The End of the Chase

Saturday 30th August sees the publication of THE SAFEHAVEN COMPLEX, which completes the CHASING MERCURY trilogy.

It’s been quite a journey, for me as well as Mila and Bradley. Not least because what was originally meant to be a full-on commercial undertaking has ended up becoming (with the exception of the consideration given so generously by beta/advance readers) the ultimate indie effort. A one-man-show. Pulled together on the thinnest of shoestrings. For love, or pride, or whatever you call it when it sure as hell ain’t going to pay the mortgage.

If you’ve read Book One, THE BORODINO SACRIFICE, you know where Mila and Bradley’s journey began. But what about mine?

Well, I don’t come from the secret world. (Although I would say that, wouldn’t I?) And while these stories have inspirations that are very personal to me – yes, from Uncle John’s tales of working with both ‘Lucky’ Luciano and SOE's Vera Atkins to my own experiences in the Czech Republic and my mother’s with the Springbok Legion/Torch Commando – they are first and foremost works of invention, drawing speculative links between real events with the goal of entertainment not education. That goal came first; the personal stuff was fitted around it.

And yet. Here’s the thing…

I think any book can have or be a noble cause. Especially if it sprang from a desire to fill a gap – i.e., not to produce something that is just like something else but to create something that wasn’t there before. And not only in terms of plot but also execution. That’s why I used to struggle when pitching these books, particularly when it came to trotting out comparison titles and saying where they’d fit on the shelves.

Now, I’m not saying that such a mindset is in itself noble. (Commercially, it’s pretty stupid, for a start.) Nor am I claiming that my CHASING MERCURY books are mould-breakingly, trend-settingly unique. (In fact, to my mind, there are places where they become a little too imitative.) But I think they do come from an honest place, a place that I admire in many authors yet search for in vain with too many others.

So this, boiled down to its basics, is the true “origin story” of these stories: the moment when my juvenile impulse to be a writer grew into an adolescent (and therefore, of course, lifelong) desire to produce plot-AND-character-led thrillers that I couldn’t find on the shelves.

It’s the moment when I began venturing beyond the young adult section of the local library and encountered the paperbacks at the second-hand bookstores. Those books. The ones in the boxes outside. The Fontana Alistair MacLeans and Desmond Bagleys and Helen MacInneses featuring photoshoots that looked like movie stills on the front. (Geoff Dyer, over to you…) The completely unrepresentative Modesty Blaise covers from Pan’s 1970s sexploitation fever-dream (even whilst, for Wilbur Smith, they managed to overdo the epic grandeur instead). The Bonds that you tried to collect with matching spines and art and never could...

Covers, and titles – before the days of algorithm-feeding tedium – on books that had a lot to live up to and didn’t always deliver on their promise.

But maybe I could.
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​There you are. A great big, dirty, embarrassing ambition. Some would say laughably arrogant. Certainly naive. And, of course, one that was doomed to fail, by its very nature, as perhaps it had failed over the years for many of those authors in the 10p boxes out front. But an honest one. And that’s something.

And what of the journey now – for Mila and Bradley, and for me?

“Time will tell. It always does.”

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