J D Davies - Historian and Author

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Enter the Lion

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Cover of the UK edition of The Lion of Midnight
Cover of the UK edition of The Lion of Midnight

A short blog this week, but one that marks a big event – The Lion of Midnight, fourth of the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’, is due to be published in the UK on 23 April! You can read the first chapter on my website.

Lion marks a bit of a departure from the previous books in the series, both in its setting and its subject matter. Most of the action takes place in Sweden, or the waters off the Atlantic coast of Sweden, during the early months of 1666. The second Anglo-Dutch war war is at a critical stage – France has declared war on the side of the Dutch, the combined kingdom of Denmark-Norway is about to do so. Meanwhile, a fleet of mast ships lies ice-bound in Gothenburg harbour, waiting for a thaw and an escort so it can bring back its vital cargo; for without fresh supplies of masts, the British fleet’s ability to continue the war will be finite. But what Matthew Quinton expects to be a straightforward piece of convoy escort duty becomes something much darker. What is the true mission of his mysterious passenger, Lord Conisbrough? Why does Matthew become involved in a shadowy power struggle within the Swedish government? Above all, how will he respond to the presence in Gothenburg of one of the most notorious of the regicides, the men who signed the death warrant of King Charles I? As he encounters enemies old and new, together with some unexpected allies, Matthew struggles to carry out his duty while confronting some powerful demons from his and his family’s past.

Carving of King Charles X (1654-60) from the wreck of the Kronan: Lansmuseum, Kalmar

So why this particular setting? For one thing, I’d long been interested in Sweden’s ‘Golden Age’, from roughly 1610 to 1721, when the country was one of the greatest powers in Europe. I actually taught it to A-level students for many years – an eccentric choice, some might say, but most of them loved it, given the fascinating personalities and themes they were dealing with (not to mention the fact that the questions in the final exam were invariably predictable – either ‘why did Sweden rise?’ or ‘why did it decline?’ – and led to a pretty high percentage of each cohort achieving excellent grades).

As I write in the historical note to The Lion of Midnight,

The campaigns of her warrior king Gustavus II Adolphus, der Löwe von Mitternacht to his German enemies, won her vast new territories, despite her tiny population and limited natural resources. Although Gustavus’s intervention in the Thirty Years War was ended abruptly by his death during the battle of Lutzen in 1632, his generals continued to win triumph after triumph in the name of his daughter Christina, who succeeded to the throne at the age of five, and later under her warrior cousin…

Large tracts of territory in Scandinavia and northern Germany were conquered, the new city of Gothenburg was established as a ‘window to the west’, and the country also built up a formidable navy. I’d been to Stockholm several times to see the remarkable Vasa, but to research Lion, in February 2011 I spent a week in Kalmar and Gothenburg (aka Göteborg). The former houses the astonishing range of exhibits recovered from the wreck of the Kronan, which sank in 1676; at the time, she was one of the largest warships in the world, the brainchild of the English shipwright Francis Sheldon. I was also really impressed by the museums in Gothenburg, notably the Maritime Museum and the City Museum; the latter has a vast model of the city as it was at pretty much exactly the time I’ve written about in Lion!

Model of mid-17th century Gothenburg: City Museum
Model of mid-17th century Gothenburg: City Museum

So I hope readers will enjoy The Lion of Midnight, which explores a relatively little known aspect of naval history, visits a fascinating foreign land at the height of its short-lived greatness, and sees the hero face challenges very different to any he has encountered before.

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When this post goes live, I’ll actually be hacking my way down the M5 to Devon for a few days of research fieldwork connected to the next Quinton book and some ongoing non-fiction projects. (Those of you who know the subject of ‘Quinton 5’ from my previous posts and the website might be wondering why on earth a story focusing on the Four Days Battle of 1666 needs fieldwork in Devon, of all places. Watch this space, or better still, read the book in about a year’s time!) So next week, I hope to be blogging about some of the places I’ll have been to.

Merry Christmas, Restoration Navy Style

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Henry Teonge, a Warwickshire clergyman, was fifty-five when he first went to sea as a naval chaplain, presumably forced into the job by the extent of his debts. In 1675 he joined the Fourth Rate Assistance, commanded by William Houlding, which was despatched to the Mediterranean as part of Sir John Narbrough’s fleet, operating against the corsairs of Tripoli. Teonge kept a lively diary of his time aboard the ship, and during his subsequent service on the Bristol and Royal Oak. This is one of the best contemporary sources for the nature of shipboard life in the Restoration navy, and I’ve used it often during my research for the Quinton books. For example, several of the ‘menus’ for officers’ meals in Gentleman Captain were taken straight from Teonge, while my description of Matthew Quinton’s Christmas at sea aboard the Seraph in The Mountain of Gold was based closely on the following passage in the diary – his account of Christmas 1675 aboard the Assistance, near Crete.

24 Very rough today. No land yet. Our decks are washed for Christmas.

25 Christmas Day we keep thus. At 4 in the morning our trumpeters all do flat their trumpets and begin at our Captain’s cabin, and thence to all the officers and gentlemen’s cabins; playing a levite at each cabin door, and bidding good morrow, wishing a Merry Christmas. After they go to their station, viz. on the poop, and sound three levites in honour of the morning. At 10 we go to prayers and sermon ; text, Zacc. ix. 9. Our Captain had all his officers and gentlemen to dinner with him, where we had excellent good fare: a rib of beef, plum puddings, mince pies, &c. and plenty of good wines of several sorts ; drank healths to the King, to our wives and friends; and ended the day with much civil mirth.

Zacchariah Chapter 9, Verse 9 reads (in the King James version that Teonge would have used) ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.’ (The first part of the verse was later used for a famous soprano solo in Handel’s Messiah.) Teonge records no specific New Year festivities, although he did write a poem as a special New Year’s present for Captain Houlding. William Houlding, a former East India Company captain, held several important commands in Charles II’s reign, including that of the London in the 1673 campaign, and died on 20 September 1682.

A NEW-YEAR’S GIFT TO OUR CAPTAIN.

ACROSTICON.

W — hen Phoebus did this morning first appear,

I — nriching with his beams our hemispheare,

L- eaving the darksome night behind him, and

L — onging to be at his meridian;

I — magine then the old-year’s out of date,

A — new one unto Jove let’s dedicate—

M— an should not be like an old almanack.

H – eavens guide you, sir, that Paul’s words may be true,

O — ld things are done away, all things are new;

U — nto the rich endowments of your mind,

L — ift up your noble courage: Fortune’s kind

D — irections bid you forwards; your Assistance

I — s beggd by Mars for th’ Trypolenes resistance-

N — ‘er man more fit bold acts to undertake,

G — od with his blessings make you fortunate.

On 6 January, Teonge recorded the hilarious festivities for Twelfth Night.

6 Very rough weather all the last night, and all this day.  We are now past Zante; had we been there this day, we had seen a great solemnity ; for this day being Twelfth Day, the Greek Bishop of Zante doth (as they call it) baptise the sea, with a great deal of ceremony; sprinkling their galleys and fishing-tackle with holy-water. But we had much mirth on board, for we had a great cake made, in which was put a bean for the king, a pea for the queen, a clove for the knave, a forked stick for the cuckold, a rag for the slut. The cake was cut into several pieces in the great cabin, and all put into a napkin, out of which every one took his piece, as out of a lottery. Then each piece is broken to see what was in it, which caused much laughter to see our lieutenant prove the cuckold, and more to see us tumble one over the other in the cabin, by reason of the rough weather. 

And with that glorious mental image of the chaplain and officers of the Assistance laughing uproariously and falling over each other (and, presumably, the great cake), I’ll wish you all the compliments of the season and a very Happy New Year!

Thanks so much to all of you for your support of this blog and my books during 2012. Gentlemen and Tarpaulins will return on Monday 7 January, and 2013 will be quite a year! I’ll be using the blog to build up to the UK publication of ‘Quinton 4’, The Lion of Midnight, and the North American publication of ‘Quinton 3’, The Blast That Tears The Skies, both in April, and then to the launch of Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales in July. There are also some other interesting irons in the fire, so please continue to watch this space!

The End

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It’s good to be back after a two week break, although ‘break’ is probably the wrong word – most of that time having been spent frantically finishing off Britannia’s Dragon, which has now gone off to the publisher! This is my fourth non-fiction historical book, so I think I’m now probably qualified to pass on some of my experiences of and reflections about the genre. Having said that, I’ve got a long way to go to catch up with the very many more prolific authors out there, notably the astonishing Jeremy Black, Professor of History at Exeter University, who’s published more than one hundred full-length books to date (not to mention countless articles). But for what they’re worth, and with apologies to Lawrence of Arabia, here are seven pillars of wisdom that I’ve garnered over the years.

1/ It’s never complete – So you’ve read all the sources, been to all the relevant archives, and covered everything? Oh no you haven’t. Sorry to sound like a panto script, but you really, really haven’t. Sod’s law will dictate that some time after the book goes to press and before it ends up in the obscurity of the ‘remaindered’ list, you’ll come across some gold-plated piece of evidence, or an entire previously unknown archive in an obscure library, that should have gone into your book. So does the inevitability of this happening mean that you should delay finishing it? No, for that way madness lies – or at least, the closest thing to madness for an author of non-fiction, namely not actually finishing the book (or even not writing it in the first place). I know several very distinguished historians who have either been working on their magnum opus for twenty or thirty years, or who never got round to writing it at all. There are considerably more than fifty shades of grey between this extreme and the other one (which is, fortuitously, Black): above all, set a reasonable timescale, cover as much as you can in that time, but then, one day, say ‘that’s it’ and declare the book finished. In reality, no book is ever truly ‘finished’ – it could be expanded, improved, have that annoying new evidence which turned up the day after publication incorporated into it, and so forth. But unless you’re lucky and get the chance of a revised second edition, the author’s equivalent of the director’s cut in film-making, your tome will be your final word on the subject, and the important thing is to get it out there, not worry about what other evidence might be lurking in the dark recesses of some archive or other. To coin a paraphrase, the cemeteries are full of the authors of unwritten books; make sure you’re not one of them.

2/ Be ruthless – Every word you’ve written is precious, every example you’ve cited is essential, every sub-theme you’ve developed is absolutely vital to the book. No, they’re not. Much of the angst that develops between authors of historical non-fiction and their publishers is due to the former’s belief that the publisher should be grateful for every single one of their 500,000 words on peasant life in Upper Silesia from 1848 to 1850 and should thus publish the whole thing with no cuts whatsoever. Remember that this is something you want people to read without losing the will to live, so after you finish the first draft, be brutal with yourself (or do what I did and move in with a veteran Fleet Street journalist and editor to whom the ruthless pruning of purple prose is as natural as breathing). Blood of Kings started out at nearly 180,000 words, but was closer to 110,000 by the time it went to the publisher. It was difficult to lose many of the 70,000 words that got culled, but it ended up as a better book; and taking the metaphorical chainsaw to your own text is much better than having a publisher’s editor do it for you.

3/ Prepare to be criticised – You’ve written the book, it’s been published, you’ve had some nice reviews on Amazon and perhaps, if you’re lucky, in one or two of the historical journals. But then you start getting the letters and emails, or the other kinds of reviews… These come on two levels, the micro and the macro. The micro criticisms tend to come from those who know a huge amount about a very tiny aspect of your subject, and who obtain a sense of delighted fulfilment from pointing out that you’ve left out fact X, or clearly didn’t know about obscure letter Y in archive Z. The macro criticisms will come from more august members of the profession, who will ‘take issue with your methodology’ (the historian’s polite euphemism for ‘you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about’) or will shoehorn you into a philosophical straitjacket that you never knew fitted you; one of the more surreal of the (fortunately very few) criticisms of Gentlemen and Tarpaulins came from an exceptionally eminent left-wing maritime historian who accused me explicitly of being a Thatcherite, which was news to me and to every ballot box I’d voted in since 1979. But all of this comes with the territory. Once you publish, you’ve put yourself out there, and simple human nature dictates that not everyone will agree with what you say. Above all, remember that no matter how much criticism you get, yours isn’t the worst book that’s ever been written. It doesn’t even come close to being the worst. As for which is the worst book ever written…now that sounds like a topic for a Twitter thread or a series of blogs.

4/ Prepare to be ripped off – Ah, you want illustrations in your book? You particularly like that picture at, say, the Imperial National Naval Maritime Warfare Archives Museum? (Names have been changed to protect the guilty.) Then you need to licence the reprographic rights. Be prepared to part with a limb or two, because the fees charged by such institutions make Mafia protection rackets or pay-offs to BBC executives look like a bunch of elderly grannies having a little flutter at their local whist drive. Moreover, the entire basis for charging such fees is morally and (probably) legally dubious – after all, in many cases the institutions concerned don’t actually hold the copyright to this material at all. So three cheers for the British Museum, which licences the items in its wonderful collection for free. Let me repeat that: free. So, for example, you could spend between £50 and £100, perhaps even more, licensing an image of a painting of Nelson from the INNMWAM, or you could get the engraving taken from the same painting from the BM website for nothing. Will your readers damn you for this? Don’t be silly, they just want to see what Nelson looks like, they won’t think any more highly of you if they knew you’d spent a lot of money to show them the original instead of a copy.

5/ Write right – History is the most wonderful, lively and exciting of all subjects, but few things depress me more than the sorts of history books which try their hardest to conceal all of that beneath layers of treacle-like prose and deliberately obscure, quasi-scientific jargon. We historians aren’t scientists, economists or sociologists, for heaven’s sake; even if you really are writing about the peasants of Upper Silesia between 1848 and 1850, don’t you owe it to them to write about their lives in the most interesting and lively way you possibly can? All of this applies even if your book is being published by some ‘distinguished’ academic publisher or other, who will pay you no advance, produce no more than three or four hundred copies of your book, and charge anyone tempted to buy it £50 or £60 for the privilege. But that, as they say, is another story…

6/ Be prepared for an emotional rollercoaster –  Many writers have described in detail the emotions that surge like the tides during the actual writing process: the flashes of inspiration, the long hours of writer’s block, the sense that it’s no good, the sense that it’s the greatest book since the Bible, the endless coffee (or Scotch, depending on one’s preference), and so forth. But having just finished Britannia’s Dragon, I’d like to focus on one specific moment in the process: the one I’m at now, namely the end. The completion of a book is always a very strange time, simultaneously a cause for celebration and also somehow slightly depressing. After all, this thing that’s had such a powerful hold over your life for so long suddenly isn’t there any more. In one sense, it feels a bit like a death in the family; on the other hand, one would hope that not too many deaths in anybody’s family would be accompanied by the overwhelming sense of relief that also accompanies the completion of a book. Which leads me on to the most important piece of advice of all to anyone who’s made it all the way through and finally typed ‘the end’ on the last page…

7/ So finally – Celebrate! You’ve just written a book, for heaven’s sake. Do you know how few people ever get to do that? At the very least, your mum will be proud of you. Plus think about just how many hours, days, months, even years, you’ve devoted to this. Doesn’t that effort deserve to have a glass or two raised in its honour? Then take a week off – longer, if you can manage it. Recharge your batteries. Reflect. Watch absolutely mindless dross on TV. Concentrate on the other things that have been pushed onto the back burner for the duration of writing the book: real life, for example. Because soon enough, something – at first no more than a germ of a glimmer of a half-formed thought – will start to grow somewhere inside your brain. This will gradually work its way to the front of your consciousness, by which time it will have a name. It will be called ‘the next book’. And so it all begins again…

Jester Minute

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All authors start somewhere. I’m not quite sure when or why I got the bug, but it was certainly very early on. My mother relates how my infants school teacher (ages 4-6) told her that she loved reading my stories: whereas a lot of the kids turned out a paragraph or two about bunnies, I’d produce some vast screed about aliens or World War Two. By the time I was seven or eight, I was writing a lot, even turning my hand to what my dad called comics but which were probably nearer in conception to graphic novels. However, these were let down by one fundamental flaw: I can’t draw to save my life, so no matter how good the storylines might have been, they were always illustrated by stick men. (Nowadays, I sometimes still draw scenes to help with visualising some aspect of a plot, but my artistic skills haven’t moved on, so they still contain stick men. Tall stick man with feathered hat = Matthew Quinton.) I was picking up influences, too. At that age I was reading voraciously – everything from the Ladybird books (I particularly remember the ones about Nelson and Charles II, which probably explains a lot, but also the one about Alfred the Great, which doesn’t) to comics. As far as the latter went, I was never a Beano or Dandy man: my staple diet was the Valiant, which contained the adventures of Captain Hurricane (an entire Waffen SS division against one man? no contest, Hurricane triumphs again!), but I was also an avid reader of The Eagle and the legendary Dan Dare, reading copies borrowed from the next door neighbour’s son, who was a lot older.

All of this might have remained unchanneled but for a lucky quirk of fate. Having spent the best part of thirty years as a teacher, principally in a public school (note to my American readers – the opposite of your public schools!), I know that there’s inevitably a tendency to remember most vividly the staff who were there for many years and who thus impacted on many generations of students. It’s obviously gratifying when former students or their parents come up and thank you for what you did for them twenty or more years ago, and even more gratifying that, far from thinking ‘I don’t want to end up like that grumpy old Welsh bloke’, quite a number of my former charges have ended up as historians or history teachers themselves. But in my case, perhaps the biggest impact on me of all wasn’t made by a teacher who’d been at Llanelli Boys’ Grammar School for decades: it was made by one who was only at the school for two years before moving on. In 1969 or 1970 a young English teacher called Peter Elliston came to the school. He taught me English, but much more importantly, he set up a school newspaper. This was named The Jester, a name chosen in a school-wide poll, and from the very beginning, it was driven and staffed almost entirely by the students. This led to some peculiar quirks: for example, the early issues contained a long running Pythonesque story about a rebellion by the much-reviled prunes that were invariably served up as pudding in the school canteen. But it also ran ‘serious’ news stories, features of all kinds, sport…indeed, it even had its own crossword. Fortunately it survived Peter Elliston’s departure: another keen young teacher, Noel Rees, took it on, and the paper went from strength to strength. I still have some copies of it, and will have to take good care of them – even the National Library of Wales considers The Jester worthy of a place in its collection!

I joined the staff of The Jester almost at once, so it became the outlet for my first ever published work, aged about thirteen. I wrote pieces about local history and warships, but as I gradually worked my way up the hierarchy, I branched out into all sorts of other areas, even writing about sport – very nearly with disastrous consequences, notably in 1974, when my prediction in print that Manchester United would be relegated led to The Jester office being besieged by a potential lynch mob composed of some of the school’s very large contingent of irate Man U fans. (Gratifyingly, though, I was right and they were wrong: the team was relegated.) I ended up as co-editor; this was in 1974-5, long before the days of desktop publishing, so each page was typed onto special stencils and then affixed to a duplicating drum filled with foul-smelling fluid. This led to a particularly memorable disaster when someone accidentally put their hand through the drum. In the best traditions of journalism, we went ahead and published anyway, leading to the production of an artistically surreal edition which had a strange blank space in the middle of each page. (If my memory serves me right, the culprit later became – and still is – an exceptionally eminent surgeon, so his manual dexterity evidently improved with age.) At that time we also had a very keen young junior sub-editor on the staff by the name of Huw Edwards; I wonder whatever became of him? Indeed, quite a number of Jester alumni eventually went into the media or became writers of various sorts. For my part, I know that I owe a huge amount to The Jester, which was probably the pivotal experience in giving me the ambition to become an author. Consequently, I certainly owe a tremendous and very belated ‘thank you’ to Peter Elliston, wherever he is!

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Next weekend I’ll be attending the Historical Novel Society conference in London, and will be speaking as part of the ‘Ships Ahoy!’ panel on Saturday morning. I’m really looking forward to meeting lots of fellow authors and enthusiasts for the genre, and will provide my take on the proceedings in next week’s blog post.


The Sailors’ (and Soldiers’) Graves

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Last week’s post about naval and maritime graves in west Wales got a very positive response, so I thought I’d return to a similar theme this time. I spent the second half of last week further north, on the shores of Cardigan Bay, dodging torrential downpours, visiting a few places of naval interest (both expected and unexpected) and doing some research in the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. As I think I’ve said before in these blogs, the latter must be one of the nicest study environments anywhere in the world – where else can you sit at your desk and look out over a glorious vista of sea, hills and a medieval castle? (My runner up would be the library of the National War Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where you can get a stunning view over Princes Street, the Scott memorial and the Firth of Forth to the hills of Fife – but only from the gents’ loo…) It turned out to be a really productive session, perhaps the best discovery being the autobiography of a Victorian seaman from Aberdare who provides some fascinating information about naval life in the 1870s and 1880s. He’ll be one of the ‘stars’ of Britannia’s Dragon!

Other ports of call included Barmouth, where I arrived during a near-monsoon; diving out of the car, I got a picture of the new memorial to local man Harold Lowe, fifth officer on the Titanic (played, appropriately, in the film by fellow Welshman Ioan Gruffydd!). Lowe was an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve during World War I and was aboard HMS Suffolk in Vladivostok in 1919, during the Russian Civil War. There’s a good account of this, and of his life as a whole, in Inger Sheil’s new biography of Lowe. The other intriguing naval memorial that I came across was in the somewhat unlikely setting of the church of St Peter ad Vincula (‘St Peter in Chains’) in Pennal, near Machynlleth. Pennal is a tiny village now, but it was once a really important place; the church was a chapel royal for the Kings of Gwynedd and then for the Princes of Wales, including Owain Glyndwr. Indeed, Glyndwr held his second parliament here and signed the ‘Pennal letter’, a document asking for recognition and support from the King of France. But on the wall of the church is a memorial to Commander Edmund Wybergh Thruston, Royal Navy, second-in-command of the cruiser HMAS Sydney when she encountered the German raider Kormoran on 20 November 1941. The Sydney won the engagement but was also lost during it, and for decades her fate was a mystery and a source of considerable debate in Australia. The wreck was finally discovered in 2008, but it was both strange and moving to discover such a poignant reminder of one of Australia’s great national tragedies so many thousands of miles from where it took place. (I was able to do some research on the Thruston family at the National Library: Captain Charles Thruston, RN, of Suffolk, who died in 1858, married the heiress of the Talgarth estate near Pennal, and Edmund was their great-grandson.)

Finally, here’s one of the places I visited on my way home: the tiny, ancient church of Pilleth, near ‘Offa’s Dyke’ and the English border. The hill behind it is Bryn Glas, and it was here, on 22 June 1402, that the Welsh army under Owain Glyndwr fought and defeated that of Edmund Mortimer. The mass grave of those who died is still marked in the churchyard. Mortimer defected to Glyndwr’s side and married his daughter, a story taken up by Shakespeare in Henry IV Part I (which coincidentally I studied for A-level and which has just been given a brilliant new treatment by the BBC, first broadcast last weekend). Shakespeare called him ‘Owen Glendower’, and that name was used twice by the Royal Navy – firstly for a frigate built in 1808, which distinguished itself in anti-slavery operations off the African coast, and secondly, without the ‘Owen’, for the training base established at Pwllheli in the second World War (perhaps better known in its later incarnation as a Butlins’ holiday camp!). Both HMS Glendowers feature prominently in Britannia’s Dragon, but the very fact the name was used at all is surely pretty remarkable, and must partly be due to his appearance as a character in Shakespeare. Maybe one of the readers of this blog can provide evidence to the contrary, but I don’t know of any instance of, say, the French or Spanish navies ever naming warships or important shore establishments after the leaders of failed Breton, Corsican, Basque or Catalan independence movements. Even the United States Navy, which has had no difficulty in naming warships Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson (albeit only once in each case, 100 years after their Civil War), has baulked at naming one after Confederate President Jefferson Davis!

Blasts from the Past

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I’ve been exploring the loft. To be exact, I’ve been exploring ‘my’ loft, i.e. the one above my workplace, ‘the Lair’. (As regular readers will know, this is a converted garage in the garden; probably the only garage in Britain with a bay window. Don’t ask, the previous owners had some very strange ideas…) The word ‘explored’ doesn’t really do justice to the nature of the operation; it’s impossible to stand upright in the loft, and as the first things that went in there after we moved in are at the far end, with more recent additions nearer the entrance, it’s very much akin to a Time Team dig, working on one’s hands and knees to remove the newer layers in order to reach the really ancient archaeology. The object of the exercise has been to get rid of the vast amounts that are surplus to requirements (farewell, 2004 bank statements) and to make space for more to go up there in the future (yes, books on medieval Scottish history used for deep background research for Blood of Kings, I’m talking about you). But I’ve been making some wonderful discoveries, becoming reacquainted with some old friends, and above all, rediscovering the evidence for the development of my writing career. For example, I’d forgotten quite how much satire I used to write at one time. I wrote quite a bit when I was at Oxford, probably reaching the pinnacle of my career as a comedy writer by penning a sketch for the 1979 Department of Educational Studies revue (Cambridge Footlights, eat your heart out). I continued to write satire during my first teaching job, in Cornwall, and still remember the po-faced reaction of senior management when one of my pieces (thankfully anonymous) fell into the wrong hands – believe me, Headmasters and their deputies don’t take kindly to having their self-importance pricked (and I say that as an ex-Deputy Head). Several of the items in question have turned up. For some reason, I decided that the school bore a certain resemblance to Colditz and thus cast the Head as the Commandant, with senior staff bellowing out orders in cod Allo Allo-style German accents; can’t think why.

However, the most exciting ‘finds’ have been the abandoned drafts of old attempts to write my first novel, and looking back through them, it’s now very easy to see why I gave up on them! They must all date from about the early 1980s to the mid-1990s: they’re all handwritten, and I abandoned that method in favour of word-processing around 1997-8. It’s impossible to date the drafts more precisely, but my hazy recollections suggest that in the early ’80s I was still convinced that I’d be the next Ian Fleming / Tom Clancy / Frederick Forsyth, writing techno-naval-global conspiracy thrillers; one in particular is  a labyrinthine plot involving Britain’s first Trident submarine, then just a sketch on a drawing board. (However, I’m quietly chuffed that I predicted one of the submarines in question would be named HMS Vengeance, probably about ten years before that name was actually allocated.) I’ve only dipped into it – the draft is quite long, maybe 20-30,000 words worth, and it now seems pretty excruciating – cardboard cutout characters including standard-issue CIA heavies, and so forth. At that time I was clearly still much more interested in the hardware than in such essentials as character development, and I was still convinced that one simply wrote ‘Chapter One’ at the top of a page and everything would flow naturally and inevitably from there; I hadn’t realised just how much time one needs to spend on plot construction, a longer and more difficult process than the actual writing itself!

At some point, though, the penny dropped and I decided to have a go at historical novels instead. Even so, there were a couple of odd detours along the way. For some reason now lost in the mists of the early 1990s, I started a couple of stories set in the 14th century.  Now, I wouldn’t say that what I know about the 14th century fits onto a postage stamp; probably more like the reasonably large books of postage stamps one gets at Christmas. Interestingly, though, one of them seems to be my first attempt to write in the first person, the method I later adopted for the Quinton series, so it clearly played a part in my development. I had a couple of stabs at Victorian-era novels and even bizarrely started a story set against the backdrop of the Welsh religious revival of the early 1900s (as if that ever stood a chance of having ‘bestseller’ stamped all over it…). Much more important, though, was my first attempt at a novel set in the Restoration navy – the real precursor of Gentleman Captain and the entire Quinton series. By now I was clearly putting a lot more thought into the preliminary development of the characters’ back stories, and the hero is – wait for it – a young gentleman captain of Charles II’s navy. What’s more, the villain is … [SPOILER ALERT FOR ANYONE WHO HASN’T READ GENTLEMAN CAPTAIN YET – DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS SENTENCE!] …a former Commonwealth officer who seems to be loyal to the Crown but is actually secretly plotting treason. But for some unaccountable reason I decided to ignore the entire milieu of the Restoration and the second Anglo-Dutch war which forms Matthew Quinton’s world, setting the story instead in 1679-80. Re-reading the story now, though, I’m quite impressed with some aspects of it; indeed, I’m not going to reveal anything more of the plot now because I think it’ll provide material for sections of future books, if not the basis of the story for something like ‘Quinton 14’!

I suppose what all of the above proves, apart from the obvious lessons about the importance of plot construction and characterisation, is the main message that aspiring novelists might learn from my experience – try, try, and try again! Oh, and tidy your loft every now and again; you never know what’s up there.

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I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post Monday; thanks to a tennis-nut friend, I’ll be on Centre Court for the first day of Wimbledon, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to write a post beforehand. Watch this space!