Most significant for his excellent characterization, George Sims takes advantage of his experiences with manuscripts and rare books in creating the settings and protagonists of many of his novels. The world of the British rare-book dealer is well presented: the auction houses, the collectors of poetry and pornography, the large country-house sales all come across to the reader as true to life. Sims's love of literature is also evident in the many authors he either quotes or refers to in his novels. In Sleep No More (1966), for example, there are quotations from, or references to, Carolus Linnaeus, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Johnson, the Bible, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Omar Khayyam, Robert Browning, Henry James, and Lewis Carroll, among others.

George Frederick Robert Sims was born in Hammersmith, London. He attended John Lyon's School, Harrow, Middlesex, from 1934 to 1940. Before joining the British army, in which he served from 1942 to...