AUTHOR and businessman, Daniel Peltz has penned his third novel – focusing on the fictional discovery of an original Shakespeare manuscript. The St John s Wood resident says Daffodils Before Swallows is his homage to the Bard and to Shakespeare critic Har

AUTHOR and businessman, Daniel Peltz has penned his third novel - focusing on the fictional discovery of an original Shakespeare manuscript.

The St John's Wood resident says Daffodils Before Swallows is his homage to the Bard and to Shakespeare critic Harold Bloom.

After reading Bloom's work, Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human, he realised "how much Shakespeare means to us, how everything we do and think and speak is influenced by him and how important he is to literature as the first playwright we could really identify with."

Peltz was also amazed to discover that apart from several (disputed) signatures on legal documents, there were no examples of the playwright's handwriting - leading some to doubt whether he existed at all.

Visiting auction houses and book dealers, he asked them to estimate how much a genuine Shakespeare document would fetch.

"It's not too far fetched to think that in one of those 600 copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, one of them might contain an old playscript," says Peltz, who unsurprisingly is convinced that Shakespeare did author his famous plays.

Daffodils Before Swallows starts with the fictional Sotheby's sale of a fragment of Romeo and Juliet - then rewinds to recount the love story of the two young people selling it.

Peltz, a 46-year-old dad of four, has now signed up for an MA in Renaissance Studies to continue his discovery of Jacobean and Elizabethan playwrights but wants to focus on the work as pieces of theatre rather than academic texts.

Peltz, who lives next door to Sir Paul McCartney in Cavendish Avenue, plans his next book as a critique of the social judgements made by suburbanites on their fellow humans - certainly not something he will be doing with his famous neighbour's high profile marriage woes.

"We are not friends but we are invited to his house for parties and he is a normal, nice neighbour," he says.

Daffodils Before Swallows is published by the Book Guild priced £9.99 from amazon.co.uk.