Authors Electric

First it's ME ME ME, then a plea for more deserving cases, being helped by the amazing Mark Frankland, who I've written about before. He helps run a charity in Dumfries called First Base, and they need cash. They help people - mainly ex-servicemen - to survive  and now they need help to survive themselves.  MARK WRITES: One donation stands out of course. £5000 from Mark Jardine. Unbelievable generosity. I am pretty sure Mark won't want me to write much about this. He's not that kind of guy. Well, tough. Mark is a funeral director and all too often over the last thirteen years he has buried clients of ours. Average age? Maybe thirty. How? The usual. Drug overdoses. Or the gradual physical disintegration Class A's bring to the party. Or the slow inexorable drip, drip poisoning that is alcoholism. Or suicide when life has just gotten way too dark. Or the sharp end of the violence that stalks to streets of addiction. When young people die from drink,...

So picture this, sensation seekers. At a specified time on Monday, I will be hunched over my laptop fielding a million calls from slavering punters desperate to know the nuts and bolts of historical fiction-writing. In actual fact, I am due to take part in an online forum organised by my e-book publishers Endeavour Press. Historical books are a substantial part of their trade, and a substantial part of my output. My first book when I moved from children to adults was called A Fine Boy for Killing, set in the British Navy in the second half of the eighteenth century. My latest effort, which I am only halfway through, is the third in my series of novellas based on the life of Nelson. In between, there have been further delvings into times past (should that be passed, I wonder?), one of which, Death Order, uses the mystery flight of Rudolf Hess as its basis. I'm not a great believer in conspiracy theories, but some of them are just too enticing. My last novella, Napoleon:...

Huge jollities over poor old Rudy. The weekend when Endeavour Books put Death Order up for free, the Independent did a huge story headlined Adolf Hitler's Nazi deputy Rudolf Hess ‘murdered by British agents’ to stop him spilling wartime secrets - which is the nub of the novel. Within hours the Daily Mail had lifted the Indy’s story, and fully credited their source, which in modern journalism terms might be something of a first! They also added a further twist: Nazi Rudolf Hess was 'murdered by British agents in prison to stop him revealing war secrets but Scotland Yard was told NOT to investigate' Both papers named the Scotland Yard detective who undertook the enquiries – Detective Chief Superintendent Howard Jones – and also revealed that his investigation had been abruptly terminated on the orders of the DPP! They also named the British Army surgeon, Dr Hugh Thomas, who said the medical evidence proved that the prisoner who died in Spandau could not hav...

I’ve never been much of a fan of conspiracy theories, but, to coin a phrase, I know a man who is. But I have always been a fascinated observer of how people in power lie and cheat, and how rationality bleeds away from the most dangerous and difficult human problems. We all know that war has no winners, we all know that wars will never end. And now, thanks to the wonders of ebookery, I’ve been able to revisit possibly my favourite wartime thriller. The conspiracy theory in question has been around for a long, long time, and it will not go away. It is about an event so bizarre that the truth will never, obviously, be known. That’s the beauty of the animal. You don’t have study philosophy very long to hit the sixty four thousand dollar question. What is truth? Consider this. My book, Death Orders, which will hit the cyber world in the next couple of weeks via Endeavour Press, is about the supposed death of a man who supposedly flew to England in a Messerschmitt in...