Arthur V. Sellwood

Arthur Sellwood was born in Kensington, London, on 16 April 1920. He married a fellow journalist, Mary, whom he met in court when they were both reporting on a crime story for competing newspapers. ==Career==

'' formed Sellwood's first book. In addition to working as a journalist, In 1956 he continued the theme with Dynamite for Hire, the story of "Hein" Fehler who also served on Atlantis and as commander of the German submarine U-234, and in 1959 he produced Lt. Commander T. J. Cain's memoir of his service on HMS Electra. In 1973 he published ''The Damned Don't Drown, an account of the sinking by a Soviet submarine in 1945 of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. Other military titles were Stand by to Die! (1961) about HMS Li Wo and The Saturday Night Soldiers'' (1966), a history of the Territorial Army in which Sellwood had served as a rifleman, and of which his father and son had also been members. His other non-fiction works included Black Avalanche (1960) (with Mary), the story of the Knockshinnoch pit disaster, The Red-Gold Flame (1966) about the Irish 1916 Easter Rising, and Police Strike, 1919 (1978). His only fiction book was the novelisation of the MGM film Children of the Damned (1964) for New English Library (NEL)'s Four Square Books, published the same year as the cross-genre Devil Worship in Britain which he wrote with the anthologist and editor at NEL, Peter Haining. His last book, with Mary, was The Victorian Railway Murders (1979) which told of eight murders with railway connections. Set during the era when trains had sealed compartments without communicating corridors, meaning that murderers and their victims might be confined together between stations, it has been placed by Michael Cook within the genre of "locked room" crime literature. It was conceived just after the end of the Second World War when Mary was sent to interview a Miss Pill, a relative of Isaac Gold who had been murdered on the Brighton line in 1881 by Percy Lefroy Mapleton, but the decision to finally write the book only came after a "violent incident on a night train" in the 1970s. It was republished in 2009 as Death Ride from Fenchurch Street and Other Victorian Railway Murders. ==Death and legacy==

Sellwood died in Lewes, Sussex, on 31 October 1987. He left an estate not exceeding £70,000. Several of his books remain in print or have received new editions since his death. ==Selected publications==

• Atlantis: The story of the German surface raider. Werner Laurie, 1955. (With Ulrich Mohr) (Published in the United States as Ship 16: The story of the secret German raider Atlantis by John Day, New York, 1956.) • Dynamite for Hire: The story of Hein Fehler. Werner Laurie, London, 1956. (Also published as The Warring Seas, 1975) • H.M.S. Electra. Frederick Muller, London, 1959. (With T. J. Cain) • Black Avalanche: The Knockshinnoch Pit disaster. Frederick Muller, London, 1960. (With Mary Sellwood) • Stand by to Die! Four Square, London, 1961. (Republished as ''Her Majesty's Ship Li Wo and HMS Li Wo: The most decorated small ship in the navy'') • Children of the Damned. Four Square, London, 1964. • Devil Worship in Britain. Corgi, London, 1964. (With Peter Haining) • The Red-Gold Flame. Corgi, London, 1966. • The Saturday Night Soldiers: The stirring story of the Territorial Army. Wolfe Publishing, London, 1966. • ''The Damned Don't Drown: The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff''. A. Wingate, London, 1973. • Police Strike, 1919. W.H. Allen, London, 1978. • The Victorian Railway Murders. David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1979. (With Mary Sellwood) (Republished as Death Ride from Fenchurch Street and Other Victorian Railway Murders, Amberley, 2009.) == References ==