About The Author:

JP Bean’s first venture into the world of writing was a radio play, Samson Enterprises, broadcast in BBC Radio 4’s Thirty Minute Theatre on 10 March 1976. It featured Colin Edwynn – at the time Les Dawson’s radio straight man – as a small-time theatrical agent trying to break into the big-time pop scene. The Sheffield Telegraph described it as “slight but sprightly”!

On 10 November that year Peck and Call, in the same Radio 4 slot, starred Sam Kelly, who was to be seen regularly in TV sit-coms like Porridge and `Allo `Allo, as Jackpot Jones, a bingo caller who seduces one of his fans and thwarts her husband’s ambitions to teach his parrot Churchill’s war speeches.

JP Bean: “I thought I was on my to Hollywood, casting couch and all that, but it didn’t happen. After a while I started researching The Sheffield Gang Wars. Like a lot of people in Sheffield I’d grown up with the mythology about the Mooney Gang and the Park Brigade - my grandfather was a bookmaker on the racecourses. I wrote the book to establish the facts and put the story down properly. Much later on I was speaking at a dinner and sitting next to me was George Mooney’s grandson, Tony Mooney, who's a retired headmaster in London. He said he’d enjoyed the book and it was story that had needed to be told.

“After the Gang Wars it’s been non-fiction almost the way. As well as the books I’ve done liner notes for eight Joe Cocker re-mastered CDs, re-issues and anthologies, the notes for Jackie McAuley’s album ‘Headspin’ and bits of journalism - but I did have a short story, Gatty, Son of a Goalkeeper, published in London Magazine and I've written the script for a 30 minute film The Pig-out at Heart Attack Jack's, which has not yet come to the screen.

"There's also been a number of television documentaries, either as consultant or interviewer - most recently Peterman, a short film about a safe-blower for Discovery and Riding Bikes & Robbing Trains for Channel 4, about the train  robber Bruce Reynolds' love of cycling."

JP Bean's seventh book The Sheffield Chronicles was published in September 2008 and attracted great reviews from the press and radio.

In recent times JP has done a number of talks to all manner of audiences, including sell-out events in Sheffield at Off The Shelf and at The Greystones.

(For upcoming events, see News)

 

 

 

JP Bean with JackieMcAuley and Lonnie Donegan in Manchester

 

 

 

 

 

 

JP Bean with Jeremy Beadle at the Clerkenwell Literary Festival