My friend Dave Crook, who has died aged 71, was a bookseller, poet and songwriter. His home in Stirchley, Birmingham, was a salon for local writers and musicians. For several years in the 1990s he edited the cultural magazine Out of the Circle, the title of which came from the city’s Number 11 Outer Circle bus route that ran past Dave’s terrace house in Handsworth. Produced by the technology of its day – photocopying and stapling – the monthly magazine featured book, film and music reviews, alongside reportage, opinion pieces, original fiction, poetry and comic strips. The cover-line for the March 1997 travel issue was: “Around the World: Hebron, Morocco, Edgbaston”.
Dave was the middle of three brothers, raised by their mother, Hilda (nee Webster), on a meagre British Rail widow’s pension. His father, Bertram Crook, was a ticket inspector who died from a heart attack when Dave was 13. After passing the 11-plus exam, Dave attended King Edward VI grammar school, where he excelled in literature, history and mathematics. Although he could have become a classics scholar, he balked at the arcane rituals of a Cambridge University interview in 1970; he later began a degree at the University of Swansea, but dropped out almost immediately.
