Mark Simon Frankland

Mark Frankland grew up in the Lancashire of the 60’s and 70’s when it was still very much dark and satanic. Eleven plus success meant a red brick grammar school and O and A levels that annoyed his teachers intensely. His gap year saw him knocking doors to sell loft insulation up and down the terraced streets of cotton towns until he managed to raise the wherewithal for an overland journey from London to Nairobi. Next came an unlikely three years studying History at Magdalene College, Cambridge where Frankland was very much the token Northerner amidst the ranks of tweed clad Etonians who went one to become richer than God in Maggie’s deregulated City of the late 80’s.

After graduating to the intense annoyance of his tutors Frankland, had his first taste of small business. For three years along with two other dissolute pals he established Outovit which imported a variety of Rajastani hippyware to be punted out at summer festivals where Thatcher’s discontented subjects would gather to protest and get stoned. The business crashed in 1986 and Frankland joined his parents to establish an Animal Feed company which rose to the heady heights of a £18 a year turnover and 70 staff before crashing in the wake of the BSE crisis.

The demise of the business thanks to the efforts of publicity hungry scientists inspired Frankland to pen his first novel, ‘One Man’s Meat’, which flickered briefly in the national media.

Next came a small café in Dumfries which rolled along steadily until being wiped out by the Foot and Mouth crisis which inspired the author’s most successful novel, ‘The Cull’.

The last ten years have seen Frankland and his partner managing The First Base Agency in Dumfries. The charity is a drug and alcohol information and support centre which hands out over 2000 emergency food parcels each year and now also supports war veterans. Frankland has now written seventeen novels which have sold over 100,000 copies, mainly in Scotland. He has developed a reputation for producing gritty, hard hitting thrillers which are often be set in the darker corners of what now tends to labelled Broken Britain. His work gives a voice to many of the forgotten members of society who come in through the doors of the frontline charity where he now spends his days.