About Mike Dash

Mike Dash, the author of Tulipomania, Batavia’s Graveyard, Thug and now Satan's Circus, was born, in 1963, just outside London, and brought up in the Home Counties by a family of Welsh expats. Emigrating with them to Germany at the age of 9, he was educated at Gatow School, Berlin, Wells Cathedral School, Somerset, and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read history and ran the student magazine. From there he moved on to King’s College, London, where in 1990 he finally completed a particularly obscure PhD thesis, entitled British Submarine Policy 1853–1918, that has been little read. By the time he was 27, Mike had thus endured a peripatetic existence that took him from Wheathampstead (Herts) to Berlin, Wells, Zurich, Paris, Cannes, King’s Lynn, Cambridge, Hertford, Windsor, Watford, Wantage (Oxon) and Hungerford (Berks). These early travels have, however, made him unusually easy to book onto regional radio stations as a ‘local author’.

 Running out of money around four years into his research, as most postgraduates do, Mike turned his hand to journalism to earn a crust. His first job, for which he was thoroughly unqualified, was compiling about a quarter of the entries for Harrap’s Dictionary of Business and Finance (1988), a volume that he researched via clandestine meetings in a London Spud–U–Like with a college friend who had gone into banking and that was (perhaps thankfully) little read. Obscure early outings in the likes of Manufacturing Clothier — for which he wrote articles on zips and those little labels giving washing instructions that one finds sewn into clothes— led to a wildly implausible stint as a gossip columnist for Fashion Weekly and eventually to a full–time job as assistant editor of Licensing Reporter, a monthly newsletter — little–read as usual — aimed at the character licensing trade (think Garfield greetings cards and Bros lunch boxes).

 Improbably promoted to editor after only a week when both his bosses walked out, Mike’s reward for thoroughly revamping LR was a non–negotiable transfer to helm a failing stablemate, Ceramic Industries International. Fleeing his new title in terror, he fetched up in Teddington on the staff of Haymarket Magazines’ weekly Newsagent and finally made it to Fleet Street, as editor of Magazine Week, in the summer of 1990. Sadly this new job at the heart of British journalism lasted all of eight weeks before MW was folded into UK Press Gazette and the whole operation was packed off to Cockfosters, at the furthest extremity of London’s tube network.

 Mike spent three years running the magazines pages of UKPG before being phoned by John Brown, the maverick publisher of Viz, and asked to suggest the names of possible magazine publishers with an editorial background and some knowledge of the newstrade. Unsurprisingly nominating himself, Mike was hired as Brown’s associate publisher and handed the eccentric portfolio of Viz (by some way the most scurrilous title openly available on the UK news–stand) and Gardens Illustrated, a hugely upmarket title aimed at the sort of women who get their butlers to renew their subscriptions.

 He stayed with John Brown Publishing for seven happy years, launching the hugely successful Bizarre (1997) along the way, before departing for a brief stint at the Ministry of Sound in 2000. Having written his first three books while still at JBP, Mike then turned to writing full–time. Since then he’s contributed occasionally to Time Out, the Guardian, the Independent and the Daily Mail.

 Rather more significantly, Mike also worked for nearly 20 years for Fortean Times, the celebrated ‘Journal of Strange Phenomena’ which he joined as a contributing editor while still at university. More than a decade later, after the title was acquired by JBP, he became FT’s publisher for several years, launching numerous spin–offs including the acclaimed academic annual Fortean Studies (1994–2000); three of his contributions to the latter journal can be found in the Original Investigations section of this website. Mike was also briefly editor of FT in 1988–89.

 Having written his first book, The Limit: Engineering at the Boundaries of Science (1995) — a TV tie–in published to coincide with the little–watched ‘Engineering Week on BBC2’ — ‘principally for the money’, Mike went on to produce Borderlands for Heinemann two years later. A comprehensive 500–page study of all manner of Fortean phenomena, Borderlands was commissioned in the hope of cashing in on the unexpected success of the Graham Hancock’s million–selling Fingerprints of the Gods (a book that claimed the pyramids were built by Atlantaens from the South Pole) by a publisher who somehow overlooked the fact that Mike’s take on the subject was rather harder edged than Hancock’s. Displayed as it was in the New Age section of many bookshops, the rigorously sceptical Borderlands was, sadly but predictably, little read.

 Mike’s luck changed at last with the publication of his third book, Tulipomania, a history of the Dutch tulip–trading craze of 1636–7. Cannily marketed as a business book in the United States, it sold well to the thousands burned by the dotcom crash and paved the way for Batavia’s Graveyard three years later. Its follow-up, Thug – which tells the story of gangs of murderous highway robbers responsible for an estimated fifty to a hundred thousand deaths in India between the years 1550 and 1840 – became Mike’s best-reviewed title to date, and his latest book, Satan’s Circus (about the only American policeman ever executed for murder) looks well set to repeat that success.

 Among Mike Dash’s minor claims to fame are numerous appearances between the sticks for Old Tiffinians FC (a position he holds despite having absolutely no connections to Tiffins School), a spectacularly brief spell as a regular guest on the Mark Radcliffe show, and a thoroughly embarrassing stint plugging The Fortean Times Book of Weird Sex on Television X – The Fantasy Channel.

 Mike is married to Penny Dash — formerly editorial director at the magazine publisher Attic Futura and currently director of Deeper Media, a leading editorial and publishing consultancy — and has a daughter, Ffion. He now lives in London, some 200 stone’s throws from the British Library.

 He is no relation, so far as he is aware, to Mike Dash, the extreme pizza expert, to Mike Dash, the opinionated ultimate fighting aficionado who so irritates the denizens of the alt.rec.martial–arts newsgroup, or to Mike Dash, the mythopoet, pro-feminist organiser of SMASH — Seattle Men Against Sexual Harassment.

Seth Dickson, 2005, 2007