To have one book published is an achievement similar to having climbed a mountain, but after a while, it seems as though you are walking down a street with only a shoe on one foot.
To have two books published balances your step and the thought of stopping there can satisfy some ambition unless the insatiable desire to tell stories is too strong to stop; until—But is there ever an ‘until’ moment?
I published something similar to that—‘In My Quotes’ on Goodreads, in 2018. I think I had three, or maybe four books published by then. In 2023, my tenth novel was published.
Each book is available in all formats, including being narrated as audiobooks and available both online and in ‘bricks & mortar’ bookshops.
The book I was asked by Author’s Lounge to tell you a little about was—-What Happened in Vienna, Jack?
It started life sometime after WWII when my late father was an army intelligence officer interviewing German and Italian troops who had been captured when Italy capitulated, a few months before WWII finally ended in 1945.
From the papers I’ve seen, my Dad was part of a specialist interrogation unit, until he found himself posted to The War Department, in Whitehall, London.
A little later in his life, he was blessed with a selfish, self-opinionated teenager, me, who listened to every story he was told but did nothing about them until his father died and his son found enlightenment in the fact of there being more people in life than just himself.
In 2008, or thereabouts, I was in an incident in central London that left me incapable of work for three and a bit years. I was a Metropolitan Police detective at the time, who found myself on the wrong side of someone escaping from a diamond robbery in Hatton Garden.
To cut a very boring but long story short, I wrote a book in 2012, loosely based on one of the stories my father had told me. Within three months of that book being self-published, it was under a paid option to become a thirty-million-dollar film!
Unfortunately, after six years of being paid, that option was dropped because distribution became a problem for the production company. However, I’d had great publicity for the novel, including book signings in roughly twenty Waterstones bookshops, countrywide. All of which helped to introduce my name to a wider circle.
I had a great time whilst all of that was happening. Each weekend I was off to some Waterstones shop for a book signing and sometimes also midweek. On one event, on a Saturday in Nottingham, I was included on a ‘Crime Fiction Writers Tour’ with Lee Childs, John Connolly and two other famous people! To say I was overawed was a LARGE understatement.
What Happened In Vienna, Jack? marks the introduction of Patrick West, a young detective in London, to Jack Price, a seasoned Secret Intelligence Service operative who witnesses West shoot dead an IRA commander at the scene of an attempted armed robbery not far from where Jack Price lives, in his Soho apartment.
At the end of WWII, Jack Price is on a government assignment in Austria when he hears of a secret meeting that took place in Vienna before the start of the War. He has told only one person the full details about that meeting.
He needs someone like Patrick West to join his small group to track down any survivors of that meeting or others they may have spoken to. Jack Price needs the secret to go away, but there are others with different ideas.
Over the series of four books, named the Lies and Consequences Series, Patrick West grows in both confidence and self-esteem, so much so that by the last book of the series, A Covenant of Spies, he is promoted to a very prestigious position in the United Kingdom Intelligence Community.
I am a seventy-four years of age disabled member of The Society of Authors. I also write espionage stories that, invariably include at least one murder.
