His early books "Lud Heat" (1975) and "Suicide Bridge" (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by "White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings" (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Study in Scarlet" and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).