Sims worked for a year for an antiquarian bookseller, then opened his own shop, G. F. Sims (Rare Books), in 1948 in Harrow. In 1954 he moved his business to Hurst, Berkshire, where he lives in a seventeenth-century cottage with his wife and three children.
Sims is interested in exploring, in all its facets, the reality behind the illusions men and women present to the world. At the end of Sleep No More, Sims has one of his characters describe what can be said to be the general theme of his novels, that people are seldom what they appear. Jeffrey Wilson, who had hoped to write a biography of William Beaumont, a film star, says that the "motif [of the biography] ... has been the discovery of the face behind the mask." The masks that are worn by Sims's characters may be actual ones, used to hide a grotesque deformity, as in The Keys of Death (1982), or to disguise a character's identity, as in The End of the Web (1976). Or, the masks may be those of attitude, such as the mask of conventional manners and morality used to disguise murderous plans, as in Sleep No More.
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