His grandfather, Thomas Adams (1871–1940), was an influential urban planner, who served as an advisor to Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt and went on to found the Civic Improvement League in 1915 and the Town Planning Institution of Canada in 1919.
In the 1960s and 1970s he became involved with several distinguished poets, including Edward Lucie-Smith, Ted Hughes, C. Day Lewis, Brian Patten, George MacBeth and Adrian Henri as well as artists Sandra Blow, John Piper, Josef Herman, and Mark Boyle and among others, producing poetry prints published by his own gallery, the Fulham Gallery, London.
Adams also designed posters for Mark Boyle's light shows (The Sensual Laboratory), the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Soft Machine.
His connection with the modern world of rock music continued when he met Lou Reed, an admirer of his Christie and Raymond Chandler covers.
With Pomfret's representation, Adams began a career as a book cover illustrator, most notably for the early John Fowles's novels The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman and the now famous paperback covers for Agatha Christie (Collins UK and Simon & Schuster USA).
[5] Adams also provided the illustrations for the hardback editions of John Fowles' The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman.
His occasional portrait commissions have included HRH Prince of Wales, Benjamin Britten (twice), Federico Fellini for the Playboy organization, Bud Flanagan, Richard Dimbleby, and President Tubman of Liberia.
In music, he did covers for Lou Reed's self-titled album and Iron Maiden's compilation Edward the Great.
Adams ended up doing the covers for Agatha Christie paperbacks for twenty-eight years (1962-1980), thus becoming connected with her intimately in the minds of many readers.
Organizing the vast majority of them, however, is Adams's unique exploration of a form that was vital for much of twentieth-century art: the collage.
This element also goes to explain one of the most distinctive features of Adams's art: the combination of a sought-after realistic accuracy with an unsettling, surrealist, if not alienating, effect.
His work is in numerous private collections and he exhibited in London, Toronto, Tokyo, Dublin, Sydney, Marbella, and more recently in Exeter and Torquay, the setting for many of Agatha Christie's mysteries.