It’s now 40 years since The Exorcist hit the big screen and was promptly banned by local authorities all over the UK because of its graphic scenes of demonic possession.

It was terrifying stuff and, where it did get shown, there were reports of people passing out in the cinemas or rushing outside to throw up.

But for William Peter Blatty, who adapted his own bestselling novel for the screen, both the book and the film carried an important religious message. Blatty was - and presumably still is - a Roman Catholic and the novel was based on the true story of a child apparently delivered by a Catholic priest from what looked very much like the grip of an evil entity.

Blatty’s point is that the existence of extreme supernatural evil is strong evidence for existence of a spiritual force for good. 

Not surprisingly, the success of The Exorcist led to an explosion of demonic novels and movies about the coming of the Antichrist which, as spin-offs tend to, got less and less credible before finally fading into the ether. 

For a long time afterwards nobody would go near big supernatural themes. Meanwhile, western society changed and became increasingly secular. The new gurus were atheists like Richard Dawkins, with undisguised scorn for the church, the chapel and the mosque. Priests had their backs to the wall.

But what if somebody decided to hit back? What if the power of an unsympathetic Old Testament God was unleashed again?

Thriller-writer Philip Kerr decided it was time for a radical variation on The Exorcist. On this weekend’s Phil the Shelf, he discusses his novel Prayer in which several prominent atheists are mysteriously struck down.

Kerr, who grew up in a contricting Christian non-comformist atmosphere in Scotland, is essentially a non-believer. But we also talk to the author of another novel dealing with evil spirits against the background of a culture where exorcism is commonplace.

Certainly not what you’d expect from GF Newman, creator of TV’s Judge John Deed and other novels and screenplays that deal with bent cops and corrupt authority.

Gordon Newman is also famous for his veganism and ecological campaigning.  His views are shared by Martin Shaw, who played Judge Deed, and production crews working on the series would be offered meat-free alternatives to the usual bacon butties. His house in the Wye Valley near Tintern employs various forms of alternative technology.

It’s no surprise to see the Catholic Church getting a bashing in Newman’s new novel, Dark Heart, but you might be interested to hear his views on the validity of exorcism.

What’s also interesting is that, in the interests of saving trees, Dark Heart is a novel which has only a virtual existence, released directly into the ebook format and highlighting another publishing revolution. 

Until quite recently, ebook only publications tended to be first-time novels rejected by publishers for reasons which were all too obvious. But now established bestselling writers are successfully e-publishing shorter stories which publishers might see as too much of a financial risk.

It also, of course, means that established authors can sell to thousands of regular readers without publishers and booksellers pocketing most of the profits.

Dark Heart, however, is one of the first full-length novels from a major writer to appear only in ebook format. Is this the start of something truly radical? We’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Listen to Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales on Saturday 28 December from 1.30pm.  

You look in a bookshop window and there they all are, the characters who live forever on the sales charts. Currently, you’ll find it’s James Bond and Bertie Wooster.

Even the ones who are officially dead can’t be counted on to stay that way. Take Hercule Poirot. You saw him sign off on the box a few weeks ago, but that didn’t stop the Agatha Christie estate from setting up Sophie Hannah to reactivate his little grey cells in a new novel expected to come out next year.

In this weekend’s Phil the Shelf we talk to Jill Paton Walsh, who’s been continuing the career of the late Dorothy L Sayers’ aristocratic amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. He’s back again in The Late Scholar, a cosy but complex mystery to see you over Boxing Day.

We also meet Felix Francis, who’s taken over the reins from his late dad Dick, probably the most successful thriller writer to come out of Wales and certainly the most widely acclaimed. Even Stephen King found much to admire in the pace and quality of the former champion jockey’s extensive output.

Keeping the family tradition alive has been an even bigger challenge for Felix, a former science teacher, because the success of all those racing thrillers was down to both his parents. It was only after her death that the importance of Mary Francis was fully revealed, with one biography even suggesting she’d done most of the actual writing.

So how convincing is Felix, who has brought back the most autobiographical of Dick’s heroes, ex-jockey Syd Halley? Are Syd and Felix natural stablemates? Find out in the programme.

I suppose what we’re really asking is if this resurrection of old heroes by new authors is any more than a damning indictment of the current lack of imagination in the popular publishing trade and its weary failure to spot the potential of new characters.

It’s not as if most of the revivals get close to the originals, James Bond being the prime example. 

The first of the many post-Ian Fleming Bonds was written by the great Kingsley Amis, and even his Colonel Sun lacked some of the Fleming fizz. The most reliable of the early sequels came from the spy novelist John Gardner. Some of the others  were.... well, let’s not go there.

Suffice to say that the Fleming Estate took to commissioning very big names like Sebastian Faulks (result: poor) Jeffery Deaver (too slick) and currently, William Boyd, whose Solo, while as well-written as you’d expect, lacks both atmosphere and any of those wonderful touches of the bizarre in which Fleming specialised - like having a beautiful woman die from being coated all over with pore-sealing gold paint.

And there’s something else missing, which we try to illustrate in the programme. Could it be that Fleming, despite his clunky dialogue, was a better thriller writer than any of them? Or is the spirit of Bond guarded by some West Indian voodoo curse?

Just the kind of insurance against plagiarism you can imagine Ian Fleming taking out...

Listen to Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales, Sunday 22 December from 1.30pm. 

When you think about it, life for the police-procedural crime writer is not getting any easier.

Real-life cops might generally be more efficient these days but, for writers of crime fiction, where the rule book tends to get discarded, policing is just not as much fun.

For a start, since the development of DNA profiling, much of the detective work is done in the lab or through a computer database.

And because the police service is getting increasingly complex and bureaucratic, you have to learn all the acronyms for different areas of what used to be The Murder Squad. The day of the maverick loner playing a hunch is long gone.

The idea of having a murder investigated by a grizzled, recovering-alcoholic DCI, followed around by his trusty, if not very bright, sergeant... well, that’s been history for quite a while. The DCI - now often a graduate administrator in his late 20s/early 30s - seldom leaves his office nowadays.

And you can forget the scene where he slowly dismantles a suspect in the interview room. According to a cop I was talking to the other week, interviews tend to be handled by the lower ranks, with the boss no closer than an occasional two-way mirror.

So it’s no great surprise to find Britain’s biggest-selling crime writer, Ian Rankin, planting the roots of his latest plot in the 1980s when policing was famously less inhibited and the fictional interview-room walls had to be regularly hosed down. Was Rankin’s wayward hero John Rebus - recently re-admitted to CID after the raising of compulsory retirement age - involved in unseemly behaviour in the old days? Can’t be ruled out, can it?

You can hear Rankin discussing the age of the anti-hero as reflected in his novel, Saints of the Shadow Bible in this weekend’s Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales.

We also talk to US crime writer Walter Mosley who explains why, for African Americans (as they weren’t called then), the late 1960s looked like the dawning of a golden age of harmony and understanding.

Back in the days before Barack Obama was even born, Mosley’s series character Easy Rawlins, a black private eye, had been finding his investigative skills seriously undervalued by White America. But in the latest Mosley novel, Little Green, it’s 1967, the summer of love, Jimi Hendrix is about to become the most revered solo rock musician in the world, and old racial barriers appear to be dissolving into the purple haze. Ah, the euphoria... however temporary.

It would’ve been interesting to have a new Welsh cop-novel exploring similar now/then territory, but we couldn’t find one. What we have come up with is Charlotte Williams, the plot of whose novel, The House on the Cliff, also hangs on the past. However, Charlotte’s central character, Jessica Mayhew, is not a cop but a Cardiff-based psychotherapist.

NOTE - not a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists prescribing antidepressants, are even more boring, from the crime writer’s point of view, than cautiously efficient senior detectives. Whereas an independent, self-employed therapist can be a free-range shrink, getting out there solving non-clinical mysteries.

Being a maverick loner, in fact...

It was Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival, who said, 'Why did it take you so long?'

He meant writing a novel set in Hay-on-Wye.

Good question. I think I just said I'd been saving it until the time was right. The thing is, I write thrillers, and thrillers always work best against a background of life-or-death tension. We're like that, novelists - we much prefer negative situations. And in Hay, even under the Christmas lights, nobody can fail to notice the bigger gaps between bookshops these days.

Hay-on-Wye in the distance

Hay-on-Wye: still the town of books?

Hay Castle

Can you believe it’s actually 10 years since The Da Vinci Code was first published? 

A book revered by those who - not having heard of the 1980s non-fiction bestseller, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - thought Dan was the first writer to explore the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had been an item. And that their descendents might still be around. 

A book reviled by those who couldn’t believe a novel so badly-written could sell so many copies. 

A book that spawned a whole of heap of spin-off titles involving a famous historical figure and a variation on the word ‘code.’ Often, publishers would even change the title of a novel to appeal to Dan Brown’s readers.

For example, the US bestseller Interred With Their Bones by the academic Jennifer Lee Carrell became, in the UK, The Shakespeare Secret, by JL Carrell (thus also ticking the JK Rowling box).

And now, just when you thought the bottom of this particular barrel had been so comprehensively scraped that it no longer had a bottom, here comes - The Camelot Code.  

Here’s the blurb: 

On a starlit summer’s night in the Welsh mountains, an old man is torn from sleep as an ancient prophesy unfolds...  

Enter the world of books with Phil 'the Shelf' Rickman

The ancient myths of the Mabinogion are firmly rooted in the Welsh national identity, offering a mystical glimpse of the medieval Celtic myth cycle and how life in this land may once have been for our ancestors. 

They tell of a time when Welsh was spoken as far north as Edinburgh and make reference to some of the earliest Arthurian myths and enthralling legends of the founding of London. 

Over the past five years the publisher Seren has been working with 10 prominent Welsh authors to reimagine the 11 tales for modern audiences.

The series began in 2009 with titles from Owen Sheers and Russell Celyn Jones and last week marked the launch of the final two books, Fountainville by Tishani Doshi and The Tip of My Tongue by Trezza Azzopardi. 

I spoke to both writers about the task of rewriting an ancient myth for modern audiences. 

Fountainville, by Welsh-Indian writer Tishani, concerns the original Arthurian tale The Lady of the Fountain and takes the reader on a bizarre journey to a surrogacy clinic in a nameless border town with gangsters, opium dens, and a mythical fountain. 

Tishani Doshi. Photo: Carlo Pizzati

Trezza Azzopardi. Photo: Rosie J Johnson

Would-be novelists are always told: write what you know.

What this actually means is that you have to look like you really know what you're writing about. Which can lead to interesting situations.

In this week's Phil the Shelf, novelist Mark Keating reveals how he goes out on his piece of north Pembrokshire, primes a flintlock pistol with gunpowder... and, er, fires it.

Apparently, even though it's a handgun, this is not against the law if no-one gets shot. And if you did try to rob the local post office with a flintlock, it probably wouldn't take Dyfed Powys police all that long to wrap up the inquiry.

The point is, knowing how to go about shooting someone in the 18th century is quite important if you're writing novels, as Mark Keating does, about pirates. Real pirates, that is, many of whom were Welsh, although Mark's principal character is Irish. Cross of Fire is his fourth novel about Patrick Devlin, and finds him in search of legendary treasure off the coast of Africa.

It's all deeply-researched, because authenticity has never been more important for a novelist - and the internet, as usual, might be to blame.

In the old days, it would usually need a trip to a reference library, but now it couldn't be easier for a curious reader to check on a writer's sources, find out which bits are factual and which have been made up. And - even worse - which 'true' information has been bent to shore up the plot.

Bad enough for writers of historical fiction, even worse if you're working with contemporary situations. A native of Cardiff tells me that even the great John le Carré made a fundamental error relating to the city's geography in his latest novel, A Delicate Truth.

Oh, yes, truth is delicate all right, and writers are constantly looking over their shoulders. Thanks to devices like Google Earth, assiduous readers can now follow your story on the ground.

You have a guy dive into a convenient doorway to avoid his pursuers and someone in San Diego emails to point out that there are no doorways at the southern end of this particular street in Swansea as all the buildings have been demolished and the site turned into a car park.

A minefield. Thrillers are particularly risky, especially if they involve police procedure. New criminal investigation divisions, identified by very forgettable acronyms, are appearing every other week. And terminology is constantly changing.

At one time, the people in plastic suits who sprinkled powder around murder victims were always known as Scenes of Crime Officers - or SOCOs. Now the Americanism CSI seems to be creeping in. And murders - British murders - can now officially be referred to as homicides. What's the world coming to?

Even archaeological procedure is becoming more technical and rarefied, with the increased use of ground-radar before you even get to take down the trowels.

Not a problem for our second guest, Francis Pryor, director of many digs for the late lamented Time Team TV series.

Francis has written a bunch of acclaimed non-fiction books about the landscape and what lies underneath it, and his first novel, The Lifers' Club, featuring archaeologist Alan Cadbury, is a prime example of writing about what you know. Getting it published, however, has been far more complex, as you can find out in the programme.

Which is the last in the series, by the way - although we'll be back in the autumn.

Listen to Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales tonight from 6.30pm.

Next year marks the centenary of Dylan Thomas' birth, and there is a raft of exciting events scheduled throughout the year to commemorate Swansea’s most famous son.

Many of those events will centre on the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, including several special Dylan Thomas trails inspired by his verse.

As a warm-up to next year's festivities, Fluellen Theatre in Swansea have devised dramatised guided tours of Thomas' favourite spots in the city. The first took place last weekend, and the next will happen on Saturday 24 August.

Each tour will use the words of the great poet to illuminate the city, breathing life into sites where he once penned verse or gathered with friends to enjoy a pint or 10.

David Dooley sitting at the base of the Captain Cat statue in Swansea Marina. Image courtesy of the Fluellen Theatre Company

Actor Huw Richards and Fluellen's artistic director Peter Richards on the tour. Image courtesy of the Fluellen Theatre Company

Actor Huw Richards among the audience. Image courtesy of the Fluellen Theatre Company

"Hilarious", it says on the back of the book. Also, "crackling with wit" and "killingly funny."

These are from top newspaper critics' reviews of Zoo Time by Booker-winning Howard Jacobson, a novel which I can confirm is droll, slightly twisted and says a lot about the downside of the writing profession.

Reviews by some readers on Amazon, however, were less effusive.

"Tedious."
"Dirge."
"Dull, droning... an insult."
"I gave up about halfway through."

Reviewers on Amazon are famous for failing to appreciate how many months of work go into a novel, usually for a financial return far lower than they imagine. If they've spent even 99p on something they wouldn't normally choose to read, the knives come out.

But when, on Phil The Shelf, we talked to Howard Jacobson about negative internet reaction to his work, he floated the possibility that some readers were basically too thick to appreciate the subtleties of the humour.

It was one reason we decided to devote a full programme in the series to funny fiction. And, to an extent, Howard's right. If you don't know anything about the object of the satire you're not going to get the jokes. In this case, it helps if you're a published writer with embarrassing memories - which is virtually all published or would-be published writers.

Generally, they were kinder to Heartbreak Hotel, the latest novel by the equally-famous Deborah Moggach, also on this edition of Phil The Shelf. "Light, warm and entertaining" typifies the reaction, though someone did moan that it wasn't, as expected, about old people dating.

It is, however, even funnier if you know a bit about the area of mid Wales where, in the story, 70-something actor Russell Buffery (most famous for his voice over for Dyno-Rod) inherits a B&B.

So if you haven't read it, or even if you have and were wondering where the town of Knockton was, I'll tell you in advance - it's Presteigne, in Powys.

The first joke about Presteigne is that, though in Wales, it's actually on the English side of Offa's Dyke.

Some of the others I don't feel safe in discussing. Suffice to say, I was there as a radio reporter when it was the base of the wonderful Boysie Rumsey, Britain's oldest mobile DJ and possibly the first ever. And when the resident policeman was also the town's wart-charmer.

Presteigne was also the last refuge of the old hippy good-lifers who arrived in Mid Wales in the 1970s - a fact not lost on Deborah Moggach whose only real mistake is having local people refer to nearby Llandrindod Wells as Llandrod (it's Lan-dod).

Anyway Heartbreak Hotel is old-fashioned character-led comedy, and it works.

Which leaves us at literary humour's surreal end. Or fantasy.

Tolkeinesque elves have, to be honest, never really spun my Discworld. Ben Aaronovitch, however, walks a fine line between fantasy and the police procedural in his series about PC Peter Grant, a character not that far removed from the wart-charming copper from Presteigne.

Grant does magic and hunts down perps of a similar persuasion. Broken Homes, the fourth in the series and already a major bestseller, makes some interesting points about the magical qualities of certain blocks of flats.

Again, to get the joke, it helps if you know enough about police procedure to recognise that Peter Grant could be an actual employee of the Met. Yes, it's set in London, but we learn that the fifth in the series will bring Grant to within a five-minute drive of... Presteigne.

Serendipity: the second-home of Phil The Shelf.

OK, I haven't yet read JK Rowling's pseudonymous crime novel... but in one way it looks very much like good news.

The title, anyway, The Cuckoo's Calling.

I can guarantee that any crime writer apart from JK Rowling who had put that title in front of a publisher a year ago would have received a distinctly sniffy response.

"It rather lacks something important," the publisher would've said. "Why not call it, The Cuckoo’s Dying?" Or better still, just Dead Cuckoo. Or even drop the word cuckoo entirely and replace it with another word that means dead.

As publishers generally operate on the basis that no company ever lost money by underestimating the comprehension skills of readers, the mortality factor has long been seen as essential for a thriller title. At one time, all crime novels had to have the word murder in the title but, in the digital age, two syllables are pushing it a bit, so for the last few years the essential word has been dead.

Peter James has included it in every title of his Roy Grace series, and other writers of police procedurals have followed. Mark Billingham: From the Dead, Good as Dead. Stephen Booth: Dead and Buried, Already Dead.

I had plans for a novel called Deader than Dead, but I'm not sure now. I'm thinking maybe it should have a bird in the title.

How do you feel about The Barn Owl's Shriek?

Mark Billingham. Photo: Charlie Hopkinson

Let's face it: if it wasn't for God, being an atheist would be no fun at all.

Without the Bible, the Welsh geneticist Steve Jones' latest book wouldn't have a sexy title like The Serpent's Promise, suggesting, as it does, all manner of seductive sins.

Actually, it's just an attempt - fairly successful as far as it goes - to explain the Bible with reference to current scientific thinking.

Steve Jones is, of course, far too cool to come over as an arm-waving evangelical, fundamentalist atheist like, erm, others in his profession.

And, though he is an atheist, the Christian ministry is actually in his west Wales genes, as he explains on the BBC Radio Wales book programme, Phil the Shelf, before the show widens out to look at what's new in faith-lit.

Professor Steve Jones

Wales has produced many interesting and unusual individuals over the years but none was more bizarre and arguably more mysterious than the writer Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn Prichard.

This was the man who wrote The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shon Catti, thereby creating one of the great mythical figures of Welsh folk lore.

Very little is known about Llewelyn Prichard. He remains a man of mystery, born in the Builth area of Breconshir, possibly in Trallog, in about 1790, where he was educated although the origins of his family remain unknown.

Prichard's early career and life are also shrouded in mystery but we do know that in January 1826 he was married to Naomi Jones of Builth. The wedding took place at Abergavenny, possibly because Prichard was acting on the stage in the town at that time.

He is known to have appeared in various plays around Wales, in places like Brecon and Aberystwyth, and even in London where he might well have performed under the name of Mr Jefferies.

Prichard had other careers apart from acting. It is thought that he spent time cataloging the library in the Monmouthshire home of Lady Llanover and his love of books led him to create some literary works of his own.

His most successful book, The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shon Catti, first appeared in 1828, being published by a firm in Aberystwyth. Hugely popular, the book went through several editions, being translated into Welsh in 1872.

Twm was an attractive character whose adventures and lifestyle seemed to catch the public imagination. He has sometimes been seen as the Welsh Robin Hood and the book has often been referred to as the first Welsh novel in the English language.

Llewelyn Prichard wrote many other books. These included a book of poems called Welsh Minstrelsy, a travel guide entitled A Guide to the Watering Places of Wales, Marine and Inland, and the historically based Heroines of Welsh History. He also edited The Cambrian Wreath: A Selection of English Poems on Welsh Subjects.

Prichard is often referred to as a book seller. He did not have a shop, however, and the description comes from the fact that he made a living selling books – usually his own but others as well, if he could get them cheaply enough – around the doors of houses in Swansea where he eventually settled after he retired from acting.

Leaving the stage was something that had been forced on him. Somewhere around 1840 he became involved in an argument which, in turn, led to him fighting a duel.

Allegedly, his nose was partly cut off by his opponent's sword and for the rest of his life he wore a wax substitute, held in place by his spectacles. It made him look ridiculous and forced his retirement from acting.

Perhaps worse, the wax nose made Prichard the obvious butt of cruel jokes from children in Swansea. He lived first in Wassail Square (since demolished and turned into a modern shopping precinct) but the constant jeering of children in the area made his life such a misery that it forced him to look elsewhere for lodgings. He found them in Thomas Street in one of the poorer districts of the town.

By now Prichard had fallen into poverty – despite the success of Twm Shon Catti, which should have ensured him at least a reasonable standard of living. Perhaps more significantly, he had become a drunkard, one of the reasons his income from book selling and writing declined.

Stumbling, drunk, from one cheap ale house to another, he became a familiar sight in the poorer streets of Swansea. He once lost a whole sheaf of papers, a complete volume of his work, by leaving them in a public house in High Street. Prichard did have supporters and friends, however, and with his financial situation growing steadily worse, a collection was made to keep him out of the parish workhouse.

In the event, the collection was unnecessary. One night in 1862 he staggered home drunk from one of his favourite watering holes. He fell into the fire in his living room and was burned to death.

It was a sad and tragic end for a man who was always more flawed than he was prolific – not easy to do for a man who managed to turn out a large quantity of work in his 60 or 70 years of life.

As Dylan Thomas once wrote in the Herald of Wales, Llewelyn Prichard "failed to be great but he failed with genius."

Wanna be a published novelist? You know... properly published, by a real publisher? That situation where the book is printed on actual paper and the only handover of money is from the publisher to you?

If so, you might be interested in the return of Shelfstarters, the feature unique to Phil the Shelf, where you send us a crisp, one-page synopsis of your novel, plus the first 25 pages, and we bung it to a publisher or literary agent for an opinion.

Easy, huh?

Crime writers who turn detective always do well on TV - particularly in the US. But in real life, of course...

Well, actually, in real life it happens, too.

Take Robert Lewis, writer of three painfully funny novels about south Wales private eye Robin Llewellyn who is not only alcoholic but terminally ill. Llewellyn's last case, Bank of the Black Sheep, begins in a hospice, and although he actually survives that one, it’s clear his career is not going anywhere.

Rob Lewis. Photo by Johnny Ring, provided by Simon & Schuster

This week marks the centenary of the birth of Gwyn Thomas, one of Wales' greatest writers in the medium of English.

Thomas was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, plays for stage, radio and television and contributor of articles to magazines and newspapers including Punch and the Western Mail.

He even managed to appear frequently on radio and television in programmes such as Any Questions, The Brains Trust, Parkinson, Eamonn Andrews and BBC Wales' own Week In Week Out with Vincent Kane.

Gwyn Thomas on the BBC's The Brains Trust, 18 August 1960

Abigail Hopkins as Nana Thomas and Anthony Hopkins as Gwyn Thomas in Selected=