John Peel (born 1954) is a British writer, best known for his TV series tie-in novels and novelisations. He has written under several pseudonyms, including "John Vincent" and "Nicholas Adams". He lives on Long Island, New York. While his wife is a US citizen, Peel continues to travel under a British passport.
Career
During the 1980s, Peel wrote a licensed spin-off novel based on the popular 1960s TV series The Avengers, titled Too Many Targets. He is also known for his various books based on Doctor Who, Star Trek and James Bond Jr. (written as "John Vincent").[1]
Doctor Who books
A friend of the television writer Terry Nation, Peel wrote novelisations of several Doctor Who stories for Target Books featuring Nation's Daleks;[1] he is reportedly one of the few writers to have been willing to do so, given the high percentage of the author's fee that Nation's agents demanded for the rights to use the Daleks. For similar reasons, Peel is one of the few novelists to have used the Daleks in full-length, original Doctor Who novels, examples of which include War of the Daleks (1997) and Legacy of the Daleks (1998), written for the BBC BooksEighth Doctor Adventures range. Neither novel was especially well received by fans of the series, in part due to Peel's re-writing of Dalek history as depicted in the TV series (in particular the destruction of Skaro in the 1988 serial Remembrance of the Daleks), to bring their story more into line with Nation's vision.
With the publication of Timewyrm: Genesys (1991), Peel became the first author to write a full-length Doctor Who novel, featuring the Doctor, not to be based on either a TV or radio script. He had been selected by editor Peter Darvill-Evans to launch the Virgin New Adventures range, to resume the story of the Doctor's travels from where the now-cancelled TV series had left off. He also wrote the Evolution (1994) for their sister range, Missing Adventures (featuring previous Doctors and companions), and also The Gallifrey Chronicles (1991, not to be confused with the Eighth Doctor Adventures book), a compendium of the history of the Doctor's planet, Gallifrey.
He also wrote the following Lethbridge-Stewart novels, published by Candy Jar Books:
The first six books were originally published by Apple. After the cancellation of the series by Apple, they were re-printed by Llewellyn Publications between 2004 and 2005. Books seven through ten were published directly by Llewellyn. Books eleven and twelve were only published in a one-volume edition, by Dragonhome Books, in 2012.
Also published in French by AdA Éditions, under the title Les mondes de la magie du Diadème.
