Having previously only had my short prequel novella available as a free download off the KV66 WebSite, I decided why not also add it as an associated title onto the Amazon Bookshelf.

This has now been done and can  be viewed on my updated Amazon author profile as below.

https://www.amazon.com/author/kgmaw-kv66

The Prequel  “Zolanda’s Destiny” incidentally has a free download offering running through to 5th October on Amazon, which I intend to try and extend periodically within the allowable promotion parameters.

 

 

 

When it comes to running a business, the CEO or Managing Director  bears the heavy weight of responsibility, not just to the board of directors who appointed their candidate, but also to the many individual shareholders who relied on this very critical decision.

Ultimately, it is these shareholders whose investment is on the line, totally dependent on what is often an incredibly fragile link. Also, one must not forget the welfare of the company’s workforce, most of whom will have joined the business with a real want to work and support the direction of their bosses, ensuring a continued combination of income, reward, prosperity and most importantly, increased shareholder value. If this equation is breached for any reason, it can more often than not lead to negative consequences and only compound any problems in hand.

Fiduciary Duty has often been declared “A Sacred Obligation”. This is due to the lives of so many hinging on the actions of the CEO and how he or she conducts his or her activities while demonstrating the highest moral integrity. It is at the heart and soul of a CEO’s responsibilities to shareholders in prioritizing their financial well being. A failure in fulfilling these duties will inevitably result in a “Breach” of Fiduciary Duty and loyalty to their firm!

As I have already eluded, any “corporate” duty of loyalty requires executives to always act in the best interest of the company and its shareholders. This means avoiding conflicts of interest, not using corporate opportunities for personal gain, and not engaging in transactions that could harm the company or unduly benefit the executive at the expense of the shareholders.

Breaches of the duty of loyalty often involve self-dealing, insider trading or other forms of misconduct that lead to personal enrichment including:

• Sharing an employer’s trade secrets
• Failing to follow the employer’s directions
• Improperly using or failing to account for employer’s funds.
• Acting on behalf of a competitor
• Failing to exercise care in carrying out duties and
• Profiting at the employer’s expense.

 

Shareholders that believe their CEO failed them through breaching any such duty of care, can and often, hold the individual accountable with a lawsuit. This can lead to financial compensation to help cover losses because of the breach, as well as serve as a deterrent for future errors of judgement.

There are indeed many such cases setting multiple precedents for employers to seek recompense as such actions have a parallel to espionage and political breaches of loyalty where the consequences of such breaches can be even more disastrous and the penalties even more severe!

Unfortunately, greed can be a determined motivator and often, carry a heavier weight, pushing individuals into making wrongful decisions and as such exposing their company to financial losses or in the case of state level espionage, exposing their country to an increased level of threat. History has shown that even the most honourable individuals can fall into this “honey trap” and be misguided, very often oblivious that they have taken the wrong turn.

Trust in my opinion remains paramount when it comes to the appointment of key executives . Any inkling of doubt should be handled swiftly to avoid any possible breach of this “sacred obligation”.

Earlier this year, I was delighted to participate in a comprehensive YouTube interview and recall much of my career path over the past 47 years.

From leaving school with just ‘A’ Levels back in 1977, then dabbling in a research lab for a couple of years, I eventually charted a course into the world of insurance that has continued almost unabated for the past 45 years.

The decisions taken during these early years ultimately enabled me to see much of the world and most importantly the ultimate reward of a wonderful family who without their unrelenting love and support, none of this would have been achievable.

Please enjoy and thanks again to the FS Brew team for making this possible!

The world’s elite hierarchy has become totally focused on fake ideals and driven by a desire for more and more wealth. It’s so refreshing to visit places where the minds of people have not been polluted by this incessant desire for greatness and the increasing need to display wealth through a collection of what are usually totally unnecessary belongings.

I count myself very fortunate coming from a background of historic wealth and was born into this world with what some may describe as a silver spoon. However, being brought up in what was a fairly strict philosophy and regimental lifestyle, I like to think I was educated to appreciate what we had and never ever to flaunt it. 

The memories I have from those early years are protected by just a few dozen black and white and early Kodak colour photographs plus a number of small mementos of no real value, but a lifeline to my past and something that I will treasure and be able to show to future generations, telling tales of how we got to where we are today.

We are ultimately born into this world as flesh and bone and all of equal value. Ultimately, we will pass into whatever realm we believe maybe out there following our death with nothing other than that same flesh and bones we started out life with. 

In order for either individuals or institutions to reap rewards, it usually comes at great cost on the other side of the wealth generation equation. The “engine room” consisting of employees, workers or contractors needed to plant, tend, harvest or drive the ship are often more than likely struggling to pay their day to day bills and unable to build out a sufficient nest egg that will keep them in good stead to their final end of days. Is that really fair?

Considering typical corporate hierarchy today, in my opinion, the world has entered what could be characterised as a modern day feudalistic society and as such we might just as well be back in medieval times as the wealth of this great planet is still under the control of too few of a minority. Whether or not Governments profess to have wiped out these unpleasant epidemics, as with any disease, they tend to always reappear in different disguises.

Just as a reminder of what feudalism consisted of and how it was and could be structured, below is a simple table defining examples of several core components both ancient and modern.

Medieval Feudalism	Modern Day Feudalism
Lords	Business Owners / CEOs / Leaders
Vassals (usually knights or other liege subjects)	Management / Politicians / Body Guards & Other Side Kicks
Fiefs (feudal estate)	Corporate Entities / Companies / Land / Estates
Serfs (peasant workers)	Production line staff / Rank & File Population / Soldiers
Feudal Dues (payments from serfs / vassals to lords)	Profits & dividends & other such dues or taxes for ultimate beneficial owners and CEOs etc

 

As we know from history books, the Medieval “Lords” of our past often tended to be very greedy and build out kingdoms or extensive estates, all at the cost of the peasants who worked their land and who if required, might even be called upon to defend their fiefs through compulsory military service.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to cast a similar shadow on today’s modern corporate world and how even politicians are in effect minor vassals, unable to control the lords and masters of their fiefdoms, major institutions or even dictatorial regimes that are the absolute epitome of modern day feudalism.

For thousands of years, only a handful of righteous thinkers and revolutionaries have tried to seek ways to “break the camels back” and find solutions whereby we can live in harmony and have a more balanced distribution of wealth. In most cases, these often colourful individuals have been silenced in one way or another, as they remained far too controversial and not acting in their Lords interests. However, someday soon and thinking rationally (particularly as todays “Serfs” will become less and less essential in the modern day feudal system, due to improved technology and innovation), we will need to find new methods of distributing wealth to the greater populous, for just remaining at home.

This is a hypothesis that more than likely falls on deaf ears and is probably tossed from one bin to another in the hope that it will just disappear.

Will we see a modern day “peasants revolt” or will our leaders look to silence such resonance through the undertaking of more drastic action or other unpleasant measures. Only time will tell.  Unfortunately, time is running out fast and the unpleasantness of modern day feudalism is already being broadcast across the globe on a daily basis.

Need I say more!!

The interpretation of this quote by the then 3rd President of the United States could no doubt be misconstrued or debated in many different contexts, nevertheless the fact that he ever used this phraseology in the first place must lead us to a conclusion that he had a very dim view of banking institutions.

For the layman, Banks are a necessary evil and something we have to live with and which sadly will have a controlling effect on the rest of our lives, once we reach that age where we can finally access a degree of financial independence and slowly move away from earlier parental support.

Unfortunately, banks have drifted away from the real “Know Your Customer” (KYC) of the past where you could walk into your local branch and the banking staff would physically know you. Today people have become commodities and basic KYC has evolved into a more mundane task of providing all sorts of personal information into an electronic system that will never replace the personal touch. It is doubtful in my mind that half these forms or documents are ever fully checked and the exercise has become more that of a tick box approach.

Banks ultimately are institutions that need to deliver profits or dividends for shareholders as well as added incentives for executives that help steer the ship. To achieve these objectives, they feed off the blood sweat and tears of their needful customers, by in most cases, upselling loans or other high interest lending products to people who quite likely don’t have an ability to repay their debt and when they eventually do, will have probably paid more than half again for what was in the many instances an unnecessary consumer product?

My father always gave me some sound practical advice, if you can’t afford it, don’t buy it! 

Many governments across the globe are possibly the worst offenders when it comes to borrowing more money than whatever they have stashed away within their treasury or federal reserve. When this happens, the easy fix is just to have more money printed and pile on more debt as if it’s just an ever flowing gravy train. However, when the breaking point eventually comes (& it will at some point!), it will come with a mighty thump, and most likely lead to hyper inflation and push the bulk of their country’s populations into poverty.

We can already see examples of this happening right under our very eyes and yet the austerity measures needed to correct the mistakes of past decision makers will never be taken. Why? because that alone would be political suicide for the incumbent parties in power, and as such, these debt mountains will continue to rise or even worse, we see a repeat of what happened in Germany in the 1920’s and 30’s?

For those of us who may be fortunate enough to live with any degree of reasonable savings, banks also prey on these funds and indeed, it is these deposits that will become the manacles farmed out to other consumers in the form of expensive credit card facilities or loans. In consideration for supporting the lending life cycle and giving the bank access to our cash deposits, they willingly give us a mediocre interest rate and have an abacus in hand already counting out their profit.

The real pariahs out there are the private banks and in many cases banks domiciled in the likes of Switzerland who only like to support ultra rich clients who are looking at ways to hedge away from more traditional deposit based accounts. 

This requires very sound financial advice and unfortunately, these institutions tend to ring fence themselves with a ton of fine print and will never accept that they have made mistakes when things go wrong and that ultimately, the unknowledgeable consumer should have known better! 

Unfortunately, I have a personal experience with this treatment and for legal reasons cannot name and shame the institution concerned, however, I will certainly never forget the damage that was caused by their extreme lack of “duty of care” and negligence in handling our savings. Had I had the resources to sue, absolutely, I would have gone all the way as even the country’s Ombudsman, you could tell, was not at all interested to accept the facts, and was probably more interested in protecting the concerned financial institution than listening to the woes of an overseas complainant.

I suppose like any product or service we go back to the basic rule of “Caveat Emptor” namely let the buyer beware! This is very true, but none the less we are surrounded by salesman offering all manner of promises and when we purchase products from those who profess to be the very best, we expect a higher degree of quality and after care service, after all, that is what we are paying for.

 

 

 

 

 

Everything about life is uncertain!

Life would be too easy with even the slightest degree of Certainty & Darwin’s whole hypothesis on his “Origin of Species” & its corresponding “Survival of the Fittest” epitomises everything about how the world ticks & the fragile balance of nature that exists at any point in time. 

Charles Darwin (like myself) was a Shropshire lad born in Shrewsbury on 12th February 1809 150 years before my surfacing on this planet also in Shrewsbury back in 1959. Immortalised in Bronze and sitting high on a pedestal near the entrance to Shrewsbury Castle, I still remember clambering on his statue as child and have always remained a great supporter of all his evolutionary ideals and readily see how forward thinking he was and so far ahead of his time.  Perhaps this magnetic attraction to the great man was already in my genes as one of my ancestors, George Maw (1832-1912) apart from co-founding the family tile business, had been an avid Botanist and frequently exchanged his own evolutionary views with Darwin on the Crocus Flower which had been one of his passions and on which he had written a number of important scientific papers.

Education during the 18th and 19th Centuries still followed the more classical route and had far stronger roots with traditional biblical beliefs. Latin & Greek were still compulsory subjects and not surprising, Latin remained the primary language adopted for science and medical terminology. Consequently, without gaining at least a basic knowledge of what was essentially a dead language, one was less likely to progress and gain access to the great Universities or further educational establishments of that era, to pursue advancement into these fast growing and exciting disciplines that still exuded a touch of taboo.  

I can even recall being handed my first Latin Book at around the age of 10 called “Latine Legamus” and reading texts of Virgil’s Iliad out loud to class in this strange language wondering what purpose this would serve. Indeed, we students back in the 1960’s even used to utter a symbolic rhyme to resonate our bewilderment – “Latin is a language as dead as it can be, It killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me!”

It was perhaps not surprising therefor, why Darwin’s views were initially not so well received due to a clash in beliefs and certain reluctance of religious leaders in accepting that they may have a wrong interpretation of life and that their books and ancient texts were fundamentally being challenged by advancing scientific fact. 

But what of  Uncertainty of this marvellous blue planet that is so precariously positioned within our galaxy to give life to such an abundance of creatures that do nothing more than feast on nutrients that have evolved over 100’s of millions of years to provide every organism with a balanced ecosystem to sustain their precursor life cycle.

If we look at Life on Earth right from the beginning, one can easily see how the planet has evolved and re-jigged itself to provide new life from one mass extinction to another. 

To date, we know that 5 great Extinction Events have occurred over time highlighted below and all driven by major Climatic Changes.

• End Ordovician (444 million years ago; mya) – Loss of life 86%
• Late Devonian (360 mya) – Loss of Life 75%
• End Permian (250 mya) – Loss of Life 96%
• End Triassic (200 mya) – Loss of Life  80%
• End Cretaceous (65 mya) – The event that killed off the dinosaurs – Loss of Life – 76%
• The Next Mass Extinction ?????

While there seems to be an average timeline of approx 95 Million years between each mass extinction, the next such event in my opinion, (and probably also by all like minded people) will most likely be fast forwarded and attributable to human interference. Unlike the previous 5, this could be accelerated very quickly through derailment and propulsion along either of two counterproductive directions!

1. Our continued neglect in ensuring that all ecosystems are adequately protected and that we maintain a careful balance in nature with absolutely no further eradication of species, particularly deforestation, or
2. Through catastrophic conflict and the horrific possibility of nuclear war, which we all know will most likely lead to a mass extinction event.

With the out of control conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine, it seems our “doomsday clock” remains at it’s most volatile point in history, namely 90 seconds to midnight and the tipping point couldn’t be that much closer.

As pointed out in my earlier January blog on failed leadership, there are unfortunately no leaders of any substance in this world that are able to pull humanity together and solve the crises that now dawn upon us, particularly when it comes to armed conflict. It seems only a matter of time that we will most likely learn our lesson the hard way, instead of taking head from past mistakes and instilling a measure of corrective action to steer us back on course to a balanced and harmonised planet.

Are we all so ignorant and unable to elect people who can get us on the right path?

Wake up World or we will soon be at 30 seconds or less to “D-Day”

What has this world evolved into?  Breaking away from the very painful period of the last two world wars, one would have thought we would have learned the lessons of the past. However, the ever eternal disease of greed and power continues to prevail. 

Religion throughout the ages has been a tool to give some form of hope to the masses that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Leaders over the millennia realised this and in an effort to take more control of their destinies made themselves religious icons or gods epitomised by the Pharaonic culture that lasted thousands of years, followed by the Roman Empire and the more power hungry Caesars.

Christianity developed from almost nowhere at the peak of Roman arrogance and when their empire was expanding at tremendous cost of human life and suffering.  Like Moses at the time of Exodus, who through the aid of his people’s beliefs conjured up a rebellion to escape enslavement from within the powerful Egyptian Empire, little did he know that history would repeat itself and experience similar undertones. Almost 1300 years later, Jesus was born in Bethlehem at a time when people also needed miracles to help them break away from the tyranny of the Romans. Reading the New Testament, one can almost visualise the desperation of what average people were enduring at the time and how the gap between rich and poor was so monumental with human life having no real value.

As England began to expand it’s reach and gain power during the Tudor period, Henry VIII in order to gain more power and keep a hold on his people and allow himself to have a free rein to do as he saw fit including overruling the pope and divorcing his Roman Catholic wife, decided he should become the head of the Church of England.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you look at the build up of communism in the Soviet Union and the desperate need of the millions of peasants who had no life as compared to the Romanov’s, and other noble families. Like their distant relatives in the English Royal family, the Tsar was also very much in control of the Russian church and as such it was not surprising that faith dwindled over the threat of poverty and starvation to a point where belief was almost lost entirely. Following on from Lenin, Stalin proved to be no better than the former Tsars and indeed, millions lost their lives through a period of outright terror and radicalised purging.

Not so far away, Germany was also going through a similar Great Depression as with the Tsars, while not being killed, Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate as Emperor, following the end of the Great War in 1918, ending what had been a dynastic period that had lasted in parts of his nation and empire for over 500 years.

Through the miserable period that followed, Adolf Hitler a relatively obscure individual rose to power and following a short period in prison, where he wrote “Mein Kamph” My Struggle, built out his Nazi party through enforced propaganda and brain-washing the masses, programming them into a belief that he was the answer to a greater Germany and superior race. Hitler’s final solution and system of ethnic cleansing to eradicate all Jews from Germany and all the countries that he invaded through the course of WW2 surpassed all the horrific acts of earlier dictators and one would have thought, this would never again be repeated. However, like with any wrongful act committed by an individual, time seems to have an effect of eradicating the consequences of such acts and others step in and continue purging societies not even caring if their people have been the victims of these types of atrocity…

History is a subject that seems to be losing popularity as too Divinity or Religious Studies that were a must in the last century. How are we to learn to behave right if we do not hear the wrongs of the past or have some form of guidance and hope for a better future. The disease of greed unfortunately tips the balance, the want for more wealth and an ability to have anything at the cost of millions steers infected individuals on the wrong path and ultimately breeds similar such behaviour from all that surround these individuals.

You only have to take a look at North Korea and see how this is happening right under our very eyes today. Kim Jong-Un is a ruthless dynastic dictator and despot leader of an impoverished nation. Instead of looking after the welfare of his people he seems bent up intent in following the footsteps of Adolf Hitler, investing all the country’s wealth into building out a powerful army in addition to amassing an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction! For what? Well, he is just intent on continuing his dynasty, maintaining a lavish lifestyle & enjoying all the mod cons while the average North Korean has nothing and no opportunity to even question the wrongs of this tyrannical regime.

On the other side of the globe and considered not just by the dictators of the East but also by many Middle Eastern dictatorial regimes, most notably Iran “The Great Satan”, comes the United States. Does the US have failed leadership, the answer I believe is yes, but instead of being seen as tyrannical leaders, they have followed a different course becoming weak through the inability to say no.

In one of Churchill’s most famous speeches titled: The Defence of Freedom and Peace – October 1938. Within it he stated 

Quote 

“…Alexander the Great remarked that the people of Asia were slaves because they had not learned to pronounce the word “No.” Let that not be the epitaph of the English-speaking peoples or of Parliamentary democracy, or of France, or of the many surviving liberal States of Europe.”

Unquote

Indeed, this speech drilled down into much what I have stated already but which very sadly seems to have been forgotten with time. The US today is a bankrupt nation unable to repay its debt.Instead, leaders print more money and sell misery through production of arms and weaponry which they want to produce more of by instilling trouble throughout the world in an effort to prop up the coffers of their technically empty treasury. I am sorry to say that looking at all the potential candidates for the presidency of this nation, not one has any charisma and all they do is want to slang off each other and preach lies to their voters almost in a similar fashion to how Josef Goebbels handled Germany’s propaganda machine.

Moving on to 2023, history is once again repeated with genocidal atrocities this time driven by the Israelis supported of course by the US extended debt mountain and arms primarily supplied by US defence industries.

The UK unfortunately through the failures of their past colonial expansion and inability to respect borders and tribal boundaries, gave away land that was not their’s to give away in the form of the “Balfour Declaration”
This grave misunderstanding has caused consistent violence since its proclamation in 1917 and today has reduced Gaza to rubble not witnessed since the levelling of cities by bombers during WW2. How can a nation of people who have experienced the horrors of Hitler’s Final Solution and the Holocaust, now effectively wear the Nazi SS scull & cross bones and dish out similar horrors to the Palestinian people.

To conclude, every nation needs to find leaders who lead by their hearts with the welfare of the people taking priority, give up the need for arms and instead, invest in protecting our environment and ensuring peace and unity for our children and our children’s children. We need a Utopian society more than ever!!

Howard Carter first set foot in Egypt in 1891 initially working as an artist supporting archaeologists in recording many of the intricate reliefs and heiroglyphics carved into the walls of tombs and temples before venturing on his eventual hunt for the tomb of a relatively unknown and forgotten king, Tutankhamun,

Post 1917, Carter rallied on the support of a long time friend, Lord Carnarvon, to finance his planned excavation operations in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings and it is interesting to note, that for the 1918/19 season, his estimates were a mere EGP 3.15 for labour (12 men and boy from Thebes & 25 local boys and 2men) + EGP 701 for camp expenses, giving an approx total of only EGP 3.85 per day.

By 1922 after 4 fruitless seasons, Canarvon’s patience was beginning to wane and only after some pursuasive negotiating, including an offer of guarantee, did Carter secure further finance for what would be his 5th and final season.

Carter left England to take a boat from Marseille on 5th October 1922 arriving in Cairo on 11th October where he stayed for a further 2 weeks visiting several antiquities dealers on behalf of his employer before eventually leaving for Luxor.

When Carter arrived at his home in Luxor on 27th October, he brought with him a new pet, very fittingly and because of his love for birds, a small yellow canary in a guilded cage.

With his servant Abdul Al carrying the cage behind him, as they entered the house, the guards and staff greeted them and on seeing the bird, one quickly remarked “Mabrook, it’s a bird of gold that will bring luck! This year we will find inshallah a tomb full of gold!”

Astonishingly and only a week after receiving this warm greeting, Carter finally made the discovery of what would ultimately be described as the most fabulous find of all times and, the tomb being branded by his team, “The Tomb of the Golden Bird” & officially numbered KV62, that day on 4th November 1922, 101 years ago.

On 6th November, Carter cabled Lord Carnarvon

“At last we have made a wonderful discovery in the valley, a magnificent tomb with seals intact. Re–covered same for your arrival.

Congratulations, Carter”

On the afternoon of the 26th November 1922 and after cutting a hole into the newly discovered tomb, Carnarvon asked “can you see anything?”  to which Carter simply replied, “Yes, Wonderful things!”

These 3 words are now firmly part of the story and are enough to conjure up for many, the images of what they must have seen when peeking at the objects scattered around what we now know was the initial Antechamber and a just a prequel of Tutankhamun’s unparalleled treasure horde.

But what of the golden bird, strangely and very soon after the discovery, while Carter was collecting
Carnarvon from Cairo, an Egyptian Cobra somehow managed to enter the bird’s cage and consume it. Much speculation persisted as it was hard to imagine how a snake could have penetrated through the bars, as had they been spaced wide enough, the bird could surely have got out or was it as many might theorise, part of the young Pharaoh’s curse and what would be included within many other strange and unfortunate incidents that followed after the unsealing of Tutankhamun,’s final resting place, including the untimely death of Lord Carnarvon??

Carter brushed all such speculation aside and simply replaced his dead bird and carried on with business. We on the other hand, along with countless millions over the years, continue to speculate if there was indeed some form of curse initiated by ancient priests as they placed their beloved pharaoh in his sarcophagus, surrounded him with all his worldly objects for his onward journey into the afterlife and then, sealing the tomb for what should have been perpetuity.

 

 

The Books That Make You Show features authors, literary experts, celebrities and community leaders. Consequently,  it was an absolute privilege for me to be invited to participate in a second follow up interview, almost a year on from my first, and have an opportunity to bring my audience up to speed with the continuation of the KV66 saga.

In addition to recapping on both volumes one and two, I was also able to delve a little into the lives of the novel’s principal characters  and not to mention, give a little hint of what’s install in this third and final episode of my intriguing trilogy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k7DUkyfN68

A standard question found on practically all manuscript submission forms, digs deep into the author’s likes, in terms of books written by other authors.  Also, upon which shelf in a bookstore he or she would picture their books adjacent to other authors within their genre and how these authors may have influenced their writing.

It’s often a tough choice to pin point an exact answer to this question, particularly where one has read and liked the books of many authors. As such, I though I would highlight a few names of the past and look at novels that had a profound effect on me during my teenage years, when I was reading books all the time,  particularly while I was studying at Oundle or while traveling on holiday during school breaks. 

These were books that took readers to all sorts of remote locations across the globe immersing you in a series of nail biting plots. What’s more the paperback versions were usually of a size that would fit in your jacket pocket and as such were a great distraction for long train or plane journeys as today’s more modern entertainment systems were of course then non existent.

Three names falling into this category and which immediately spring to mind would be as follows:

1. Hammond Innes

Hammond Innes produced his books in a regular sequence, usually with six months of travel and research followed by six months of writing. Many of his works featured events at sea. His protagonists were often not “heroes” in the typical sense, but ordinary men suddenly thrust into extreme situations by circumstance and in a away not too dissimilar to that of George Drake within my own KV66 trilogy.

 Often, this involved being placed in a hostile environment such as the Arctic, the open sea & deserts, or unwittingly becoming involved in a larger conflict or conspiracy. The protagonist generally is forced to rely on his own wits and making best use of limited resources, rather than the weapons and gadgetry commonly used by thriller writers.

Some of the titles I recall reading almost 5 decades perviously included:

Campbells Kingdom – 1957  Having been diagnosed with a terminal disease, Bruce Campbell returns to a town in the Canadian Rockies to prove his grandfathers theory that there is oil in the hills. No-one believes him and to make matters worse, Owen Morgan plans to build a dam and flood the land where the oil lies.

The Wreck of the Mary Deare – 1956  This book tells the story of a very old deathtrap of a ship found adrift at sea by salvager John Sands. Sands finds the ship is not completely abandoned with one crew member, first officer Gideon Patch still aboard. Patch convinces Sands to help him beach the ship and on returning to London, Patch ends up in front of a board of inquiry and soon it becomes apparent, the shipowners had had other plans for this old wreck.

Wreckers Must Breathe – 1940 Set in the early stages of WW2, it tells the story about German U-boats operating from a secret base in Cornwall UK.

2. Dennis Wheatley

Dennis Wheatley (8 January 1897 – 10 November 1977) was a writer whose prolific output of thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world’s best-selling authors from the 1930s through the 1960s. His Gregory Sallust series was one of the main inspirations for Ian Flemming’s eventual Bond series.

As a teenager, I enjoyed staying up late at night watching the old Hammer House of Horror movies and was intrigued, almost with a type of fear of the occult and as such enjoyed Wheatley’s novels that frequently touched on the subject. I even remember writing a letter to him while at school to which I received a warm response, although he did also give me a stark warning at the time never to dabble with the occult as it was not a subject to be reckoned with.

Books within this category included:

The Devil Rides Out  – Written in 1934 and set in 1930s London and the South of England, the Duc de Richleau and Rex van Ryn rescue their friend Simon Aron from a devil-worshipping cult. Rex falls in love with another initiate of the cult, Tanith. The book eventually culminates in a desperate chase across Europe to an abandoned Greek Monastery where the evil cult leader is defeated but has an added twist to it. The Duc de Richleau was one of Wheatley’s principal protagonists and in the film version “The Devil’s Bride” made by Hammer Studios, Christopher Lee also took on the lead role as De Richleau.

To The Devil A Daughter  – Written in 1953 and also subsequently made into a film with the same title the plot, the book follows an American occult researcher in England who attempts to save a young girl preyed upon by a satanic cult led by a fallen Roman Catholic priest. The cast of the movie included iconic actors of the era such as Christopher Lee, Richard Widmark and Honor Blackman.

The White Witch of the South Seas  – First published in 1968, the novel feature’s Gregory Sallust who, when visiting Rio de Janeiro, becomes drawn into perilous action. Circumstance leads to him becoming the friend of a young South Seas Rajah, Ratu James Omboluku, there to secure finance to recover treasure from a sunken ship lying off the island he rules; and he intends to use this treasure for the betterment of his people. But others, led by the unscrupulous Pierre Lacost, are also planning to recover the treasure, and it is not long before Gregory, having an affair with the passionate Manon de Bois-Tracy, finds himself surrounded by murder, magic, blackmail, kidnapping and some of the most ruthless thugs he has ever encountered.

3. Agatha Christie

I couldn’t end not mentioning Agatha Christie, (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) A prolific writer known best for her 66  detective novels, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives  Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. These were always enjoyable reads and it was most probably her novel Death on the Nile that inspired me to stay at the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, sit on the veranda overlooking the Nile sipping a G&T and remember these memories for inclusion into my first novel Siptah’s Legacy.

Death on the Nile – Published in 1937 and possibly one of Agatha Christie’s most daring travel mysteries!  “The tranquillity of a cruise along the Nile is shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway has been shot through the head. She was young, stylish and beautiful, a girl who had everything – until she lost her life”. Hercule Poirot also on board the luxury Nile cruiser, steps into action to solve the case. The novel has since been filmed twice one in 1978 featuring Peter Ustinov as Poirot and more recently in 2022 with Kenneth Branagh taking on the role.

 

This is just a bare glimpse of some of the names I could add to the bookshelf along side my own books. Others would include the likes of Henry Rider Haggard, Alistair Maclean, Clive Cussler and many more.

Just the mention of these iconic writers, makes me want to dig out some of their works and re-immerse myself away into their world filled with adventure, intrigue and mystery.