News Archive

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.