How I became an Author.

I spent my career working in engineering for State and local governments, but was let go (on my birthday) during the recession. At age fifty-four I couldn’t find a job. Suddenly I had time on my hands. My wife says my personality changed; I mellowed out, relaxed, and I read a lot.

I’ve been a reader all my life, mostly WWII nonfiction; "Halsey’s Typhoon", "Heroes in Dungarees", "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors", "Neptune’s Inferno". I found the stories that attracted my attention the most were about the civilian Merchant Navy men manning ships that had casualty rates far above any of the other services.

But I also read fiction. There were thrillers by Eric Ambler who invented the genre in 1935 (A Coffin For Demetrios, Journey into Fear, Passage Of Arms), and detective stories by Philip Kerr (the entire Bernie Gunther series), and thrillers by Alan Furst (Dark Voyage, Kingdom of Shadows, Midnight in Europe, Spies of the Balkans, Spies of the Warsaw).

These books often featured an “Everyman” unwillingly caught up in international intrigues, usually with a woman he meets but in the end, triumphing. With Alan Furst, I found his books heavy on description but somehow “repetitive” – he seemed to be mimicking Eric Ambler but, not done well. I began to think, “I could write better than him.”

I’d thought about writing a novel for a few years, and in 2017 started a meandering outline for a novel, but nothing seemed to gel. I had 3 pages of notes and random thoughts about a ship on a voyage. If anyone remembers that 2017 movie, “The Man Who Invented Christmas” where Dan Stevens (of Downton Abbey fame) plays Charles Dickens – that was me: unable to write a character until I’d come up with a name, and I didn’t have a name, and couldn’t visualize a Captain yet . . .

Then Covid happened. I got vaccinated (and booster jabs too!) but still got ill. I did recover. Then in Spring of 2020 I was reading a magazine and saw a photo of a British steamboat captain named Mallinson, and I thought “That’s him!” – it was like a thunderclap out of the blue. Everything came together in an instant. I did, however, change his first name and make him an ex- Canadian.

I sat at my laptop and in 2 months had a 20,000 word outline. Eighteen months later I had a completed manuscript. That became my first novel, Heavy Cargo. My wife Karen did the cover, and also my website.

Then in September 2021 we took a cruise from Malta to Croatia and back. I got inspired again, and pounded out another outline followed by a manuscript. “Pounded out” is a relative term – I’m actually a “hunt-and-peck” typist. That became my second novel, The Belfair Pinch. I did my own cover this time.

In October 2023 I got inspired again, and pounded out another outline. That one will become The Bitter Pit of the Cherry, and this hopefully will be out by early 2025. I have finished four chapters as of the Thanksgiving Holiday 2023.

I pride myself on my research. If I mention a person, an event, a ship, or a convoy, it was real and happened or existed then; I do not place a ship or a person where historically they could not have been. Many of my characters are real people: Sir Shenton Thomas, Lieutenant Freddie Spencer Chapman, Captain Samuel Fridvold, Prime Minister John Curtin, Admiral Karel Doorman of the HNLMS De Ruyter. My fictional crew remains, of course, fictional.