He died in Manchester.

It's been over two weeks, so I was surprised to find only one obit! (It's a long one, though - an 11-minute read.)

https://northwestbylines.co.uk/lifestyle/books/obituary-jan-needle-provocative-childrens-author-and-screenwriter/

Obituary: Jan Needle, provocative children’s author and screenwriter
The legacy of Jan Needle, author of Wild Wood and screenwriter for A Game of Soldiers, Truckers, Grange Hill and Brookside

By Andrew Rosthorn Oct. 9th

Excerpts:

....His edgy 1978 story My Mate Shofiq, about a desperate interracial alliance between two boys in Oldham and his novel The Bully, 1983, became recommended reading in schools worldwide but Wagstaffe, the Wind-up Boy, a gruesome tale about a boy catapulting eggs at heavy lorries on the M62, was widely deplored by adults, although relished by children.

John Stephens in Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction found that Wagstaffe was seen as “endemically subversive of such things as social authority, received paradigms of behaviour and morality”.

Wagstaffe was published by Andre Deutsch in June 1987 just before BBC Two screened Needle’s eight-part TV drama Truckers about lorry drivers surviving in Thatcher’s Britain, sometimes by strike-breaking.

....gave Needle a bonus job as children’s’ editor. Week after week, Needle awarded the children’s best joke prize to a contestant called Sadie M’Gee until the Star discovered that Sadie M’Gee was an old lady living in Scotland.

Needle “loved the jokes, loved the name” and named his only daughter Sadie M’Gee Needle. Years later, when it came to naming a fictional nurse capable of thieving from Oldham Royal Hospital the liver of the squashed Wagstaffe boy and cooking it for supper, the wind-up boy’s nemesis became Nurse Sadie M’Gee.

“I never thought I would have to explain it to anyone. Because even I could not have invented what was going to happen. Our little Sadie M’Gee grew up, passed all her exams and became an A&E nurse at the very same Oldham Royal Hospital. Unbelievable. Even for me.”

....The most curious tribute to Needle as novelist and researcher came in May 1991 when HarperCollins published The Butcher’s Bill, a roman á cléf for the 50th anniversary of the still unexplained crash landing in Scotland by Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess.

Francis Wheen at Private Eye soon worked out that Frank Kippax, a mysterious author offering a £5,000 prize for any new information on the Hess flight, was really Needle.

When copies of the book went on sale at a launch party in the field where the Hess plane had crashed, someone from the British security services turned up, bought a copy, gave Needle a false phone number in Edinburgh and picked up an entry form for the cash prize.

A later edition of the book, re-named Death Order, included fresh information that the cabinet minister Ernest Bevin had warned Winston Churchill in a telephone call from the Queens Hotel in Leeds that Hess was flying to Britain.

Death Order attracted serious attention from a history professor who found evidence in wartime newspapers that Bevin had cancelled an advertised speaking tour after making the phone call to Churchill but no one has ever claimed the prize.

....Grange Hill earned him an invitation from Phil Redmond to join the tightly organised scriptwriting team at Brookside, the Merseyside soap opera that ran on Channel 4 for 21 years.

Andy Lynch, who met Needle at Brookside, remembered how “Jan was initially taken aback by the combative nature of storyline conferences at Brookside where a dozen or so people vied to have their voices heard, stories accepted and commissions awarded”.

“It was a far cry from the solo crafting of novels. We became the best of friends and Jan was soon a valuable member of the team, enjoying the camaraderie and the social side that went with it.”

Margaret Thatcher’s armed forces minister John Stanley asked Thames Television to ban Needle’s three-part children’s TV serial A Game of Soldiers. The government in the recently liberated Falkland Islands had discovered that Needle’s plot involved three islander children deciding it was their duty to kill a wounded Argentinian soldier. Thames resisted.

A Game of Soldiers was nominated for a BAFTA and is still shown in schools to provoke classroom discussions and inform school essays on the power of rumours in wartime. On the orders of Bryan Cowgill, the wartime Royal Marine from Clitheroe who headed the Independent Broadcasting Authority, each episode of A Game of Soldiers included a spoken warning about “the fictional nature of the storyline”.

Jan Needle’s Irish penny whistle will be heard no more in the back room of the Cross Keys pub at Uppermill. He leaves his wife Elizabeth, his partner Viv Gardner, emeritus professor of drama at Manchester University, four sons and Sadie M’Gee Needle, who was at his bedside when he died in a Manchester hospice on 9 October.

https://www.janneedle.com/blog/
(his blog)

https://www.facebook.com/people/Jan-Needle-Author/100066810520081/

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/n/jan-needle/
(book covers)

https://www.historicnavalfiction.com/authors-a-z/jan-needle
(about his naval novels)

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/authorpage/jan-needle.html
(three PW reviews)

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7767.Jan_Needle
(reader reviews - somewhat to my surprise, most people seem to LOVE "Wild Wood"! Not what I expected - but I haven't read it.)

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0624130/
(TV writing credits - he also appeared in a 1999 Russian comedy: "I Want to Go to Prison")

https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=577175651&q=%22jan+needle%22&tbm=vid&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj72L3vtpaCAxV7v4kEHfOPBiwQ0pQJegQIDBAB&biw=1920&bih=884&dpr=1
(couple of videos about his books)

From Wikipedia:

Bibliography

Albeson and the Germans (1977)
My Mate Shofiq (1978)
The Size Spies (1979)
The Bee-Rustlers (1980)
A Sense of Shame and Other Stories (1980)
Wild Wood (1981)
Another Fine Mess (1981)
Losers Weepers (1981)
Piggy in the Middle (1982)
Going Out (1982)
A Pitiful Place and Other Stories (1984)
Great Days at Grange Hill (1984)
Tucker's Luck (1984)
Tucker in Control (1985)
Behind the Bike Sheds (1985)
Wagstaffe, the Wind-up Boy (1987)
Uncle in the Attic (1988)
The War of the Worms (1992)
Bogeymen (1992)
The Bully (1993)
Killing Time at Catterick (2013)
Silver and Blood (2013)
Death Order (2015)
Kicking Off (2015)
Nelson: The Poisoned River (2015)

William Bentley

A Fine Boy for Killing (1979)
The Wicked Trade (1998)
The Spithead Nymph (2004)
Undertaker's Wind (2006)

Charlie Raven

The Devil's Luck (2013)
The Death Card (2015)

Plays

A Game of Soldiers (1985)
Rebels of Gas Street (1986)
The Thief (1989)

Literary criticism

Brecht (1981) – with Peter Thomson

UNDER PSEUDONYM FRANK KIPPAX

The Scar, William Collins and Sons, 1991.