Some years ago and to his great surprise, James Christie got Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a fictional ‘flatmate’ in Glasgow and ended up corresponding with the real-life Hollywood actress Juliet Landau, daughter of Martin Landau, who’d portrayed the crazy vampire in the cult TV series!

Born in Shropshire in 1964, James graduated from college in Cheshire with a degree in creative writing as well as College Colours ”in recognition of outstanding service to the student body and the college community”. After travelling around Australia for a year, he went to library school in 1992, catalogued the private library collection of a Scottish stately home and worked as a law librarian in Glasgow.

He was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome in 2002 and shortly thereafter began to take a focused interest in Drusilla. He wrote a quartet of fan-fiction stories (Drusilla’s Roses, Drusilla’s Redemption, Drusilla Revenant and Spike & Dru : the Graveyard of Empires) which further developed Dru’s character, sent them to Juliet Landau and impressed her so much they commenced an email correspondence.

In 2010, James took a historic Buffy-themed Greyhound bus trip across America with the support of the National Autistic Society Scotland in order to meet his dear Miss Landau. The story of the journey, Dear Miss Landau, which also described his difficulties living as an autistic adult in a neuro-typical world, was published by Chaplin Books in 2012.

Reviewing Dear Miss Landau on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read, Tim Coates (former managing director of UK booksellers WH Smith and Waterstones) said:

“This is the best book I’ve read for ten years.”

In 2015, The Legend of John Macnab, the “Great Scottish Novel” James had spent over twenty years working on, and which centred on a Scottish gospel illuminated manuscript arguably more important than the Stone of Destiny, was also published. He may have rewritten Scottish history in two places, and is indeed the only man alive commercially to have written about the Book of Deer.

James once blogged for the Huffington Post UK and an ebook anthology of these and other articles, Differently Wired, was published in 2018 by Chaplin Books.