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Wells, a money-hungry global multinational. Paul Carpenter - gangly, unsure of himself, in his early twenties - works for J.W.

The Portable Door, I realized after starting In Your Dreams, provides some backstory for this current novel, but it isn't absolutely necessary to have read it.

I read Holt's first four or five books with pleasure but missed the later ones, several with punning titles like Grailblazers, Faust Among Equals and Djinn Rummy.

Holt's early novels were taken up by American trade publishers, but most of his recent books have been available mainly as imports distributed by Trafalgar Square, an estimable firm situated in Vermont that brings over superb British titles. In Expecting Someone Taller, for instance, Holt's feckless hero finds himself in possession of the all-powerful ring of the Nibelungen - and the invisibility-granting Tarnhelm, as well. The tone throughout is reminiscent of low-keyed 1930s screwball comedy or of those fizzy 1920s romps of Thorne Smith (e.g., Topper, The Night Life of the Gods). More often than not, his protagonist would be a well-meaning but rather shy or bumbling young man who finds himself helping a troupe of Vikings or the pantheon of Greek gods while trying to forestall the end of the world and still keep his job and win the girl. In his early novels Holt generally took some ancient myth or legend, then set down its heroes and villains in modern, corporate England. Since then he has established himself as a reliable purveyor of light entertainment, a member of that English company of humorous fantasists that includes Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde. Ashford never repeated her youthful success (though she published other books), but in his early twenties Holt amazed again with a pair of excellent sequels to the comic Lucia masterpieces of E.F. The precocious son of Hazel Holt, the friend and biographer of Barbara Pym, he brought out a book of poems when he was 11 and was naturally compared to Daisy Ashford, who scribbled her classic The Young Visiters at the age of 9. Tom Holt has been writing since the 1970s and has produced some 30 or so novels, even though he was born only in 1961.