Christopher Verner was born on 13th December 1949 and brought up in Richmond, Surrey, England. His father was thriller writer Gerald Verner, born John Robert Stuart Pringle on 31 January 1897. He lived a colourful life while producing an extraordinary output of novels and plays. Chris began writing a biography of his father in 2010, Plots and Gunpowder, completing it this year. He was delighted to have the biography accepted by Level Best Books for publication in 2021. Like his father, he began his working life in Stage Management. He began as a student at the original Mermaid Theatre in Blackfriars, London, in 1967; spent five years at The National Theatre at the Old Vic in Waterloo until 1974; then Company Manager for The Black Mikado musical until 1976-after which he left the theatre world to form his own company to design and carry out special effects, principally for film and television, including Danger UXB, Time Bandits, and 1984, plus over four hundred television commercials. Apart from a posthumous collaboration completing his father's unfinished manuscript, The Snark Was A Boojum, he has completed a novelette The Man On The Train and a full-length novel The Seventh Virgin, both featuring his father's detective 'Mr. Budd'. He lives in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England with his wife Jenny.
