Mark Ellis

Mark Ellis is a Welsh historical crime novelist and former barrister and entrepreneur, born in Swansea. His fascination with the Second World War was strongly influenced by his parents’ experiences: his father served in the wartime Royal Navy, while his mother remembered the bombing of Swansea and attending dances in London during the Blitz. Ellis became particularly interested in the less romanticised side of the British Home Front, when wartime disruption, blackout conditions and bombing created opportunities for theft, fraud, looting and violent crime. He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and Crime Cymru, and his fiction combines police procedural, espionage and historical thriller elements.

Ellis is the creator of the DCI Frank Merlin series, following an Anglo-Spanish Metropolitan Police detective investigating crimes in wartime London. The sequence begins with The Embassy Murders (originally published as Princes Gate), set in 1940, followed by In the Shadows of the Blitz (formerly Stalin’s Gold), The French Spy (formerly Merlin at War), A Death in Mayfair, Dead in the Water, Death of an Officer and Boom Time. The novels move through the Second World War while combining fictional murder investigations with the Blitz, espionage, political intrigue, organised crime and the changing fortunes of the conflict. Merlin at War was longlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger. Ellis’s books are therefore particularly closely associated with Second World War Britain and the London Home Front, showing how ordinary criminal investigation continued beneath the larger drama of war.