Bob Biderman

Bob Biderman (1940–2018) was a British-American novelist and publisher known for his coming-of-age novels, Red Dreams – an obverse view of 50s America – and Letters to Nanette, about a young man drafted into the army at the start of the Vietnam War. Biderman is considered one of the wave of literary oppositionists who were active in May 68 and attempted to redefine popular genres, exemplified in his Joseph Radkin Investigation series which combined social and political history in a mystery format. He also was the founding editor and publisher of several magazines – Café Magazine, where he wrote extensively on the social history of coffee and Visions of the City Magazine, an offshoot of The Visions of the City Project which looked at alternative constructs of the urban metropolis. Biderman was one of the founders of Black Apollo Press and edited its popular Rediscovered Victorians series.

Biography Bob Biderman's father was the poet and political activist, A.E. Biderman and his mother, the visual artist, Fannie Kuller Biderman. He grew up in the American Midwestern city of Cincinnati, Ohio where his father was forced to go underground during the anti-communist purges of the 1950s. This experience provided the basis for several of Biderman's novels: Red Dreams, which viewed the brutalities of McCarthy's America through the eyes of a child and the first of his Radkin mysteries, Strange Inheritance.

In 1954 Biderman's mother left Cincinnati, moving to Los Angeles in search of a more liberal environment in which to raise her children. After the repeal of the Smith Act in 1956, the family was reunited and subsequently moved to Houston, Texas where Biderman completed high school. In 1958 he began his undergraduate work at the University of Texas in Austin where he studied mathematics, transferring two years later to the University of California at Berkeley where he studied science with the idea of becoming a physician.

In 1962 Biderman left the States for Europe, living first in Paris and then London; however in 1963 he was drafted into the military and was forced to return 'by any means'. As Biderman later wrote, 'I took the slowest route possible – in this case a rusty freighter sailing out of Glasgow bound for San Francisco via the Panama Canal'. While in the army he trained as a medic and subsequently worked as a medical technician assigned to the first US Army division destined for Vietnam – though he, himself, remained stateside. His military experiences at the beginning of the Vietnam War became the basis for his debut novel, Letters to Nanette.

After his discharge from the army in 1965, Biderman returned to San Francisco where he worked at odd jobs, 'hanging out at the Café Trieste with the remnants of the Beats', It was during that period he met Joy Magezis, also a leading student activist, whom he married in 1970.

In 1983, Biderman and his young family moved back to Britain, settling in Cambridge where he took up residence as a full-time writer. Struggling to find an outlet for his work, he was influenced by a friend and colleague, Gordon DeMarco, to develop a more popular form of political fiction. DeMarco, himself, was finding limited success as a political mystery writer and had been taken on by Pluto Press as one of the lead authors for their 'New Crime' series. DeMarco had introduced Biderman to Pete Ayrton, who at the time was editing this list and in 1984, Pluto Press published Strange Inheritance, the first of what was to become the Joseph Radkin Investigations series. His second mystery, Koba, set in San Francisco and peopled with the survivors of May 68, was shortlisted for the Pluto Prize but remained unpublished for several years as Pluto was sold and restructured during the economic downturn of the mid-1980s. In 1986 the London-based publishing house, Victor Gollancz, published the next in the Radkin series, Genesis Files (which was listed by the Guardian as one of the top ten crime novels of the year) and then Koba as part of their revamped yellow jacket mysteries.

In 1988, Biderman, now living in Toulouse, France, completed Judgement of Death, the third in the Radkin series. After Toulouse. Biderman returned to the States where he and his family took up residence in Portland, Oregon as cheap housing there became a magnet for struggling artists no longer able to afford San Francisco. DeMarco, who was living in Portland at the time, introduced them to the lively writers' circles that had sprung up in the city. It was in Portland that Biderman wrote the final two books in the Radkin series – Paper Cuts, concerning the clear-cutting of the great redwood forests and Mayan Strawberries, about the Mixtec Indians who travelled north from Guatemala to work the Oregon agricultural harvest.

By 1990, Biderman and his family had decided to go back to England. As Biderman explained it, their return to the United States had been 'sort of a last chance saloon – an attempt to reconnect with our American roots before finally succumbing to the realisation that we were, for better or worse, expatriates.' In 1996, along with David Kelley, a fellow at Trinity College, he began Black Apollo Press 'as a way of connecting to the bohemian subculture – hoping to create a Rive Gauche on the River Cam'. This project evolved into Visions of the City Magazine which Biderman edited. In the succeeding years, Biderman focused much of his time on researching 19th century immigration patterns into London from Eastern Europe and the process of assimilation that followed. This research eventually became an exploration of his own Jewish roots and resulted in his last novel – Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee: The Queen, the Jews and a Murder.