Phil Rickman (1950-2024)
Author Phil Rickman, 74, died October 29, 2024. Rickman was a journalist and a prolific author of crime and supernatural fiction, best known for the Merrily Watkins mystery series, adapted into a TV series in 2015.
Philip Rickman was born in Lancashire and lived in Wales. He was a reporter for Wales Today in the 1980s, and worked in radio broadcasting for over two decades, hosting literature show Phil the Shelf.
His debut novel Candlelight appeared in 1991. The Merrily Watkins series began with The Wine of Angels (1998) and ran for 15 volumes, most recently The Fever of the World (2022); a final installment, Echo of Crows, is forthcoming in 2025. He wrote non-fiction Merrily’s Border: The Places in Herefordshire & the Marches Behind the Merrily Watkins Novels (2009, with photos by John Mason).
The John Deep Papers series is The Bones of Avalon (2010) and The Heresy of Dr Dee (2012). Other works of genre interest include Crybbe (1993), December (1994), The Man in the Moss (1994), The Chalice (1996), and Night After Night (2014). He also wrote as Thom Madley and Will Kingdom.
