He joined the NME in 1972, recruited by editor Alan Smith.[2]
He was an early expert on the Middle-earth fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, publishing The Tolkien Companion in 1976. It was a concordance describing all the characters, objects, and places named in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (The Silmarillion was published the following year).[1] A revised edition was still in print in 2022 as The Complete Tolkien Companion.[3]