Michael Thame

Michael Thame was born in Kent, the Garden of England, in 1974 and it was a lightbulb moment 42 years later that would result in the Conyers Street Gang series of children’s whodunits. It’s a series that brings to life the real life childhoods of John, Tom, Chrissie and Mary Boden, and their friends GeeGee and Philly Brown, breathing colour into their bygone wartime world.

For decades Michael listened to his grandfather, Tom Boden, as he told of his time in Liverpool as a young boy and of the World War Two blitzes he experienced in that city. He listened as he heard the tales of evacuation, first to rural Shropshire in England (where Tom had never seen so much green) and later to Caernarfon in North Wales. And he listened as Tom talked of his time in the Royal Navy and when he uprooted his family to Australia in the early 1970s, only to return home as soon as he could.

But rereading those memoirs, which Michael had committed to paper so that his own daughters would always know about ‘Little Grandad’, it was one story in particular that occurred in Conyers Street, Liverpool, in 1941 that suddenly caught the eye; an air raid that unearthed an unsolved crime from 30 years earlier…

Suddenly Tom had provided the inspiration for a children’s whodunit. Suddenly he had provided the kernel from which the Conyers Street Gang would grow. Suddenly, Michael started to write children’s novels.

Today Michael Thame lives in Didsbury, Manchester, UK, and has two daughters. Whereas Tom Boden provided the inspiration, his daughters provide the motivation to keep going.

Based on real people and on real events, Michael welcomes you to the Conyers Street Gang.