Author: Graham

The Dragon’s Many Claws

My latest novel The Dragon’s Many Claws is now out, available on Amazon.

In some ways, I think this is my best book yet. The pacing, as an action thriller, is really good. I know this from the test readers and editors who have been through the text, but more to the point, I know it because I felt it when I was writing it.

The other thing I love about this book is that it is a war story that will appeal to people who don’t usually read war story – the same way The Hydra was a courtroom drama for people who never read courtroom dramas.

Anyway, this is where to go to buy a copy (I guarantee you won’t regret it if you do): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXD56T4G

The Lost Scholar

What happened to his days
Of wasted cafe stays
Coffees nursed and nursed again
‘Til nothing more remained
But stains of foam and a few stray grains?

What happened to his pads of note,
Filled with self-important poems?
Thoughts to which he gave a home.
By hand he wrote those dog-eared tomes,
The most precious things he owned.

What happened to that quick and hungry kid
Who slid through life amid
A thousand storms and strife and grit,
In hopes he’d win his long-shot bid
To rid himself of hunger, the need for speed and grit?

Now with coffee cup and belly full
With notepad empty, feelings dull
He’s left to mull
What happens when a vibrant mind –
Through wine and time –
Becomes a sunken skull.

The Dragon’s Many Claws

I’m very excited to announce that my new thriller, The Dragon’s Many Claws, will be released on Amazon in paperback, ebook and audiobook on 1 February! Here’s the book cover and blurb as a teaser. Watch this space for more news!

US Army officer Stephen Chen has uncovered a plot by China to carry out a sneak attack on the United States. He’s got all the receipts and knows how to stop them before they even start. The only problem is, no one believes him.

The fight to bring the plot to light may cost Chen his relationship, his career and even his liberty. But if he is right, the fight to save America might cost the country even more.

My review of Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana”

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Graham Greene is a desperately good writer. He can’t help but write well, even on an off day. Even when attempting a literary loop de loop that goes slightly wrong. And because he has that magic gift to turn even his stumbles into artistry, there is extra deliciousness in the very imperfections we observe.

So it is with Our Man in Havana. Having read other of Greene’s work, you start this one with a comfortable expectation that he will deliver scene and structure. He does not disappoint. Right away, we are plunged into pre-Castro Cuba, and become acquainted with a typical Greeneian underdog protagonist – an impoverished English vacuum cleaner salesman with a limp named Wormold, whose wife, we learn, has already left him for another man.

But as the plot accelerates, we realise this is not The Power and the Glory. Greene is giving us a rather comic tour of the brothels, bars and casinos. As Wormold becomes embroiled in a world of medium-stakes espionage, the novel veers close to farce.

It is here that he misses a step on the balance beam. Without revealing too much, a few of the plot elements fail to land on the fine line between comedy and hyperrealism that he so carefully treads for much of the story. There is also a missed opportunity late in the story to create a dramatic counterpoint around the death of one of the characters.

But for everything else this book achieves – laugh-out-loud comedy, incredible sense of place and masterfully crafted characters – Greene shows in Havana that he is, yet again, one of the 20th Century’s finest.



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My review of Charles Sprawson’s ‘Haunts of the Black Masseur’

Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero by Charles Sprawson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction. I find much of it to be clunky, badly organised and badly written. It favours substance over form, as if there were ever a trade-off between the two! Non-fiction tends to pay little attention to the beauty and flow of words and sentences or the cadence of ideas. Worst of all, it lacks kindness to the reader. As in, ‘if you want to know what happens, mate, you will be forced to suffer through my clunky prose’.
At first glance, Sprawson’s watery account of the literature and history of swimming and all things wet appears to be no exception. By page 100, you realise you have been thrown in at the deep end of a self-indulgent pool of random facts, written by a man whose sole purpose in authorship is to free his head of as much aquatic trivia as he can, so that he might go back to his preferred lake or river and have another dip. Sprawson doesn’t even attempt to adhere to his own loose chapter structure – to wit, a big chunk of the final chapter, which purports to tell us about the decade Japan dominated competitive swimming, veers off into an impossibly long tangent about the effeminate French writer André Gide’s favourite Gallic watering holes. The hook is that writer Yukio Mishima liked Gide’s work.
But beneath this eddied surface, Haunts of the Black Masseur has hidden depths. The very self-indulgence that defines his writing style, is mirrored in the book’s theme – the swimmer is submersed, alone, embraced by nature, without the lifeline that tethers us to bourgeois morality. The point is, he does not have to be coherent, sensible or clear. He is free. This is the Masseur’s common current; the love of swimming as subversive counterculture or escape, which binds Ancient Greece, the English classicists of the 18th and 19th Centuries, the German Romantics, the Americans and finally (if only briefly) the Japanese.
So if you are prepared to forgive Sprawson his contempt for good writing and allow yourself to be swept up in a riptide of delicious, random and sometimes surprising anecdotes, you may just reemerge from the experience refreshed.




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My Christmas letter to you, 2024

Dear Daniel,

Merry Christmas! I hope that through the gloom of the dark winter the joy of Christmas is shining brightly upon you.

I have always loved Christmas, for many reasons. First, because it is the birth of Jesus, a baby who comes into this world to give us new hope and to save us from our sins. I believe that even those who are most sinful can find a path to justice, and Christmas is the start of that path.

But I also love Christmas as a pagan holiday. It is perfectly timed, just after the Winter Solstice (December 21st), to symbolise the time in the year when the days are getting brighter and spring is coming (the ‘Yuletide’). You can’t feel it, but it is coming, and the world will be renewed again!

Finally, I love Christmas because it is a time for family to come together. Of course, in your case, it means I miss you. But it has been nice spending time with your sister Daphne. And I hope you have been loved and have been able to love this Yuletide.

So Happy Christmas, my lovely son. I love you,

Dad

A simple plan to stop the killing in Europe

Donald Trump has won the election, in part on the promise to bring an end to US involvement in foreign conflicts. This includes swiftly bringing an end to the war in Ukraine. But how?

Here I propose a simple and, I think, obvious solution to the conflict that could be acceptable to all sides.

Main elements of the deal

  1. An immediate ceasefire along all lines of contact, and for all missile and drone attacks.
  2. The Russian Federation withdraws its forces from all DMZ territory currently occupied (e.g. the city of Mariupol…), and relinquishes all territorial claims to Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Kharkiv oblasts.
  3. Ukraine withdraws its forces from Kursk and any other territory of the UN-recognised Russian Federation. Ukraine withdraws its forces from those parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts currently occupied by AFU forces. Ukraine relinquishes any legal claim to Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
  4. Ukraine is divided into three regions, as below, (for which all parties agree to seek immediate recognition by the UN):
    1. The first region (in dark blue on the map) is the EU security zone. This comprises all oblasts and parts of oblasts west of the Dnieper River. The only territory east of the Dnieper is the remaining piece of Kiev Oblast. It is understood that this region will fall under the protection of NATO, as it transitions into a permanent security arrangement under a new EU Defense Treaty, which would have a smaller and decreasing role of the United States, but would cover countries like Moldova, (Western) Ukraine, the UK, the EU itself and other areas vital to Europe’s security interests.
    2. The second region (in light blue on the map) is the DMZ. This region comprises the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Poltava, Sumy and Chernihiv oblasts, as well as those portions of the Cherkasy and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts that are east of the Dnieper River. It remains under the administration and jurisdiction of Ukraine, but is not covered by the EU Defense Treaty. Ukrainian police can operate, but no weapons systems, artillery, combat units, military aircraft or missiles are allowed. Russian military advisors have permanent, unfettered access to all parts of this zone. All civilian and economic infrastructure remains fully Ukrainian, with no obligations to supply or facilitate the supply of power, water or other utilities to the Russian Federation.
    3. The third region (in red) is Crimea including Sevastopol, as well as Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. This territory becomes part of the Russian Federation.
  5. The Russian Federation grants freedom to navigate in the Sea of Azov for all civilian and commercial purposes and allows unfettered access through the Kerch Straits.
  6. Ukraine commits to passing, in law, denazification rules, in particular in relation to the Azov Brigade and a full repudiation of historical associations with the Nazi German SS.

If karma’s a bitch, coincidence is a rabid she-wolf in heat

Our brains are programmed to seek patterns, even in the wildest storms of chaos. Imagine the universe spitting stars across galaxies, in a physical process that literally bends time, as close to perfectly random as possible. Now imagine standing on a rock in the middle of all this and looking up at it. What do we see? A connect-the-dots picture of a hunter with a club and a belt; a saucepan; and a giant bear.

Assuming the universe truly is random, why then do we indulge in this kind of silliness? It must serve some evolutionary purpose for us to believe in patterns, in fate, in a hidden intelligent design behind the apparently random.

Maybe ideas like karma evolved because they can help us to curtail psychopathic tendencies, by fostering in us the belief in some external enforcer of socially desirable behaviours. Once comforted by such a belief, the very idea of pure coincidence, of random outcomes behind which there is no deeper meaning at all, can provoke an almost existential level of angst – that moment when atheists stare into the abyss of their own belief systems and recoil in horror.

If God truly does exist, I am sure He create the concept of randomness and its bastard child coincidence with a very specific purpose – to scare the shit out of anyone foolhardy enough not to believe in karma.

A future historian’s map of 2024

Chapter 24.1 – With 20/20 hindsight, 2020 will be crystal clear

Sometimes it’s only possible to understand what is going on with the benefit of hindsight. Think of your own traumatic childhood – after all, we were all scarred horribly by our childhoods (at least, all the interesting people I know were). Yet at the moment when the worst events were happening, how aware were you of the full context? I remember the moment my family fell apart – I was eleven and my biggest concern was not the loss of my parental relationships, the long and ugly court battles that lay ahead, the loss of a nurturing home environment or the economic hardship that would follow the disorderly dissolution of family wealth. No, it was the loss of my pet turtle. Now, 38 years later, I can’t even recall that turtle’s name.

And what is true of family histories is as true of our greater political history: We turn on the news and are bombarded with images of … ehem … bombardments. The news item changes, and we are being told by some talking head or other that this US Presidential election is the one that really really matters – not the last one we were told really really mattered. But are these the ‘world-changing’ events really that big a deal? How will future historians see the things that raise eyebrows, like Russia invading Ukraine or Israel attacking UN peacekeepers in Lebanon? Will Julian Assange make the Table of Contents?

Chapter 24.2 – Citing foresight, for four poor sites?

Given what we know about the folly of making predictions when you’re caught in the storm of current events, only a fool would attempt to answers these questions. I always remember that wisest of sages, my father, telling me as a boy in the 1980s that I’d better hurry up and go visit the Amish, before they all disappeared. Decades later, while on a trip to Upstate New York, I asked a local if there were any Amish left and was nearly laughed back to New England. “The question is are there any non-Amish left. They have like ten kids each!”

Or else consider a sage even wiser than my father: Francis Fukuyama, with his ‘End of History’. He predicted that the 1990s had already seen the end of global conflict – that economic liberalism and democracy had won and solved the question of how to rule, and that everything that would follow would be a series of internationally organised peacekeeping missions to slowly spread the joys of Westernism to the far corners of the earth.

Chapter 24.3 – A fool and his predictions are soon parted

Of course, I am every bit the fool my father and Fukuyama are, so I will attempt to do the impossible: draw a political map of 2024, as it might appear in the textbook of a future historian of, say, 2034. This is what I believe it would look like:

The first thing to notice about this map is that the United States of America doesn’t appear on it. That is because, in my view, the constitutional republic of the US will be considered by future historians to have ceased to exist some time in the mid to late 20th Century, (when Deep State operatives assassinated President Kennedy). Instead, there exists the great empire of the time, drawn in blue – the American Empire, whose capital is not Washington DC but New York City. It occupies the territory of North America, but includes two blocks of vassal states: one in Europe and one in the Asia-Oceania Region. There are a number of aligned states, most notably the region of the middle east, which I believe historians would simply view as being ‘occupied by the American Empire’.

The other great power bloc is comprised of the Asian Powers (Russia, China, Iran and North Korea), supported by their network of sympathetic Asian states (Kazakhstan, India, Vietnam…). Most of the developing world is in grey, reflecting their weak ideological alignment and susceptibility to economic or even military suasion from either of the two blocs.

Chapter 24.4 – The four forlorn corners of Asian conflict

The future historians will conclude by identifying Four geopolitical flashpoints – areas where the American Empire’s political and economic boundaries and interests brush up against those of the Asian Powers: Ukraine, Israel, South Korea and Taiwan. Simply put, the Asian Powers cannot afford to allow these regions to remain under the sway of the Empire, and the conflicts that will bring the blocs into outright war hinge on these four geographic corners of Asia. As the Empire declines, the future of the world hinges on the fate of these four flashpoints: if Ukraine falls to Asia, the ripple effect on the European Vassal States will be so profound it will unwind a goodly portion of the Empire’s Atlantic power. If Israel falls, the Empire will lose its grip on the resource-rich Middle East. If South Korea falls, the Empires North Pacific flank will collapse, and if Taiwan falls, the South Pacific will soon follow.

So much for Chapter 24. A part of me is burning with curiosity to turn the page and read Chapter 25. But another part of me wants to turn back to Chapter 0 and watch an episode of Friends.