Introduction
In the last decade or so, I’ve written five full-length books. Along the way, I’ve also self-published several shorter works, most of which have expanded on articles I’ve written that I felt warranted more space than was possible in newspapers or magazines, but which didn’t deserve full-length treatments.
This book collects all these shorter works and a few other pieces that haven’t previously appeared in book form, including some of my early journalism. In creating this compilation, I wondered what motivated me to write about some of these topics, many of which I researched over the course of several years. Most of the time, I think, I simply wanted to find answers to questions that intrigued me, and then doggedly (or perhaps stubbornly) pursued them. Sometimes this has seemed like a distraction, a way to let off steam when wrestling with writing my ‘main’ books. Sometimes it has been as a result of my research for my novels (mercenaries in Africa, for example) or fed into them: my interest in Antony Terry and Sarah Gainham led to the creation of Sandy Harmigan and Rachel Gold in my novel Spy Out the Land, and eventually resulted in Agent of Influence.
The section titled Blunt Instruments is part of a much longer abandoned work in which I aimed to look at some of the forgotten influences of Ian Fleming. I abandoned it for a few reasons, one of which is that it became increasingly unwieldy and I despaired at how long it would take me to research fully: I had pencilled in chapters examining in detail the penny dreadfuls, Biggles, American pulps and much more besides. Another reason was that my research into Dennis Wheatley’s work had convinced me that his was the most striking forgotten influence on Fleming, and that eventually became A Spy is Born.
This collection comes full circle with Cabal, the first piece of fiction I wrote that I felt had any value. Rather than taking a strictly chronological approach, I’ve tried to arrange the material in an order that makes sense – but this probably isn’t a book to read sequentially anyway. I hope you find something in it of interest.
Jeremy Duns
Mariehamn, December 2020