Authors Electric

"Did she think I'd keep a corpse under my sofa?" The e – edition of The Adventures of Margery Allingham, published February 1 st 2013, is my third version of a book first published in 1991 as Margery Allingham: a Biography by Julia Thorogood. I'll apologise at once for the confusion of surnames. I married in my early 20s and did the conventional thing of changing my surname to my husband's.  Why? Heaven knows! I can still remember the shocked rush of emotion as I set off for the church all dolled up in my wedding dress and my brother said “Well, goodbye then, Julia Jones.” It was a bit late then to say hey! Whoa! Stop! What am I doing, messing about with my identity? The marriage didn't last but I had three extraordinarily lovable children and it felt like solidarity for us all to keep the same family name. I persisted in this even when I had a new partner and two more children, with different surnames. It wasn't until the little ones were abou...

In memoriam HMS Bounty, Claudene Christian, Robin Walbridge, Dave Harris, Dick Cronin, Cassandra Jardine, Tom Carter, Richard Morris, Patricia Moran HMS Bounty, caught by Hurricane Sandy My family and the Mayan calender tell me that the world is going to end at this winter's solstice so perhaps it's time to say some farewells. The ship was HMS Bounty , built in Nova Scotia in 1960 for the film starring Marlon Brando. I wish I could describe the thrill it was in the summer of 2011 when I received a message from Doug Faunt, a deckhand on the Bounty , telling me that he was reading The Salt-Stained Book, volume one of the Strong Winds tri logy .  I met Doug later when he took some time away from the Bounty and visited Peter Duck . He was one of the first people to convince me that it was worth publishing the Strong Winds trilogy in electronic format so the stories would pack easily into a sailor's kitbag. Thank you for that advice, Doug. Doug and I kept i...