Colin Evans

COLIN EVANS is a retired newspaper journalist who covered sport and crime for 40 years.

MODS & BLOCKERS, themed on the summer of 1965, describes the life of an English county cricketer named David Green and Evans's own experiences, growing up as a novice reporter/1960s teenage Mod in his small home town. It was awarded 5 stars out of 5 by the cricket site CricketWeb - only the second book to have done so - and 4 out of 5 by the award winning author Colin Shindler in the cricket magazine Wisden Monthly. David ('Bumble') Lloyd of Sky TV labelled it as 'a fantastic read'.

FAROKH The Cricketing Cavalier is the authorised biography of Farokh Engineer, one of India's greatest cricketers. Again Evans, who has known Engineer for over 40 years, has spiced the book with personal anecdotes and with events outside cricket. It is probably the only sports book to detail an IRA bombing campaign!

RED TRAITOR - A Football Odyssey from Old Trafford to Maine Road looks at football from the viewpoint first of a young naive fan and later as a cynical sports writer. It also offers an insight into the events involving Manchester United and Manchester City over three decades 1950s,60s and 70s when the game - and journalism - was a different world than today.

NO PITY is an investigation into a cold-blooded murder in which an innocent tailor was gunned down in a peaceful English country town - the town made famous by the Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell, who used it as a model for her famous novel Cranford, and the town where Evans was born and bred. Indeed, the murder took place close to the home of his family, and within spitting distance of the sports ground where he played soccer and cricket. But the crime took place in 1901 and Evans only heard of it a century later, "As a crime reporter I covered many murder cases," he says, "but this was the most sensational, and it was right under my nose." He uses a blend of detailed research, experience of police and court work, local knowledge and educated guesswork to produce a fascinating account of a story which gripped Britain throughout the first summer of the Edwardian era.