The idea is delightfully simple: for 30 days, you post once a day in response to a book-themed question. That’s it. No essays, no footnotes, no need to summon the ghost of Shakespeare, just honest answers, curious reflections, and maybe a few cheeky confessions about your reading habits. I have decided to take part this year, and since I picked a month with 31 days (I know it would have made more sense to use a 30 day one) I am using March 1st to explain what I am doing.

Each day brings a new prompt: favourite characters, memorable endings, guilty pleasures, and the books that made you weep, rage, or fall in love with the written word. It’s a gentle nudge to celebrate your literary life, one post at a time.

So why not give it a go? Dust off your bookshelf, sharpen your wit, and join the challenge. Thirty days. Thirty questions. One slightly eccentric bookworm’s journey through the pages.

DAY 17. – Author I wish people would read more.

I am simply going to choose one of my favourite authors, the incomparable Dennis Yates Wheatley.

Dennis Yates Wheatley was an English writer whose astonishing output of thrillers and occult adventures made him one of the best selling authors in the world from the nineteen thirties through to the nineteen sixties. His work enjoyed a few revivals in the seventies and eighties when publishers released collections of his Black Magic novels, helped along by a couple of Hammer Horror adaptations that brought his darker tales back into the public imagination.

Yet he was far more than the occult chap people remember. He produced an enormous body of work, both fiction and nonfiction, and long before Ian Fleming ever created James Bond, Wheatley had already written a series featuring a suave, worldly, and rather dangerous gentleman adventurer who would not have looked out of place in a tuxedo with a martini.

He also lived a life as colourful as his characters. During the war he served as the only civilian member of Churchills war council, brought in specifically to imagine the unthinkable and devise ideas that were as bold as they were bizarre. His job was to think in ways that others could not, and that sense of daring invention runs through everything he wrote.

Wheatley has always appealed to me because he blended adventure, mystery, and the occult with a certain old world charm, and he did it with complete confidence. It is no wonder he became one of my enduring favourites.