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A L MASTERS is the alter ego of Ken Webb. Ken Webb was born and educated in the industrial town of Swindon in Wiltshire, southern England. At age eighteen he left to study at university, as is usually the practice in the UK. After university he did a one-year post-graduate Certificate in Education. At age twenty-two he emigrated to Australia. In the years that followed there have been lots of travel, a career in senior teaching, and a family.

For some years, Ken Webb taught in NSW government schools before he eventually crossed over to the “dark side”, as colleagues jokingly described it, when his teaching career took him into independent schools. He stopped teaching in 2012. However, he continues to lecture in the areas of Modern History and Extension History to Year 12 HSC students and teacher groups across Sydney, regional NSW and the ACT.

Ken Webb has been a successful writer of History since the late 1980s. Over the years, countless senior students in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, New Zealand and international schools across Asia, have made use of his many books on everything from the Weimar Republic to the Vietnam War to the Emperor Augustus to ‘What is History?’ He still works extensively in the area of Modern History.

Yet inside was the crime writer seeking to escape from this world of History. And so was born A L MASTERS and his Swindon-based sleuth, Detective Inspector Winston Leonard Spencer Hargreaves – known to everyone from the Chief Constable to the lowest low-life as “Spence”. Again and again, ‘Spence’ was pushed aside to make way for the likes of Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin or Ho Chi Minh.

But finally, the world of ‘Spence Hargreaves’ won out.

The first four novels in the ‘Spence Hargreaves’ series were: “Malicious Obsession”, “Delusions of Grandeur”, “The Evil of Virtue” and “Patient Vengeance”. Each novel takes place in the early 2010s. Though Spence and his team are present in each story, each novel is discrete.

“The fifth ‘Spence Hargreaves’ story – “Julie Trax Down” – is now available (see the Books section). This time, A L Masters takes Spence back to where it all began as a lowly DC in Swindon CID in the mid 1980s.” A L MASTERS lives in Sydney, Australia but returns to the ‘mother country’ whenever the opportunity allows.

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