ONCE upon a time there were two accountants who wrote books in their spare time... and it all ended happily ever after when they were published.

Authors Ed Wicke and Roger Barnard work for the Basingstoke office of accountants and business advisers Tenon.

Ed, the special project manager, has written and published several child-ren's novels in the past 14 years. His latest work to be printed is Mattie and the Highwayman, an adventure set in the 1840s near Andover and based on local history, including the town's workhouse scandal.

Now he is about to publish a new book entitled Akayzia Adams and the Masterdragon's Secret, which is a funky Harry Potter-style novel, and another book in creation is about a semi-autistic boy and his talking cat.

Ed said: "I started writing novels when my children were young and insisted that I write down the stories I told them when putting them to bed."

Roger, who is the director of tax at Tenon, has a rather more conventional subject in his writing. He was asked by the publisher Croner CCH Group to pen two books - Income Tax, Employment and Related Income and Trading Property and Income.

Roger drew on his 30-plus years of experience to make a somewhat complex topic a little easier to understand.