When the book was suggested, he made no secret of the fact that the occult was not a subject that interested him greatly and when he sought the advice of none other than the poet Robert Graves, asking him whether he should write it, he was told very firmly that he should not. But with a young family to support, he had spent far too much of the 1960s on the arduous American university lecture trail, keeping him away from home for lengthy periods of time. This was to be his first commissioned work, a sign that he had finally ‘arrived’ as a professional writer. The financial terms from his would-be publishers, Random House in the US and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK (a $4000 advance), were obviously too tempting and so he went ahead.
