The Story of M

By on July 13, 2021
This entry is filed under News & Announcements.

OK, so this blog is WAY overdue an update. What can I say? I’ve been busy.

Today, July 13 2021, sees the release of ‘M, King’s Bodyguard,’ an historical thriller based on actual characters and events that I have been working on for over ten years, since I came across William Melville in a website article headed ‘Ten Amazing Irishmen You’ve Never Heard Of’. I am not the first to try and tell his story in fiction, but to the best of my knowledge I’m the first to get to publication.

William Melville left Ireland at fourteen, joined the London Metropolitan Police in 1872, and rose to become head of Special Branch and occasional bodyguard to British royals. In 1901, in the leadup to the funeral of Queen Victoria, he received a tipoff that a gang of European anarchists planned to attack the cortege and assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. With the Kaiser’s bodyguard Gustav Steinhauer in tow, Melville set out to see off the plotters – but nothing went according to plan…

Last time I […] Continue Reading…

Roll Up Roll Up… But Mind the Wet Paint

By on June 28, 2014
This entry is filed under News & Announcements.

Look at the state of this website! The Crusher trilogy is complete, and the home page still says Parts 2 and 3 ‘coming soon’? Bear with us – (Here imagine frantic sounds of sawing, hammering and cursing behind the scenery…)

Ladies and Gents, the third and final part of the Crusher trilogy, Shredder, is out this month, June 2014. The official launch is Thursday 3rd July (which is next month, I know, shut up at the back) and to mark it I am going to raffle off three sets of the novels in the paperbacks with the cool matching covers, autographed of course (so you can’t send ’em back.) The draw will take place on Sunday 6 July and a link to the entry widget is on the front page of this website… or will be very shortly…  (Hoot! Let’s stink a link to the comp on the home page!) I will mail the signed sets to winners anywhere in the world.

What can I say about Shredder […] Continue Reading

An Imperfect Science

By on October 20, 2013
This entry is filed under Notes from the Coalface.

The narration over the wonderfully absurd opening* of Sunset Boulevard, where we learn that the man talking to us is the dead guy floating in the pool – includes every screenwriter’s favourite observation: that no regular moviegoer knows or cares what screenwriters do because ‘they think the actors make it up as they go along.’

If a screenwriter does their job right, all the artifice – setting up the story and introducing the characters and moving the narrative forward – disappears.  The viewers suspend their disbelief, ignore the contrivances and the coincidences that hold the story together, and let themselves imagine they are watching something real. The impression of spontaneity – that the ‘actors make it up as they go along’ is pretty much the effect every writer is trying to achieve. At the same time we’re also trying to make viewers forget they are watching actors at all, and convince them that that bloke who resembles Tom Hanks might just die horribly before the end of the movie.

Of course these days critics and audiences […] Continue Reading…

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