The Website of Novelist and Rugby Pundit
                                          Derek Robinson

                              

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               BIG SPRING CLEAN 
2 novels for only Five Pounds  Signed and/or gift-named as you wish

     Set 1:   Two outstanding novels of the R.A.F. in WW2: 

          A GOOD CLEAN  FIGHT and DAMNED GOOD SHOW                                                                         for £5 plus postage.

  (UK postage is £4.50.  Airmail to Europe it's £7.50  Rest of the world Airmail it's £14.50)

              Click here to read Author's Notes and Reviews of the books.


     Set 2: Two classic novels of the R.F.C. in WW1: 

       WAR STORY and GOSHAWK SQUADRON                                                                                                      for £5 plus postage

 (UK postage is £2.50.  Airmail to Europe it's £4.50 Rest of the world Airmail it's £8.50)

           Click here to read Author's Notes and Reviews of the books.

To buy either set, see Payment Methods panel below

GOOD NEWS
MacLehose Press (a division of  Quercus Books)  has begun to publish my entire R.F.C. and R.A.F collection   in paperback. This will be the first time that all eight titles are in print from the same publisher. Two  books are now out: Piece of Cake and Hullo Russia, Goodbye England.
The rest will follow at short intervals. The new covers are terrific. Here are Cake and Hullo Russia:




                          pce cake                               hullo russia

MORE GOOD NEWS
All four of the Luis Cabrillo novels (following the career of  probably the best WW2 double agent and later con-man) are now available as e-books from Amazon/Kindle. Here are the covers:

                              Artillery                  RedRag                 OpBam   

Click any Kindle cover to go to its Amazon UK page.             

Click here for payment methods


 

 
OPERATION BAMBOOZLE

-  brand new Derek Robinson

novel for only a tenner

        'Operation Bamboozle' is a fastmoving black comedy about what happens when a high-stakes con artist takes on the Mob in Los Angeles.  The result is a heady brew of disorganised crime, hot dollars, triple virgins and dead bodies in the begonias.   

         Luis Cabrillo is the con artist, Julie Conroy is his squeeze, and here's the opening sentence:   

      For a man who had been hauled out of Lake Michigan in 1949, headless, his legs and arms broken, and stabbed in the heart with a red ballpoint pen, Frankie Blanco was in pretty good shape in 1953.  

         'Operation Bamboozle' is strong on humour and big on surprises, including the price  -  £10 inc. p&p in the UK or Europe. Outside the UK it's £15 inc. p&p.

Click to see the News of the World Review

 

First edition

232 pages

Each copy numbered and signed

Click here for payment methods

             'Damned Good Show' and 'Red Rag Blues'

FRESH OFF THE PRESS

   'DAMNED GOOD SHOW'                                                  (reprint)

                  Top Flight 
   Many people believe RAF Bomber Command's war began with the Lancaster bomber.  Not so.  From day one of WW2, squadrons flying twin-engine Hampdens (the 'flying suitcase') and Wellingtons (the 'Wimpy') took off on operations  -  not so much to help win the war as not to lose it.
 
  "Here's what you get," The Guardian wrote of 'Damned Good Show',  "tough, taut prose that pulls you through the book like a steel cable... the acrid tang of veracity."  Off-duty, pilots fell in love like all other young men. Reviewing DGS, the Daily Express said: "although it is sparely told, it captures perfectly the excitement  and sadness of wartime romance...Flying is hard to write about,  but Robinson never loses his way, or his dry eye. A masterpiece." 
 
To read the reviews in full, click here.
 
 

To buy: see pair purchase above

Click here for payment methods


              FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACK

             'RED RAG BLUES'                                                   

  He's a heel, bless him. 

 Luis Cabrillo rides again in this "dashing tale of Nazis and Mafiosi", as The Observer called it. (To read the full review, click here.) 
 
In fact, Nazis and Mafiosi play second fiddle to the real dynamo in this story.  It's 1953, and Senator Joe McCarthy's witchhunt for Reds under beds is scaring America witless.

Cue Luis Cabrillo, ex-double agent, now con artist supreme. Dollars flow, hotly pursued by bullets. Luis doesn't know it, but FBI, MI5, KGB and CIA have him firmly in their sights. Not to mention Stevie, the only three-times married virgin in New York City.  This is a rich, fast and very black comedy.


HOW TO GET IT 

This reprint is in paperback format:            282 pages.

Copies are available from me, at the address below.

Price in the UK or Europe is £10 per copy, including first class postage.
Outside the UK - £15 per copy, including airmail postage.

Click here for payment methods
  

Problems?   Email me here or write to me at: Shapland House, Somerset Street, Kingsdown, Bristol BS2 8LZ



New novel: 'Hullo Russia, Goodbye England'
   It's no joke being a Vulcan bomber pilot when the Cold War turns hot.
Reviews:
The first commercial review of HRGE, by Nicholas Lezard of the UK's Guardian
 newspaper, appeared  on the 18th of April.
  
See it here.

"WAR CRACKER IN FROM THE COLD" was the  News of the World's headline  for Matthew Nixson's review of 'Hullo Russia' on 10th May.   See it 
here .
 
 

Silk and the Vulcan were made for each other. "Now see how she climbs," the instructor said.  He stood the Vulcan on its tail and they went up as if somebody up there was hauling them in, hand over fist.



 

HRGESoldOut

                    A Good Clean Fight

     Warhawk
North Africa, spring 1942. Dust, heat, thirst,flies. For those who liked that sort of thing, it was a good clean fight: nothing to harm but the sand, the enemy and yourself.

Enter Fanny Barton's squadron, last seen in  Piece of Cake, now flying clapped-out Tomahawks on ground-strafing attacks at 300 miles an hour and zero feet. At the same time, the men of Captain Lampard's SAS patrol drive hundreds of miles behind enemy lines to plant bombs on German aircraft and vanish into the Sahara... where a German expeditionary force is hellbent on beating the SAS at its own game.  Meanwhile, back at the squadron, Skull Skelton and Baggy Bletchley (survivors from Piece of Cake) join Barton with their outlandish views on the best way to carry out a good clean fight.

The desert, however, has its own indisputable ideas.

                        "A cynicism and hard-bitten humour  that has you halfway
                          between tears and laughter. Biggles was never like this."
                                                                                               Daily Express
                           ***********************************************
To buy: see pair purchase above

Click here for payment methods


Hornet’s Sting is now on sale (576 pages)
     in a limited edition of 100 copies,
        each numbered and signed.    
                         

 PRICE IN U.K.  or Europe  -  £15  per copy, including p&p  
   
Send your sterling cheque, payable to Derek Robinson, to me at:
    Shapland House, Somerset Street, Bristol  BS2 8LZ, England
- and of course I'll need your address. 

 
PRICE OUTSIDE U.K.  £20 per copy, inc. airmail p&p.

(That’s the U.S. and Canada and the rest of the world)
Payment  by  PayPal is usually the best option - see below.     
                   Any queries, please email me here.   
hornetsnewcvr_sold_out

                                                 Payment Methods
paypal
Paying by PayPal        Whether or not you are in the UK, the simplest and quickest way to buy any of my books is by crediting my PayPal business account.

You don't need to have a personal PayPal account.  All you need is a credit or debit card card. Just email me  here (or write) telling me what you want and I will email you a PayPal online payment form. On P.1 click Pay Now; on P.2 Click Continue; on P.3 click the small blue Continue by the display of cards; on P.4 fill in your details and click Review and Continue; then confirm the order. PayPay tell me of your payment and I mail the book(s).  It all goes through very smoothly and quickly. Piece of cake.
Paying by Cheque - make cheque payable to Derek Robinson, and send to Shapland House,   Somerset Street, Kingsdown,  Bristol BS2 8LZ  

Readers Write #23 April 2012  

A curtain-call for extras,

             gunplay in the bathroom,

                       and laughing fit to bust

The folk-singer Fred Wedlock, now alas no longer with us, once told me the secret of how to create a statue of a horse.   "Get a big block of stone," he said, "and hack off everything that doesn't look like horse."  There are days when writing feels like making that statue, except that the chisel is blunt and the mallet has a handle made of rubber.

 That's when I reach for my omnibus edition of Raymond Chandler's novels, partly for the pleasure of seeing a champion in action, partly to remind myself that he had his bad days too, and partly to remember that what matters (especially in a crime story) are the extras, the minor characters whom Chandler crafted so beautifully.  In The Lady in the Lake, he has a scene where his private eye Philip Marlowe visits the Graysons, a retired couple who can probably provide some information.  Chandler wrote:

      'Grayson was a long stooped yellow-faced man with high shoulders, bristly eyebrows and almost no chin. The upper part of his face meant business. The lower part was just saying goodbye. He wore bifocals and had been gnawing fretfully at the evening paper.'

Chandler could have cut all that, and more like it, and got on with the plot, but the book would have been all the poorer.  There's a good reason why Chandler is still in print, 53 years after his death. It's not for his plots. It's for his extras, his telling details about people and places in Los Angeles in the 1940s. When Marlowe leaves the Graysons, he takes the elevator, 'carpeted in red plush. It had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea.'  Those last five words alone are worth the price of the book, and many other books. 

There is another link. It goes back to long ago, when Hamish Hamilton was publishing The Eldorado Network. By good fortune, Roger Machell was my editor   -   and Roger had also been Raymond Chandler's editor for his British editions. He told me that one day his phone rang and it was Chandler, calling from his home in La Jolla, California, and obviously very drunk. "I'm going to shoot myself," he said. Roger, thinking fast, said, "Don't do that, Raymond. Let's talk about it..." He heard two loud bangs. Then silence. Roger phoned the La Jolla police, they hurried over and found Chandler sound asleep in the bathtub, with two bullet-holes in the ceiling.

End of anecdote. But what interested me was that when Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye (and at last won huge critical acclaim), that story included a scene where a successful author, in a fit of boredom and depression, tries and fails to kill himself. Or maybe he doesn't really try, maybe he's just acting.  What's interesting is that Chandler wasted nothing.  Anything and everything he saw and heard got noticed and remembered, including his own misadventure with a gun in a bathroom. One day he might be able to use it. Every writer should have two mottoes.  One is: Trust nobody, check everything. The other is: Look and listen.  The book isn't about the author.  It's about the world he sees, even when (in my case) that's a world of 50 or 100 years ago.

Thanks to the Internet, I get echoes of what I write in emails from readers all over the globe.  Of course praise is encouraging. (There is no limit to the flattery an author can absorb.)  Bill, somewhere in the U.S., himself a novelist, spent 25-plus years in the American Air Force, mostly flying Phantoms, so his opinion carries weight when he says of my flying books: 'I can tell you that the fighter-pilot humor is right on target.'  He re-reads Goshawk Squadron and is now 'in the midst of Piece of Cake and laugh until I have tears rolling down my cheeks'. 

John in Japan, an old friend, writes: 'I have just come to the end of A Good Clean Fight in audiobook format. Bravo, is all I can say. I also listened to Hullo Russia, Goodbye England last year and thoroughly enjoyed that as well!'  (Much of the credit must go to the actors who made the readings, Michael Tudor Barnes and Nick McCardle, for their talented voices.)  And Derrick (I don't know where) 'just wanted to drop you a line to thank you for the pleasure your books have given me. I first read Goshawk Squadron as a boy nearly 40 years ago and have re-read it three more times since.'  Liam via Facebook 'cannot wait for the new book, A Splendid Little War, apparently due later this year.' (Publication is now planned for January 2013.)  He urges 'those of you not in the know' to 'get Piece of Cake, the greatest novel ever written'.  Another Facebook friend, John, 'just finished  Hornet's Sting. What a cracker!  I always had a soft spot for Paxton  - poor bugger. The development of his character from the first book  (War Story), and his relationship with O'Neill, was beautifully done. The end of Pax's story certainly shocked me.'

Then  -  surprise, surprise   -   a letter from Guy, a very old pal (we were at college together, back in the Middle Ages). Recovering from a rather nasty illness, he had time to re-read my flying stories   -   'Once again I was totally engrossed among the vivid characters. Their persuasive arguments and caustic banter make them so alive and such good company.'  Enter his wife, to give him a copy of my non-fiction book, Invasion. 1940, and he says 'to my astonishment I was so hooked by the reasoning that I finished the whole of it before returning to the interrupted novel.'  Well, I worked hard to make that slice of history as readable as any work of fiction, and I'm glad it paid off.  Guy spent his National Service on a Motor Torpedo Boat, dashing up and down the Channel, so he has personal knowledge of those hazardous waters.

I'm delighted to hear that Guy's gremlins have been zapped.  On the other hand, maybe the Luis Cabrillo quartet should have a health warning on the cover.  L.L in New York 'picked up Red Rag Blues, ran across Cabrillo, the Fantonis and Chick Scatola  (Mafiosi of varying competence) and began laughing so hard' that he ended up in hospital   -   although it's only fair to add that he was already suffering from a deep chest cold, so maybe Luis Cabrillo's con-artist doings simply hastened the doctor's decision. Anyway, I sent L.L. a copy of the sequel, Operation Bamboozle and he replied with thanks, saying: 'I look forward to reading BAMBOOZLE with a pacemaker handy.'    Both books were fun to write, and I'm glad they're fun to read. 

My thanks to all who wrote, and to the many who sent me birthday greetings on Facebook  -   too many for me to answer.

 Derek Robinson                   Previous Readers Write


        Derek Robinson - Who He?

I am an author, English, who has cornered the market in flying novels - three about the Royal Flying corps in WW1, three about the RAF in WW2 . Best known is Goshawk Squadron, which would have won the Booker Prize in 1971 if Saul Bellow, one of the judges, had  had his way.  "The most readable novel of the year," Nina Bawden said in the Daily Telegraph.  "I laughed aloud several times, and was in the end reduced to tears."

My other fiction hits other targets.  As well as a trilogy - soon to be a quartet (see panel above) - about Luis Cabrillo, it includes Kentucky Blues, a sprawling  western in which everyone - blacks and whites - gets the blues.  "A wonderful novel," said the Daily Telegraph, "full of hilarious and thought-provoking incident." - and not an aeroplane in sight. 

 I'm told these novels reveal a streak of black humour and a certain debunking of the myths of war, plus what Paul Scott called "a narrative gift that sets up the hackles of involvement".  The American critic Paul Fussell commented, "I defy the reader to put the book down once Robinson has got him into the air." 

Biography

 A policeman's son from a council estate, I reckon I was born lucky.  I had parents who read books, a public library on the corner, and the 1944 Education Act (State Scholarships for bright lads).  I crossed the class barrier by going to Cambridge, got a degree in history, and  learned to write boringly. Stints in advertising in London and New York changed all that.  In 1966 I went to Portugal, wrote two unpublishable novels, returned to England flat broke, married, and finally got it right with Goshawk Squadron, which bought enough time to write the next ripping yarn.

 I've also done a lot of broadcasting, starting in the 70s with radio, when editing a tape meant brisk work with a razor blade, moving on to TV in the 80s, when Autocue was new and not always reliable, so that a 60-second piece to camera tested the memory and the nerves.  I made a few dozen documentaries and  did a ton of rugby commentary.  I also chaired the first-ever Radio 4 phone-in, which used big-name studio guests (Robert Mugabe was the first), and created and presented a Radio 2 show called  Hit List that was an inverted Desert Island Discs - six bits of music you never want to hear again.  Very funny, and why the BBC dropped it is beyond understanding.  As for pastimes, I was a grassroots rugby referee for 30 years, and still play more squash than my friends, or my knees, think wise.  All of which is fine and good, but what really matters are the books.  The rest is just ink, sweat and taxes.  



Click here to see all  my books displayed in topic groups. 
 

                         Copyright

I own rights  -  literary, dramatic, screen, merchandising and the rest  -  to my books, except those rights that have been granted to publishers or producers.

MacLehose Press (a division of Quercus Books) has the book rights to the World War Two/RAF quartet. Quercus Books has the electronic (e-book) rights to all my fiction backlist. Soundings (Isis Publishing) has the audio (books on tape) rights to four books (Goshawk Squadron; A Good Clean Fight; Damned Good Show; Hullo Russia, Goodbye England).  In 1971, Sam Goldwyn Jr bought the movie and television rights to Goshawk Squadron.  In 1988, LWT made a six-art television series of Piece of Cake; the DVD is available. I own the rights to any screen remake of
Piece of Cake and the screen rights to all my other novels
 Derek Robinson

Contact       I welcome comments and views about my books, though as a working writer I can't guarantee to have sufficient time to answer everyone.  

Click here to send me an email.

 Click any group heading to see  details.

           
The RFC Trilogy (WW1)
               hrge original
                   The RAF Quintet (WW2)
       
The Double Agent Quartet
                            
Other Novels
       New!
          
Rugby Books

      PureBristleCvr
Bristol Books

Availability of the books.
This varies from title to title. High Street booksellers will be able to tell you the current position about
any particular  book, or you could try the following websites, which are useful for tracking down both
 new and second-hand copies.

Amazon UK   Amazon USA      Fantastic Fiction   

Other websites you may find of interest
:

eRugbyNews.com    Wikipedia     IMDB     The Aerodrome Forum    LibraryThing.com

                           Major books and original publication dates:
1971      Goshawk Squadron                   1973      Rotten with Honour                       1977      Kramer's War  
1979      The Eldorado Network             1983      Piece of Cake                                  1987      War Story      

1991      Artillery of Lies                        1993      A Good Clean Fight                       1999      Hornet's Sting  
2002      Damned Good Show                  2002       Kentucky Blues                            2005     Invasion 1940
2005      Red Rag Blues                          2008       Hullo Russia, Goodbye England
2009      Operation Bamboozle                                                                                                                                      
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