News
6.11.07. The eagle-eyed Mike Ripley, he of the excellent Angel books ( the latest, Angel's Share, sees the character in fine fettle) and rip-snorting historical novels, such as The Legend of Hereward the Wake has 'outed' me. In his Getting Away With Murder column in Shots (www. www.shotsmag.co.uk) he reveals that there is a scene in Empire of Sand lifted from The Professionals (Burt Lancaster, Woody Strode etc). As The Ripster likes to pepper his historical novels with lines of dialogue from The Magnificent Seven, I hope he realises its a hidden homage. And no, I'm not saying what it is.
ALSO GUY BARKER'S THE AMADEUS PROJECT CD featuring dZf is fifth in the GQ (December issue) 100 Best Things . FIFTH. Above some very gorgeous women, too.
10.7.07. Just back from San Diego, where THE AMADEUS PROJECT, the Guy Barker album with dZf as one of the two discs, was launched to the Mainly Mozart crowd. It was Mr Barker playing with the remarkable, Cabernet-loving and keyboard-bothering Roger Kellaway (Google him; he played on Oliver Nelson's Blues and The Abstract Truth as well as scores of other great projects and most recently he has been asked by Tony Bennett to be his MD). Anyway, they played a tune then Guy and I did a Smothers Brothers routine and played extracts from the CD and he and Roger did another three pieces. It seemed to go down very well. It might have gone to our heads had we not met a Liverpudlian waitress in the restaurant afterwards who, when Guy chided her gently for neglecting to bring his wine, said: 'It's not all about you lot, you know.' Indeed. And a bit a of Scouse rudeness was just what we needed after a week of 'Hi, my name's Tom, I'll be your server tonight. Can I just explain the specials..?'
This Friday (October 19) at 9.45pm on Radio 3 Michael Brandon should be reading a new short story written by me, in the same vein as dZf, on THE VERB, the spoken word/performance programme. It's a 'false memoir', which sort of explains how I began writing, but Frank Sinatra is in there somewhere.
PLUS meanwhile, back in the day job, DYING DAY out now in paperback. Plus I shall be at the GUILDFORD BOOK FESTIVAL at 10am on Saturday October 20, see
www.guildfordbookfestival.co.uk.
28.9.07. Proofs, maps and cover all done for EMPIRE OF SAND, the Lawrence of Arabia novel. It is due as a £10 hardback in April '08, although an export edition will be out in January or February, available at airports and the like. It feels like the start of a new chapter for the novels. It is possible that Dying Day was a prophetic title and that I will be leaving WW2 to others for a while. After all, there are six in the series and there is only so many times you can bear to explain what SOE stands for.
Meanwhile dZf, the mangling of Mozart's Magic Flute, is ready for release at the beginning of October. Produced by Guy Barker and Steve Price, it sounds amazing, far beefier and more complex than the live version the BBC put out (fine though that was). It is a double CD, the other being more of Guy's music, but without my script cluttering it up. There will be tour dates and perhaps an item on THE VERB Radio 4's programme about language, literature, poetry and performance presented by the poet Ian McMillan and another Radio 3 broadcast, with Guy playing the non-dZf music.
12.07.07. I have a comment piece in the Guardian today on Sebastian Faulks as the choice to continue the James Bond character. See
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/robert_ryan/2007/07/shaken_not_stirred.html.
I'm looking forward to it. I re-read some of the books recently and found I preferred the short stories. Some of the novels feel 'padded': that golf game in Goldfinger seems to happen in real time.
25.6.07. I think the cat is out of the bag about the next book, because a reader sent me an e-mail asking about it. (He might have picked it up from the advanced publicity for Guildford Book Festival, where I am appearing on October 20). OK, so it is called EMPIRE OF SAND and it is a novel about Lawrence of Arabia. It doesn't, however, cover the same period as the famous David Lean film, moving from 1917 in Plalestine, back to 1915 Cairo, then Persia and forward again to Palestine. It is, therefore, more of a prequel to the movie, bracketed by the Arab Revolt. It is due out in April 2008.
18.6.07. A belated but very welcome review in The Sunday Times For Dying Day: The novel maintains the high standards of Ryan’s historical sequence, with memorable characters (some reappearing), fine set-piece scenes and a gritty realism in its use of period colour.
4.6.07. Not much book news, but the dZf jazz bandwagon rolls on, after a series of exhilarating and exhausting nights at Ronnie Scott's (I got to introduce the band and almost made it to the stage, but there were too many people up there; so near, so far) with a new tour in late November, early December plus the album has been recorded. It will be a twin CD, with one of them being dZf in its entirety, with Michael Brandon narrating again, the other a selection of pieces by Guy inspired by Mozart. It's not mixed yet, but it sounds what our American friends would call awesome.
8.5.07. Guy Barker's dZf had two outings last weekend. Friday was in the intimate setting of Wakefield Jazz, two hundred people in a sports club. What it lacked in staging it made up for in atmosphere and enthusiasm. Standing ovations were given for both halves. Following that, Michael Brandon and I re-wrote the libretto and the new version debuted at Norwich on Saturday. The sound was fantastic, the band played a blistering set and the tweaked version works even better. The piece is being recorded at Angel Studios over the next week. Guy won Best British Trumpeter last night at the Ronnie Scott's Jazz Awards and plays the club on the 10th, 11th and 12th of May, with dZf being performed for the first set on the last two nights. Then, maybe, I can get back to writing books.
14.3.07. Nice review for Copper Kiss in Shots magazine (www.shotsmagazine.co.uk) :
Maverick FBI Agent Vince Piper is back. This latest hugely enjoyable thriller from Tom Neale sees him at the centre of a plot involving hired assassins, high class escorts, a daring diamond robbery and a billionaire with a radical approach to cleaning up politics.
Travelling from the US to the wilds of Norfolk via the London the book moves along at a breathless pace. The sharp and often very funny dialogue crackles off the page and every chapter; it seems sees Piper and his companions escape from death by the skin of their collective teeth at least once.
The whole thing is, of course, wildly improbable and the most splendid fun, not least because Neale manages to find enough humanity in his main character to make him more than just another bullet proof hero.
Copper Kiss is a novel that is crying out to be adapted for the big screen. When it is I suspect that, unlike many recent Hollywood thrillers, the film will be worth seeing even if you have already read the book.
credited: Adam Colclough
26.2.07. Anyone who enjoyed Early One Morning is recommended to seek out The Grand Prix Saboteurs by Joe Saward (Morienval Press), which tells the real story of the racing drivers who joined SOE.
12.2.07. An album featuring dZf and other music will be released by Guy in November and there will be a short tour to promote it.
14.1.07. The Guy Barker Mozart-inspired dZf with story by me looks as if it will have a life beyond Radio 3. It is to be performed in May in Wakefield (4th), at the Norwich Festival (5th) and some of it will feature when Guy does his three nights at Ronnie Scott's in Soho (10th, 11th and 12th May). This will be followed by a recording session for an album. Wakefield and Norwich will definitely feature Michael Brandon, who did such a great job with the New York/Brooklyn accent that I envisaged it being spoken in because, well, he's a New Yorker from Brooklyn.
2.1.07. Happy New Year. Not sure where the last few months went. I have been finishing the next Robert Ryan book, as yet untitled, which moves back to WW1. I am not abandoning WW2, as there are some side projects which make use of historical material, but I think there won't be another in the main series for quite some time: Dying Day (out in March) seems to be a prophetic title, as it probably brings the series that started with Early One Morning to a close.
17.10.06. First run-through of dZf with Michael Brandon of what has become Mozart's lost pulp-jazz opera. It is a monster...but in a nice way.
30.10.06. Michael Brandon, of Dempsey and Makepiece and Jerry Springer, is to narrate the text of dZf.
10.10.06. Earlier this year, along with producer John Goldschmidt, I was in talks with the BBC to produce a serial to run in the Dr Who slot (ie the family Saturday evening audience). Its premise was that certain kids, at adolesecnce, acquire the power to spot aliens who walk among us. This skill lasts as long as puberty and thsoe that possess it are recruited by a sinsiter qasi-govermental agency. In the end, what with Torchwood and another Dr Who spin-off (since shelved), they decided they had a little too much SF (hence Robin Hood). I didn?t write any scripts, just proposals, episode and character outlines and a novella, with illustrations by Gary Cook of the Sunday Times. Rather than have it clog up my hard drive, the novella will soon be available as a free pdf download on this site.
26.9.06. Guy Barker's Mozart piece, dZf, with a script by me, is due to be recorded on November 18 at Maida Vale studios. See www.serious.org.uk. Broadscast dates to tbc.
4.9.06. Maps and final corrections are done for Dying Day, the new Robert Ryan novel due March 2007. It is a sequel of sorts to The Last Sunrise, in that several characters reappear, but really it is a stand-alone story of the Berlin Airlift with a flashback to a wartime SOE operation that went gruesomely wrong. Again, based on a true story, the inspiration being John Debenham-Taylor, who told me his tales of being an SIS operative running agents over the border into the East in the late 1940s.
19.8.06. To Chiswick, where I heard the first music from dZf, a new collaboration with trumpeter Guy Barker. It is amazingly intricate, full of complex playing and lovely themes. A few years back, Guy wrote a tune called Underdogs, based on my first novel. It is on his album Soundtrack - think Mingus scoring a ?60s cop show. The new work is an hour long reinterpretation of Mozart?s The Magic Flute. My job was to take the mad, masonic storyline and reinvent it as a vehicle for a piece that, one day, will include not only a jazz orchestra, but dancers, too. It is now a story of pimps, good time girls, voodoo, impossible trumpet playing and seedy jazz clubs. I am sure Wolfie would have approved. It is being recorded for BBC Radio (so, no dancers) with a guest narrator (it?s too soon to risk saying who is in the frame) in November as part of the London Jazz Festival and will be broadcast on Radio 3.
Guy?s wife Davina, , incidentally, provided the Shamanistic and reincarnation references for the Tom Neale books Steel Rain and Copper Kiss.
10.8.06. Aborted summer holidays in Italy, thanks to Heathrow terror alerts. I was intending to visit Lake Bolzano, where the Liberator featured in After Midnight is believed to be lying. It will have to wait until next year now.
8.8.06. I got to interview Alan Trustman for a specialist polo magazine. No, I don?t play polo, but the magazine needed a long caption to go with a photograph of Steve McQueen in Thomas Crown Affair, when he played at the Myopia Hunt Club in Massachusetts (so called because all the founders wore glasses. I met Alan a few years back when I was talking at normal volume (honest) in a too-hushed restaurant and he heard me mention Pierce Brosnan. He came over and asked if I knew Pierce. No, I admitted, do you? Well, he explained, he wrote the original Thomas Crown Affair and had a hand in the remake. He then introduced me to his wife Michelle, who is cartoon editor of Playboy. They were and are a fantastically entertaining couple. Sample quote from the interview: ?McQueen used to say: "Alan Trustman knows me." He was right. I did. Among other things, no sentences of more than five words.� He couldn't remember more than five words. Later, he chased the Bullitt script, bought it and insisted I rewrite it for him.�So I did.? Now you now why Steve McQueen came across as laconic : short sentences.
10.5.06. I get to play Ian Fleming at last. Well, almost. Penguin Books asked me to write an intro for the new edition of Octopussy/Living daylights. Not the strongest in the series, but who could turn down writing about Bond and how to make the perfect scrambled eggs a la 007?
1.5.06. I received an invitation to be an after-dinner speaker at a travel event. It reminded me of earlier this year when I did the same for the British Berlin Airlift Association. I had been researching the next novel Dying Day (due 2007), set in Berlin in 1948, and was helped out by considerably by Sqn Leader Frank Stilwell and, especially, Bill Campbell. I went along to do an after-dinner talk about the reasons for writing a fiction about their astonishing undertaking. Bill had put up a poster advertising my talk with the hard-hitting sell-line: ?might be quite interesting?. He showed it to me and then said ?See you after dinner?. Only then did it hit me that being the after-dinner speaker did not involve actually getting the dinner. I dined in the bar on a club sandwich while the BBAA tucked in. Still, they came along afterwards, listened politely, grilled me lightly and in the end I think it was ?quite interesting? for all of us.
