with all its inherent values, placed under the microscope slide where it cannot dissolve into the featureless landscape of all other human acts.

The study of murder is not the study of abnormal human nature; it is the study of human nature stained by an act that makes it visible on the microscope slide.