I was born in Hollywood, where my father, Fredric M. Frank, was a staff writer for Cecil B. de Mille. What fascinated me most about my father's work was the research, the depth of details that never got onto the screen. I grew up to be a painter, then an actor and playwright, but what always drew me was the research.

Indulging myself in writing a novel about a garden in England, I was studying the mid 13th century when I discovered Simon de Montfort -- and was stunned that someone so pivotal in history could be so little known.

There followed 34 years of research into the life of Montfort, and life in the 13th century: the customs, laws, theology, banking and finance, foods and courtly manners, dress and armor, agriculture -- every aspect of life from the Court of Love to military tactics and horsemanship. And every item of information was needed to understand the chaotic, tumultuous life of Simon de Montfort.

Source material I found in the Britih Library, the London Public Record Office, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and I visited the places where Simon had lived. My work was championed by Dr. Madeleine Cosman, founder of the Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies of the City University of New York.

The written evidences of Simon's life are riddled with contradictions, the known events of his life, with instantaneous and unlikely reversals. I chose to write Montfort as an historical novel to use the novel form as a laboratory to investigate possible causal threads. Each of the four volumes of Montfort includes an Historical Context section with my sources and the reasons for my interpretations -- sometimes my views are unconventional.

The Montfort series has been receiving high praise, both as an entertaining adventure of the "can't put it down" variety, and as a deeply researched history.

And now I'm returning to that book about a garden that I put aside 35 years ago. It's a work about fairyland: about the nature of good, evil, fear, guilt, and a little girl and an eccentric gentleman who discover a world of fairies under the sundial in the West Deanery Garden of a cathedral close. It is titled The Fairy Garden, and will be in print, available from Amazon, before spring 2013.