The Books

Gallows Thief is a detective story, set in Regency London, a time when there were no detectives as such. There was a very busy gallows, however. This was a period when the English and Welsh gallows were at their busiest and, very occasionally, the government appointed an ‘Investigator’ to look into a conviction. That Investigator is my hero and detective, a man who was an army officer, but who, since the battle of Waterloo (it had to get in somehow) has fallen on hard times.

This tells the tale of one of the most obscure campaigns of the whole of the Napoleonic wars. The Danes had a huge merchant fleet, second only in size to Great Britain’s, and to protect it they possessed a formidable navy. But Denmark was a very small country and when, in 1807, the French decide they will invade Denmark and take the fleet for themselves, Britain has to act swiftly. Swiftly, but not particularly justly. Sharpe is inside Copenhagen when the dreadful and fateful bombardment begins.

Harlequin (US title The Archer’s Tale) begins a series of stories set in the middle of the fourteenth century, an age when the four horsemen of the apocalypse seem to have been released over Europe. This first book tells how Thomas of Hookton leaves his native Dorset to fight aginst the French in Brittany and, afterwards, at the battle of Crecy in Picardy. It is a tale of longbows and butchery, especially when England’s archers swarm into the Norman city of Caen.

Sharpe has to go home from India, and he would have left in 1805 and Cape Trafalgar lies on his way home, so why should he not be there at the right time? The greatest difficulty in writing this book was engineering the plot so that Sharpe could be on board a fighting ship of the Royal Navy (he would have sailed home in an East Indiaman, a merchant ship), but once that was solved Sharpe could give a capable hand in this, the greatest of all sea battles fought under sail.

What is it? So many people visit Stonehenge and come away asking just that question. Was it built by the ancient Greeks? By little green men visiting Wiltshire in UFO’s? Was it a Druid temple? (No, no and no). But it was a temple, and it was built by the folk who lived on what is now Salisbury Plain four or five thousand years ago. Very often history can’t give us the answers to our questions – we simply do not know who built Stonehenge, or why, or what religion was practised there.