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My Books
If you are a reader and would like to get in touch, leave a review or suggestion, or ask a burning question about one of my stories; here is the place. I enjoy interacting with my readers and will do my best to get back to everyone.
My Books
If you are a reader and would like to get in touch, leave a review or suggestion, or ask a burning question about one of my stories; here is the place. I enjoy interacting with my readers and will do my best to get back to everyone.
Fiction
The Anthony Standen Adventures
Book 1:
The Spy who Sank
the Armada
Penniless and a disappointment to his father, Anthony is flung into the Eighty Years’ War, spying for the queen who exiled him, against the queen who knighted him…
Book 2:
Fire and
Earth
Priests are being burnt in their churches. Pope Paul hires two old enemies to track down the killer. Their journey leads them to Galileo and his students, but finding the killer leads them to another. They can’t deal with this…
Book 3:
The Suggested
Assassin
How could Anthony and Maria possibly have known that taking the new French ambassador and his wife to his posting in Tunis, aboard their new yacht, would lead to this. The set of circumstances that…
Book 4:
The Called to
Account
It is 1612. Maria and Antonio set off to the Frankfurt fair to find a buyer for their wine, and expand their vineyard. They find a buyer, and Maria finds an admirer. When they visit the man preparing their bill of exchange…
What Inspired the Series
I first met Sir Anthony Standen in George Malcolm Thomson’s biography of Sir Francis Drake. “The time had come when Walsingham was no longer satisfied with news that came to him at second-hand, whether from Santa Cruz’s kitchen or from the Governor of Guernsey’s reports of the gossip on Breton ships or in Rouen taverns. He needed an accurate and detailed stream of information about the number of Philip’s ships, their tonnage, the sailors who would man them and the soldiers they would carry. Thanks above all to Standen, he got what he wanted.”
Standen is a family name so I became intrigued by this potential ancestor, an Elizabethan spy. I read his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and was captivated, but I kept asking myself why did he do that, and how did he do that?
I visited the British Library to read accounts by Venetian diplomats concerning Standen. I read Daphne Du Maurier’s Golden Lads, in which Standen is a minor character. I read documents from the archives of the Duke of Tuscany, for whom Standen worked for a time, and then I started to write. My book, The Spy who Sank the Armada, answers my two questions, but is not quite a biography. It is true to everything we know about Standen and the history of the period, but the why and the how are my creation. It is an Elizabethan spy novel and a quest story.The novel ends in Rome, where I am left with characters who I feel must continue their adventures through a series of historical crime stories.
Some months after completing The Spy who Sank the Armada, I completed my quest on Ancestry, and discovered that Sir Anthony Standen was my 10th great grand-uncle.
Something Hidden
An Anthology
My short story, There Must be More, closes this anthology of dark short stories.
Non-fiction
I think the most exciting day of my writing career so far, is when Jonathan Norman of Gower publishing rang to tell me that the University of Toronto had bought 120 copies.
Project Sponsorship
An Essential Guide for Those Sponsoring
Projects Within Their Organizations
The role of project sponsor is critical in large projects during the development of the business case, for governance and assurance and as the person who decides that the project should…
Interact with me
If you are a reader and would like to get in touch, leave a review or suggestion, or ask a burning question about one of my stories; here is the place. I enjoy interacting with my readers and will do my best to get back to everyone.
Interact with me
If you are a reader and would like to get in touch, leave a review or suggestion, or ask a burning question about one of my stories; here is the place. I enjoy interacting with my readers and will do my best to get back to everyone.