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Readers Write #96 September 2024
 The S.S. Demerara, sealing off the Bristol Port
- which was in the wrong place
Claud Cockburn once thought of writing a book on the English, to be called How About Wednesday Week?, that being the English idea of urgency. The Port of Bristol had that as its motto.
In 1755, Bristol had been the second-biggest
port in the country; but that was in the age of small ships. The
average was 400 tons; 800 tons was big. The saying was 'Shipshape
and Bristol fashion' because, when the tide went out, the ships in port
had no option: they survived by resting on mudbanks; hence the need for
reinforcements. And at full tide, the ships had to be towed up
the Avon which was a twisting, eight-mile river. At low tide, it
was a stream.
And bigger ships were coming. In 1837, Brunel built in Bristol the Great Western.
At 1,340 tons, it was the first-ever transatlantic steamer. The
ship went to Liverpool to be outfitted. Sam Cunard soon had four Great Western-type Cunarders in service from Liverpool. It was the only place they could go.
Bristol thought the world owed them a living because
of the port's history. Disaster loomed. In 1851, the big
steamer Demerara
left Bristol, smashed into a rocky bank, the tide swung her broadside,
the stern slammed against the opposite bank, and she settled and
twisted. The port was shut, as it was when in 1874, the steamer Kron Prinz ploughed into the bank. The Kron Prinz lay on her side for three weeks and spilled cargo.
A port eight miles up a narrow river was a
liability. Eventually Bristol realised that Avonmouth was far
preferable, and they bought the docks. This was in 1884, about fifty years after the Great Western sailed away to Liverpool. The port of Bristol was never accused of haste.
Derek Robinson
Previous Readers Write
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It's
1919. The Great War is over but a civil war is raging in Russia.
Bolshevik Reds are fighting White Russians, and a volunteer
R.A.F. squadron, flying clapped-out Sopwith Camels and DH9 bombers,
arrives to duff up the Reds. But the 'splendid little war' they
are promised turns out to be big and brutal, a world of armoured trains,
anarchist guerillas, unreliable allies and pitiless enemies.
There is comedy, but it is the bleakest kind. A Splendid Little War shows war as it is: grim, funny, moving - but never splendid.Reviews of A Splendid Little War The Daily Express American edition of GQ Magazine The Independent
 |  When
someone at a party asks what I do, I say I write Ripping Yarns.
It's a quick answer but a very incomplete one. I'm best known for my
novels about the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force in the two
World Wars and some might say the books are highly readable adventure
stories. Nothing wrong with that, but there's more than combat in
the high blue yonder - there's also memorable
characters, there's unexpected twists and turns of warfare, and
there's aircrew humour. Especially the humour. I did
my National Service in the Royal Air Force. I was never airborne;
I was in a Ground Control Interception Unit, deep underground in a
concrete bunker. But I learned a lot about the special humour of
flying people, and it emerges naturally and unavoidably in my
novels. Humour is one of the essential colours in the spectrum of life.
You don't make a story more serious by removing the humour; you just
make it less true.
The
longer I do this job, the luckier I know I am. For a start, I'm
English and the English language is global. That's pure luck of birth.
I might have been born in Hungary. There are good Hungarian
writers, but it's a lot easier for me to find readers throughout
the English-speaking world. And I was lucky to have literate
parents. When I grew up there were always books and magazines
about the house, unlike some other kids' homes. There was a good public
library at the end of the street. And there was the 1944
Education Act which created State Scholarships for bright lads and
helped me get into Cambridge. That's
where I learned to write boringly. I was writing to impress, not to
inform. Twelve years in advertising agencies (London and New York)
kicked the crap out of my style. Every word had to work hard. I wrote
ad copy and commercials for everything from Esso petrol to The Wall Street Journal.
Always I knew I wanted to move on, to be a fulltime writer
- but I had nothing to say. Nothing worth reading, anyway.
(I was a late developer.) I wrote two bad and unpublishable novels and
finally got it right with a story called Goshawk Squadron.
Might have won the Booker Prize if Saul Bellow, one of the judges, had
had his way. Not important. "The most readable novel of the year," Nina
Bawden said of Goshawk in the Daily Telegraph.
"I laughed aloud several times, and was in the end reduced to tears."
That's worth more than any prize. The first novel bought me enough time
to write the second, and so it goes. Lucky me.. |
 MacLehose Press (an imprint of Quercus Books) has published all of my flying novels - four Royal Flying Corps books and four Royal Air Force books. Here are the new covers:
Click here to go to the MacLeHose website. where you can click on their individual covers for purchase options, including e-books. This
will be the first time that all my flying titles are in print from the
same publisher: something that gives me great satisfaction.
Equally satisfying is the work of Tony Cowland, who has painted the
cover illustrations for all the books. Each cover looks dramatically
different, yet together they have a family likeness. They form a
splendid collection, and they appeared at The Mall Galleries
(near Admiralty Arch) in the Aviation Paintings of the Year
Exhibition by the Guild of Aviation Artists. The standard was high. My
congratulations to Tony on a memorable achievement. Artist and Author
Photograph: Chris French
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SALESMORE GOOD NEWSAll
four of the Luis Cabrillo novels (following the career of
probably the best WW2 double agent and later con-man) are now
available as eBooks from Amazon/Kindle. Here are the covers:    
Click on a cover to go to the Amazon sales page.The R.F.C. trilogy and the R.A.F. Quartet are also available as e-books.
OPERATION BAMBOOZLE
'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. |
Click to see the News of the World Review |
| 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. 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.
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Copyright MacLehose
Press (an imprint of Quercus Books) owns the book rights to all my RFC
and RAF novels. Sam Goldwyn Jr owns the screen rights
to Goshawk Squadron. In 1988, LWT made a six-part television series ofPiece of Cake and they own the rights to that production. I own the screen rights to any remake of Piece of Cake.
I own the screen rights to all my other novels. Quercus Books owns the
e-book rights to all my fiction backlist, available through
Amazon/Kindle. Derek RobinsonContact 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 |
Main publications Click any group heading to see details.
Availability of the books.
All
my fiction is available as e-books. Maclehose Press publish (in
print) all eight of my flying novels, available from any good book
seller (who may have to order a copy). Or you could try the
websites listed below, often useful for tracking down both new and used
books.
The two Bristle books, and A Darker Side of Bristol are published by Countryside Books .
Other websites you may find of interest: Wikipedia
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
2013 A Splendid Little War
2014 Why 1914?
2017 Holy $moke
2019 Never Mind the Facts
2020 Odds and Sods
2021 Odds and Sods Mk2
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