White Lies - Off To The Editor

Well, White Lies, the 11th Spider Shepherd novel, is off to the line editor.  My editor at Hodder and Stoughton, Oliver Johnson, who also edits John Grisham in the UK, gave me his input and there wasn't much to do - about three hours' worth of rewriting.  Three hours?  Yup, that's how long it took to get from the first draft to the final draft.

I always smile when I hear writers talk about the weeks they spend polishing and rewriting their books.  I've never worked like that.  I rewrite as I go along, so if I write a paragraph that I'm not 100 per cent happy with, I delete it.  If I'm not happy with a description I change it, and I rewrite all my dialogue as I go along, after reading it out loud. Generally my first drafts are pretty much complete. Rarely do I have to make any changes to the structure of the plot, for instance.

My journalistic background is a big help. When you work on newspapers like The Times and The Daly Mail, the news desk expects you to deliver your copy on time and ready to go. There isn't time to edit and polish, a reporter who doesn't get it right the first time won't last long. When you deliver a story to a national newspaper the facts need to be right and the writing has to flow. Yes there are sub-editors, but if your copy isn't good enough they will soon let you know.  I always prided myself on being fast and accurate when I was a reporter, and that has carried over to my fiction writing.

Writing shouldn't be like pulling teeth, and getting your work ready for publication needn't be a struggle.  Some writers say that once the first draft is done, the hard work really begins. And I get what they mean, I just think it's a very wasteful way of writing. I know some writers who throw away half of what they've written between the first draft and the second draft, and another big chunk between the second and third draft. That seems to me to be very inefficient. Far better to maintain quality control as you work and if you see something you're not completely happy with, don't be afraid to use the delete button.  I always think it's far better to produce 200 words that are close to perfect than 2,000 words that are going to require hours of rewriting. Having said that, as a writer you have to choose what works best for you.

So what's next for me?  I have another Spider Shepherd short story I want to write, and a couple of Jack Nightingale short stories. I already have a rough plot for the 12th Spider Shepherd book.  But I also have a really neat idea for a totally different sort of thriller, one that I'm pretty sure hasn't been done before. I'm keeping that one close to my chest, but I've already started on the research and I'm pretty sure it's going to be amazing!

The New Spider Shepherd Short Story

I've just self-published the new Spider Shepherd short story. It's called Narrow Escape and is set at the time Spider was on SAS Selection - in particular on the Escape and Evasion part of the course. It's generally regarded as the toughest part of the SAS Selection process, but as Spider progresses through it he realises that all is not as it should be, and that his life is truly on the line.

You can buy Narrow Escape BY CLICKING HERE

I have another Spider Shepherd short story planned - I shall keep you posted! It will be the ninth at which point I hope to publish them in a paperback. The series of short stories take Spider from his time on SAS selection, through missions in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, and end with the episode where he got shot.  I had great fun writing them and will probably do more in the future!  Spider was in Sarajevo before he joined the SAS and I think there is a good story to be told about his time in the former Yugoslavia. We'll see!

The 11th Spider Shepherd book

Whew, I've just finished writing White Lies - the 11th Spider Shepherd novel. It came in at about 108,000 words, which is about 400 pages and a good length for a thriller.

I had a blast writing it and don't think it will need much in the way of editing.  We'll see!

Unusually, the cover isn't ready. Publication is set for the first week in August so I'm expecting the cover sooner rather than later!

In the meantime, I'm working on two more Spider Shepherd short stories - Narrow Escape and Personal Protection. Watch this space!

Thanks To The Saint!

The 32nd Saint book will be re-published later this month by Mulholland Books - Thanks To The Saint. It's a collection of Saint short stories written by the great Leslie Charteris and edited by Ian Dickerson - and has an introduction by my good self! You can pre-order the paperback  BY CLICKING HERE

As I explain in the introduction, I've always been a huge fan of the Saint. This is what I wrote:

Like most young readers back in the Sixties and Seventies, I was introduced to The Saint through TV – in my case the black and white show starring the single eyebrow-raising pre-Bond Roger Moore and his very cool white Volvo.

I bought my first second hand Saint book from Altrincham market in South Manchester – The Saint Versus Scotland Yard. I was eight, and I think I was simply too young for The Saint. I made several stabs at reading it but couldn’t get beyond a few pages. The books are, after all, for adults.  But back then the choice was either the likes of Enid Blyton or full-blown adult books. There were no wizard schools or junior James Bonds, no lovelorn vampires dating High School girls, there were kids books and there were adult books; the so-called YA (young adult) market had yet to be created.

I went back to Charteris two years later when I was ten and it all clicked into place. I was hooked. Over the next year I went to Altrincham market every weekend and would exchange a handful of Superman and Batman comics from my treasured collection. Now financially I almost certainly did swap the family cow for a handful of beans. The second-hand books have long since gone and the comics have probably increased in value a hundred fold, but I’ve never regretted the trade.

One of the reasons I love Thanks To The Saint is that it was written in 1956 – the year that I was born. Whenever I pick up my copy and see that date, I feel a connection – as I came kicking and screaming into the world, Leslie Charteris was celebrating finishing his latest book and planning the next one. And I love the fact that it’s a collection of short stories. It’s an oft-repeated fact in the publishing business that collections of short stories don’t sell as well as novels. But as a youngster I always preferred the short stories because I could read a complete story before bedtime, and yes it was the cliché of using a torch under the covers so that my parents wouldn’t know that I was still awake.

Leslie Charteris took me to a world I never knew existed, thought to be honest it’s a world that probably never did exist. I didn’t just want to read about the Saint or watch the TV show -  I wanted to BE the Saint. More than anything. Seriously. I wanted to travel the world and have adventures. I remember designing a stickman logo based on my initials and stamping it on all my books. And as I read my way through all the stories, I tried to work out how I could become The Saint.

And therein lies the problem – the lack of a backstory. I could never work out how Simon Templar became The Saint.  Did he go to university? Did he ever have a real job? Where did acquire his criminal skills that came in so useful when he was being shot at or chased or having to use his fists to defend himself. And - more importantly to the young me in Manchester who rarely had two pennies to rub together - where did Simon Templar get his money from?  How did he fund his jet-setting lifestyle?

I never found out, of course. There isn’t much of a backstory in the novels. The only attempt made to explain The Saint’s beginnings came in the awful Val Kilmer movie of the same name, but that can safely be ignored.

The Saint came from nowhere, which was very frustrating for the pre-teen me that was trying to map out his own life. The Saint never had a paper round, never stacked shelves in a supermarket, never worked in a garage or picked potatoes on a farm. Deciding what subject to study at university was a struggle – what would The Saint have studied? Safecracking, fisticuffs and seducing beautiful women wasn’t an option. I settled for Biochemistry.

Years later I realized that not only didn’t The Saint exist, he couldn’t exist. He was as fictional as Harry Potter and Hogwarts. Anyone poking fun at the police in the way that Simon Templar does would be fitted up and behind bars quicker than you could say ‘Police And Criminal Evidence Act’.  And you can’t steal from gangsters, or make them look stupid. Gangsters kill people and intimidate witnesses and often get away with it.

Most of The Saint books that I read in the Sixties and Seventies had been written many years earlier – some of them in the Thirties. But they didn’t seem dated then and the stories work just as well now.

Take this from Thanks To The Saint -   "Don't ever get one thing wrong," he said. "I never robbed anyone who wasn't a thief or a blackguard, although they might have been clever enough to stay within the law. I've killed people too, but never anyone that the world wasn't a better place without. Sometimes people seem to forget it, since I got to be too well known and had to give up some of the simple methods I used to get away with when I was more anonymous, but my name used to stand for a kind of justice, and I haven't changed."

That is such a cool paragraph, a paragraph that could slot into the latest Jack Reacher novel - or indeed any of my thrillers – and not look out of place.

Some things date, of course. I’m not sure if I’d get away with using a word like “blackguard”.  Cars don’t have running boards any more. The Saint fights like an English gentleman, with his fists and never hitting a man when he was down.  Simon Templar beds women with gleeful abandon with no thought of reaching for a condom. He’s from a time without mobile phones, DNA tests or CCTV.

I love the fact that Simon Templar smokes – and enjoys smoking. One of my continuing characters – Jack Nightingale – is a big fan of cigarettes and in many ways that’s a homage to The Saint. I vividly remember how The Saint escaped poisonous gas in a cellar by filling a wine bottle with soil and breathing through it. Would it work? My scientific training says probably not but I have tucked the information away just in case I ever find myself trapped in a basement full of poisonous gas.

Looking back at my life so far, I just realized that in many ways I did get to get the Saint’s life. I work when I want to work, and to be honest writing thrillers isn’t a hardship. I can pretty much fly into any major city and call up someone I know and take them to dinner. I’ve fought in karate tournaments and crawled through the tunnels used by the VC outside Saigon.  I drink with cops and villains and spies and movie stars. I’ve been threatened by the police in five countries and been slammed against a nightclub wall by a major drugs dealer who thought I was asking him too many questions. I can sail a boat and fly a plane (and have jumped out of a few.) I can scuba dive and I’ve fired guns and thrown the odd hand grenade. I’ve sailed halfway around the world on a cargo ship for no other reason than I wanted to. I’ve climbed into cars with strangers and driven off to bars that I’ve never heard off. I’ve been threatened by gangsters and I’ve had a gun pointed at me and a broken glass thrust at my throat. In many ways I’ve had the life I’ve had because of Leslie Charteris and the books that he wrote. Admittedly I’ve never sat alone in a casino and been approached by a beautiful woman who needed my help but hey, there’s still time.

The New Inspector Zhang Short Story

I have just published the latest Inspector Zhang short story - Inspector Zhang and the Island of the Dead.

It's set on the island of Sentosa, which I've visited several times. It's full of fun places, including the Universal Studious.   It's another locked room mystery, where Inspector Zhang is called to a murder scene where a doctor has been stabbed in a locked room. I had great fun writing it, though I have been struggling with the flu for the past couple of days.  Even dosed up on Lemsip Max Cold and Flu tablets I was still able to work!

You can buy Inspector Zhang and the Island of the Dead for the Kindle in the UK - HERE

And you can buy it on the Kindle in the US - HERE

Spider Shepherd Short Stories

The four Spider Shepherd short stories that I published on Amazon and Smashwords are doing amazingly well - all four are in the Top 10 of the War category in the Kindle store in the UK.

If you want too read them, it's probably best to start with Natural Selection which explains how Shepherd got his nickname during the jungle phase of SAS selection.


You can buy it in the US Kindle store BY CLICKING HERE

And in the UK Kindle store BY CLICKING HERE

At present I'm working on the brand new full-length Spider Shepherd novel, the 11th, which will probably be called White Knight. Hopefully it'll be on the shelves in the summer of next year!

Rough Diamonds - the new Spider Shepherd SAS short story

I have just put a new Spider Shepherd SAS short story on the Kindle and Smashwords. The story is Rough Diamonds, an action-packed tale drawn from Spider's SAS days in war-torn Sierra Leone.

I had great fun writing it - the SAS stories give me a chance to show where Spider came from and what made him the man he is. It also gives me a chance to introduce other characters who will reappear in later books.  There is a terrific MI6 operative - Jonathan Parker - in Rough Diamonds and he will be in the next Spider novel.

You can buy Rough Diamonds in the UK - HERE

And in the US - HERE

I'm going to take a short break from writing Spider Shepherd short stories as I have to start work on the new Spider Shepherd full length novel.  Though I am working on a Jack Nightingale short story as we speak!