A CRIME writer renowned for taking historical fact and weaving a compulsive page-turner of a novel around it is having capital success with her latest book.

Author Amanda Taylor’s North Yorkshire-set ‘Aram’ - labelled “a true story of class and religious bigotry, fraud, incest and murder” - is being advertised by poster at 50 key sites on the London Underground - and seen daily by many thousands of travellers.

Amanda, who lives near Bolton Abbey, has written several novels before, all of them using historical fact as a starting point for imaginative intrigue.

Her latest is based on the true story of a young Knaresborough shoemaker who vanished on a snowy night back in 1745. Eugene Aram was a school-teacher who knew the disappeared boy. He was suspected of murdering the boy, but it was never proved.

With the help of extensive research, Amanda has tried to put forward her own imaginative theories to to solve the mystery.

She believes that writing is definitely in her genes, as both her parents were journalists. And she remembers finding herself formulating plots and putting pen to paper from a young age.

Amanda said: “While researching ‘Aram,’ I could almost hear the conspirators hatching their fraudulent plot in the alehouses and down the alleyways of 18th century Knaresborough.

“What exactly did happen when a young shoemaker, and a historically-ignored travelling Jewish servant-boy, simply vanish into a snowy northern night?”

Amanda says she has always had a passion for history. Educated at the City High School, Leeds, her first published magazine piece was written when she was about 13 and appeared in The Dalesman magazine.

It was about the Battle of Towton during the War of the Roses.

She said: “Towton was one of the bloodiest battles in English history – a strange story for a young girl to write about.

“I started writing mystery stories from the age of eight or nine, and although my stories showed imagination, my dyslexia was often the cause of friendly amusement, especially when I decided to produce my own newspaper for the village, charging a penny per issue. ‘Make the beast of yourself’ and ‘Don’t go in the sea if it’s cold coming out’ were some of my more memorable lines!” It didn’t hold her back, though. In her late teens, she went on to win a national poetry prize in a competiton run by Coca-Cola and had quite a few historical articles published in magazines.

But it was as a novelist that she really wanted to make her mark. After a fair few knock-backs, in 2009 she self-published a novel which turned out to be a critical success. In turn this led to her being signed by publisher Jeremy Mills, who has now also published her previous three novels - ‘The Vigil of Rain’, ‘Mortimer Blakely is Missing,’ and ‘Dangerous Waves,’ which is set in the North Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes. All her books, available at Waterstone’s, Blackwells, Amazon and independent bookshops.