RIGHTS SOLD

August 2023

This is a bitter-sweet comedy about a group of old people who decide to live together for company. Things don’t go according to plan.  The house they live in, The Graylings, belongs to Bernard, who suddenly dies, leaving everything to his daughter Sarah. Sarah is likely to evict the residents, so they decide to conceal the death. This sets off a train of disasters as they resort to increasingly desperate measures to prevent Sarah from discovering the facts. There is blackmail, violence, rage and sexual rivalry. The Mafia get involved. The climax is macabre.
   The Commune is a brilliant and hilarious exploration of the dark side of growing old, and a cautionary tale for those who, in the process, grow no wiser.

Oliver Black was a professor of philosophy and law and was a City lawyer. He had previously published fiction under a pseudonym. He lived in London and Dorset with his wife and cat. He had intended to live, when old, in a commune with his friends.

Paperback  214pp 

ISBN  9781853981852

£9.99 in the U.K. only

Film rights sold – screenplay in preparation

In March 2012, Raymond R. Scott was found dead in his prison cell, after, apparently, having cut his own throat. It was the final tragic act in one of the most colourful criminal cases ever held in the English courts.
   The story begins in 1998 when a rare copy of a Shakespeare First Folio was stolen from Durham University. Authorities had been stumped for a decade as to the Folio’s fate until Raymond Scott strolled into the world-renowned  Folger Library in Washington DC and asked to have a very similar copy authenticated.
    Scott wanted to sell the First Folio, worth in the region of £1 million, in order to live the high life with his beautiful 21-year-old Cuban dancer girlfriend whom he had met during one of his frequent trips to Havana. The flamboyant Scott had a taste for Ferraris, Lamborghinis and vintage champagne, yet spent most of his time living with his aged mother, Hannah, on social security benefits in a modest home in Washington, Tyne on Wear.
   In one of the many strange twists in the case, he claimed that he had obtained the book from a friend in Cuba who was a former bodyguard to President Fidel Castro. Scott, who never took the stand, was eventually jailed for eight years for handling stolen goods, but was cleared of stealing the First Folio.
  Shakespeare & Love explores the true story behind the theft of the Durham Shakespeare First Folio and reveals for the first time the full character of the man dubbed by the press as ‘Bling Lear’.