Mission: Falklands - Just Published!

Mission: Falklands is the fourth in the Tana Standish psychic spy thriller series. 

The Tana Standish missions are a mixture of fact and fiction but with ‘a nifty twist’, as one reviewer put it. The ‘smart, sexy female protagonist isn’t just a rare child survivor from Warsaw’s WWII ghetto. Nor is she merely a highly skilled covert operative, brought up by the British to be extremely effective against the KGB. Tana Standish has one more thing going for her: psychic talents. There’s nothing outlandish in the psi-spy’s capabilities – they’re neatly underplayed, a talent which isn’t understood or entirely controllable but which frequently tips the odds in her favour.’

Mission: Prague (Czechoslovakia, 1975).

Mission: Tehran (Iran, 1978).

Mission: Khyber (Afghanistan, 1979-1980).

Mission: Falklands (Argentina, the Falkland Islands, and South Georgia, 1982).

[All of the above are available on Amazon in paperback and e-book format]

It took thirty-four years for my original Tana Standish psychic spy novel The Ouija Message to grow and improve and eventually transmogrify into Mission: Prague. One of my first versions was rejected by Robert Hale with the comment that it was better than many books that were published but they ‘didn’t do fantasy’. (They accepted my first book sale in 2007, a western!). It came close a few times to being accepted but in retrospect I’m glad it didn’t get published earlier. The characters and the story required more depth, more time to evolve. Naturally, there has to be a willingness to suspend disbelief regarding psychic abilities! Then again, most fiction is fantasy anyway.

Prague garnered good reviews, such as ‘Interestingly, Morton sells it as a true story passed to him by an agent and published as fiction, a literary ploy often used by master thriller writer Jack Higgins. Let’s just say that it works better than Higgins.’ – Danny Collins, author of The Bloodiest Battles.

Each book begins with my first person narration. I receive a manuscript from a secret agent which recounts one of Tana’s missions. Here’s an excerpt of the Prologue from Mission: Falklands:

Beyond the headland the North Sea was grey and turbulent, white horses racing towards the shore. Leaden clouds swirled, harbingers of rain, threatening another bleak December day. I managed to find a parking space for my Dacia Sandero on the road opposite the Octagon Tower, built in 1720, in the Northumberland town of Seaton Sluice – known colloquially as ‘the Sluice’ – half-way between Whitley Bay and Blyth.

I walked the short distance past a dry-stone wall towards the King’s Arms, a large three-storey whitewashed sandstone pub. Almost everywhere you went in the north-east was steeped in history and this Grade II listed public house was no exception, built around 1764. Overlooking the small harbour and Seaton Burn with its smattering of small boats beached on mud, it had started out as an overseer’s house, and then became the King’s Arms Hotel and coach house. In the nineteenth century the coach house was used by HM Coastguard on the lookout for contraband smugglers.

On the left was a short bridge which crossed a manmade channel blasted out in the 1760s by Sir John Delaval and named ‘the cut’; the bridge linked the newly formed ‘Rocky Island’ to the mainland and is now adorned with love-padlocks.

Despite the slight chill in the air and the threat of rain, a handful of male and female regulars in shorts and T-shirts sat drinking at wooden tables outside in an area roped-off with beer-barrels: the usual tough north-easterners.

Keith Tyson, retired spy, stood waiting for me at the entrance porch, as punctual as ever. I was pleased to see under his arm he carried a familiar leather valise though it was now a little careworn – a bit like him.

The stories about her missions are told in multiple third person narrative, merging fact and fiction. Part of the inspiration for the series stems from my interest in history.

Wherever possible I have tried to write about places I’ve seen or visited, such as Gosport’s Fort Monkton, the Khyber Pass, Belize, Bahrein, the United States, the Falklands and South Georgia. Other places have required considerable research. In Mission: Tehran at a critical point there is an earthquake in Yazd; that actually happened on the date shown in the book. An episode in Mission: Falklands that involved two Soviets in Altun Ha is derived from my trek there. Another sequence describes a meal in the Pink House in Savannah, Georgia, which I’ve frequented. My memories of two days on South Georgia informed a section of the story too. And so on...

Tana has a few contacts in Argentina and several friends who suffer at the hands of the military regime. Tana is determined to help them. And of course betrayal lurks in the shadows... When she embarks on her rescue crusade she learns a devastating fact that changes everything and thrusts her towards the Falkland Islands and inhospitable South Georgia at the outset of the historic conflict...

Inevitably Argentina’s ‘disappeared’ and ‘death flights’ are relevant. As with all the books in the series, I’ve strived to inject realism even with the fantasy concept of psychics. As one reviewer has stated, ‘Such is the level of detail and ambition that Morton soon sweeps up the reader in the narrative and creates so convincing a canvas that we can easily accept the central conceit. Bouncing between different times and locations, he has created a book which feels big in scope, an adventure story with a supernaturally gifted protagonist that still feels absolutely real.’

Writing - Gestation of a thriller

Some writers believe that all those piles of writing ideas that had not been translated into either short stories or books should be ditched. There’s sense in that – tidying up, clearing the wheat from the chaff.

However, some ideas require time to gestate and may be worth holding onto - for years. I have several examples of retaining ideas that have ultimately paid dividends; here’s one.

When I was training in the RN in 1971, our group spent an evening round the mess table and set up a Ouija session, using a tumbler and placed in a circle pieces of paper with the alphabet and numbers on them. Needless to say, despite our best efforts, nothing intelligible resulted. Then I proposed that the gobbledegook was in code. And an idea formed. The message would be transmitted by a psychic spy, Tana Standish.

But, in the final analysis, it didn’t seem to be gibberish.

By the time Keith Tyson deciphered the first paragraph, he felt sick inside.

Unsmiling narrow mouth beneath a salt-and-pepper moustache, Jock stubbed out half-smoked cigarettes repeatedly. He was a bag of nerves since his last mission. It was plain on his face that he knew this astral message was very bad.

At last Tyson put down the pencil and raised his grey eyes. His expression was solemn. “It’s from Tana,” he said. “They’ve got her.”

Alan Swann’s face lost most of its colour as he leaned forward. He queried softly, “Where?”

“Czechoslovakia.” (p174)

That was the set-up. So I wrote a 2,000-word short story entitled ‘The Ouija Message’. Even though by then I’d sold a number of action-adventure stories, this one didn’t find a home. In retrospect, I realised that the story needed more space. I embarked on writing a book – same title – and it stretched to a modest 50,000 words.

At that time (1974) publishers were not averse to commenting on submissions. Robert Hale was not keen on the psychic elements but said ‘the work is up to publication standard and indeed better than many that are published’. So that was encouraging. Alas, a good number of rejections of Ouija followed and time passed and life-work tended to get in the way. I continued to have reasonable successes with short story and article sales, and wrote other books, thrillers and fantasy, but didn’t sell any of those novels either.

Time passed. As it does. Then, in 2007 I dug out a one-line idea – ‘He was dressed entirely in black. Black because he was in mourning. Mourning the men he had killed.’ I decided to write a western! That same year I sold the resultant book to Hale, and five more followed before they went out of business. At the same time, I had success with the Harry Bowling Prize, winning an award with the first chapters of a crime novel. While, sadly, I didn’t get agent representation, the success spurred me on to finish that crime book and it was accepted by a new publisher, Libros, under the title Pain Wears No Mask; (Libros went out of business but now the book is available as The Bread of Tears). On the back of these two successes, I revisited The Ouija Message and, thanks to all those years of writing experience, vastly improved the book to the extent that it ran to 80,000 words and it was accepted by Libros in 2008. That book spawned two more adventures and I’m busy writing the fourth in the Tana Standish psychic spy series. Since my breakthrough in 2007 I’ve had 37 books published.

The moral of all this? Never give up on your writing ideas. Believe in yourself. And if you keep writing, you keep improving.

 

Note: The Tana Standish books are: Mission: Prague (Czechoslovakia, 1975); Mission: Tehran (Iran, 1978); Mission: Khyber (Afghanistan, 1979); Mission: Falklands (Argentina, 1982) – work in progress.

QUILLER BALALAIKA - Book review

Sadly, Balalaika is the last Quiller novel (published 1996). Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor) died the day after he finished it, in July 1995.

It’s contemporary: following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian mafiya is poised to take over the new Russia by destroying the country’s economy. The man responsible and capable of achieving this is a British Moscow-based national, a defector from the Foreign Office, who escaped the country and was given the rank of Colonel in the KGB. ‘His name is Basil Secker, and he uses the Russian alias of Vasyl Sakkas’ (p11). Sakkas is elusive and powerful. Quiller’s mission – Balalaika – is to infiltrate the mafiya and then find and neutralise Sakkas in some manner.

Briefed by Chief of Signals Croder, Quiller is made aware that this is a dangerous ask, with poor chance of success. Quiller requires Ferris as his director in the field; this is so important, that Ferris will be pulled off the Rickshaw mission in China.

As before, Quiller shuns the use of any gun. He is adept at unarmed combat, delivering death when his life is threatened or the mission is at risk of collapsing.

All the style of the previous novels is here displayed at the hands of a 75-year-old thriller writer at the top of his game: the usual spare prose, the stream-of-consciousness writing, the extensive scene of hand-to-hand combat (subsequently employed by Lee Child, among others), and his continual argument with his pain-averse conscience, often referring to himself as ‘the little ferret’.

‘It was eight days since Ferris had been ordered out of the field and by now the lights would be switched off over the board, either that or a new mission would already be set up there with data coming in from the director in Algeria or Baghdad or Beijing, while Mr Croder shut himself up in his tempered-steel shell to consider whether or not to resign, how much guilt to feel for the little ferret he’d left running in circles through the snow, or whether he could hold out a spider’s-thread hope for an eleventh-hour last-ditch breakthrough for the mission, knowing as he did the blind tenacity of said ferret when the jaws of adversity gaped from the shadows of the labyrinth’ (p232).

The breathless climax in wintry Moscow is fitting, another Hall-mark fast-paced ending.

‘That’s it.’ So the author finished his last book. There’s a poignant four-page Afterword contribution by Jean-Pierre Trevor, his son.

Editorial notes:

Combat

In two places Hall mentions hitting the nose with force, driving the bone into the brain and causing instant death. However, when researching my recent  Leon Cazador novel No Prisoners, I learned that this is probably not so: ‘Next instant, Leon deployed the ninja Fudo-ken, the clenched fist slamming full into the man’s nose, shattering the bone structure. While the bone and cartilage probably wouldn’t penetrate his perverted brain, the blow would undoubtedly cause subdural hematoma which was bound to deny the brain adequate blood flow. As a result, a biochemical cascade was in all likelihood happening right now as Leon dispassionately watched. Brain cell death was imminent. No great loss to humanity.’

Chapter titles

The single-word chapter headings were not always evident. In The Quiller Memorandum of the 23 chapters only 12 are single words; interestingly Ch3 is ‘Snow’ and in Balalaika Ch1 is ‘Snow’.

His fourth Quiller (The Warsaw Document) is the first with the consistent use of single-word chapter headings. There is only one other exception, in Quiller’s Run, with 11 of 32 being two-word titles, one of them being ‘Pink Panties’!

Certainly, inevitably, as mentioned already, some chapter headings will be repeated, not least ‘Midnight’.

Why mention this? For my Tana Standish psychic spy novels I adopted Adam Hall’s penchant for single-word chapter titles (Mission: Prague, Mission: Tehran, and Mission: Khyber). In contrast, my Leon Cazador novels have two-word chapter headings (Rogue Prey, No Prisoners, and Organ Symphony).

See also: WRITEALOT: Book review - Quiller: A profile and Bury Him Among Kings (nik-writealot.blogspot.com)

JET STREAM

I was drawn to the book Jet by Russell Blake because the cover shares the same model as my book Mission: Prague (see the two covers to compare below).

  

The similarities don’t end there, either. Maya, codename Jet is a twenty-eight-year-old Mossad assassin. The heroine in Mission: Prague is psychic spy Tana, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto; she was thirty-eight at the time of her Prague mission.

Jet’s adventures are set in the present, while Tana’s are in the past (Czechoslovakia, 1975; Iran, 1978; Afghanistan, 1979).

Tana’s Prague novel first came out in 2008 as The Prague Manuscript. Jet was published in 2012, though the ‘shared’ model did not appear on the new Prague cover until 2017.

Both books are fast-paced.

Jet – the first book in the series

Maya thought she’d left behind her life of violence and had retired to Trinidad. Unfortunately, somebody from her past had talked and sent an assassination squad to eliminate her. From the explosive beginning to the traumatising end, it’s action all the way. I certainly want to read more in the series!

Russell Blake has produced a page-turning thrill-ride that has built up an enviable fan base. And to his fans’ delight he’s prolific. He’s just produced his SEVENTEENTH Jet novel (including two prequels) plus a host of other series; in all, in seven years he’s written about 60 books (and co-authored two with Clive Cussler).

If you like your adventures fast and furious, try the Jet series.  

***

Secret file – 00/13/417 – Tana Standish, psychic spy

Mission: Prague was released by a MOD accredited publisher, Manatee Books. It is based on a manuscript that came into the possession of the author Nik Morton (believed to be a pseudonym). Investigations are in hand to ascertain the source. It is believed that the work is a collaborative effort by a select group of agents, all intent on telling the story of Tana Standish, psychic spy.

Standish was recruited into International Enterprises (Interprises) in 1965 and her career continued until 1988.

Her story is ostensibly being told as fiction. Mission: Prague involves Standish in a mission in Czechoslovakia in 1975.

Other earlier Standish missions have still to be declassified. They take place in the following theatres: Singapore (1965), Naples (1966), Izmir (1967), Odessa (1968), Pilsen (1968), Karachi (1970), Elba (1971), Gibraltar (1972), Mombasa (1973), and Hong Kong (1974).

Standish – brief biography

Tana was born on May 12, 1937 in Warsaw. At the time of the uprising of the ghetto in 1942, she was five years old. She had two brothers, Mordechai and Ishmael, both now deceased. She was adopted by a British couple in 1942, but her adoptive father Lieutenant Hugh Standish was killed ironically in a car crash two years later. Her mother Vera never remarried.

Tana joined Edinburgh University in 1955 and read Psychology, gaining a BA (Hons) in 1958. Thereafter, she worked for the Parapsychological Research Unit, Northamptonshire – 1958 to early 1965; during this time, she travelled to the US and the USSR, among other countries, to give talks on memory, for, besides possessing psychic abilities, she has a photographic memory.

Two of her later missions have been documented in Mission: Tehran (1978) and Mission: Khyber (1979)

Book review - The Fox

Frederick Forsyth’s return after a fiction hiatus of five years sees his thriller The Fox published before it’s really ready. It seems rushed, for reasons I’ll go into soon, and is sadly unsatisfactory, and I believe the blame can be shared equally between Mr Forsyth and the publisher.

The publisher should do better. The list of books by Forsyth is impressive, with The Outsider following on from The Kill List, below which are two Non-fiction books listed, The Biafra Story and Emeka. Don’t Bantam Press know that The Outsider is non-fiction, being his autobiography?

The story is about a young British man, Luke Jennings, with Asperger’s Syndrome who has hacked into the US security system. Together with his family (mother, father, brother) he is arrested and they're sequestered in a safe place in England. Rather than prosecute him, both the Americans and the British decide to make use of his considerable gifts to tilt the balance of power – to interfere with Russian, North Korean and Chinese computer-linked weapons systems.

Forsyth’s page-turning ability is apparent as he peppers the story with facts and details about the clandestine and political world, even including most recent events, such as the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury and the summit meetings with North Korea. As usual, Forsyth employs his omniscient third person narrative, creating that immediacy of a reporter viewing events unfolding. Unfortunately, that technique here leaves little room for emotion. In truth, I felt that the book reads more like a film treatment than a novel; it was all tell, tell, tell and not much show.

It’s a quirk of mine, but I find it annoying when a character is referred to in two different ways. The putative hero is Sir Adrian Weston. Most of the time, we get Adrian or Sir Adrian. But then he drops in Weston. Bond was always Bond; end of.

The utilisation of Luke is serious wishful thinking, breaking down foreign firewalls virtually at the drop of a hat. Luke’s technical shepherd who directs the lad’s hacking activities is Jeremy Hendricks, who (to tick a box) ‘was gay but made no mention of it, choosing a quiet life of celibacy’ (p13).

Hendricks is an example of poor characterisation. We don’t really get to know Sue Jennings, Luke’s mother, or even Luke, ‘The Fox’ for that matter. We learn a little about Sir Adrian, even delving beneath his skin. But that’s all. The majority of characters – and there are over 30 listed (with organizations too) beginning on p303 – are ciphers. There is no emotional content, so as a reader I didn’t experience any tension when threats were described to silence Luke. Really, Luke is the main character, the reason for the story, Hitchcock’s McGuffin, yet he does not come alive, so then the threat of his death falls flat: it should create concern at least.

Since reading the book, I’ve looked at the reviews. They fall into two categories: excellent thriller, couldn’t put it down and the obverse, highly disappointing with a cop-out ending. I regret to concur with the naysayers.

An aside

I was fascinated to read about a sleeper agent: ‘The agent … masqueraded as a shopkeeper in the West End of London whose British name was Burke. His real name was Dmitri Volkov.’ (p73)

In my Tana Standish psychic spy novel Mission: Tehran (originally published 2009, re-published 2017) states:

Yuri – cover-name Neil Tomlinson – had hired the light cargo aircraft for the day and filed all the flight-plan papers at the nearby airport. He landed in a field a couple of miles away from Fenner House and picked up ‘agent Burke’.

Lieutenant Aksakov had already concealed the Escort behind a hedge and a cluster of trees and thrown the blonde wig and business clothes into the boot.

She was wearing the more familiar hard-wearing green cotton tunic and trousers. For this mission she’d left behind in the car’s boot her water flask, the folding stock version of the Kalashnikov automatic AKM, three hundred 7.62mm rounds and the P351-M radio set with scrambling and high-speed transmission apparatus. The vehicle was detonated to explode should she be unable to retrieve it. Instead, she carried her spring-loaded knife, spare blades, a Makarov pistol and thirty-two rounds. Six grenades and plastic explosive completed her weapons load. (p184)

Glossary: Burke - Code-name chosen because Aksakov specialised in throttling people without leaving a trace and this transitive verb stems from a nineteenth century murderer’s name. (p275)

Coincidence, then…

Editor comment:

There are a few instances where an editor should have intervened; here are just two of them.

1) ‘Though he was more than ten years older than the man at Yasenevo, he had noted the rising star of the SVR when he had been deputy chief of MI6.’ (p90) Of course the rising star of the SVR wasn’t in MI6, though that is the implication here. It should have read ‘Though he was more than ten years older than the man at Yasenevo, when he had been deputy chief of MI6 he had noted the rising star of the SVR.’

2) ‘Under the Shah, Israel had little to fear from Iran…’ (p170) Of course the Shah was never the head of state of Israel. Perhaps it should have read: ‘Under the Shah, Iran posed little threat to Israel…’

An interview

Here's an interview which has just been posted online:

http://mxpublishing.tumblr.com/post/178408884643/the-mx-book-of-new-sherlock-holmes-stories

Best wishes

Nik

'... feels absolutely real.'

"When I picked up this novel about psychic British spy, Tana Standish, and her adventures in 1970s Czechoslovakia, the spy template I thought it would adhere to is the James Bond one. After all, that is already an outsized world and surely a beautiful spy with precognitive abilities could be dropped in fairly seamlessly.

But Nik Morton actually foxed me, by instead opting for the John Le Carré model. This is a gritty and realistic feeling world, with dirt under its fingernails. And it’s beautifully realised. You can almost smell the Turkish coffee and cheap cigarettes in the cafes... But is there any way to make a psychic spy fit seamlessly into this world?

You have your doubts, don’t you?

And yet Morton manages it.

Such is the level of detail and ambition, that Morton soon sweeps the reader up in the narrative and creates such a convincing canvas that we can easily accept the central conceit. Bouncing between different times and locations, he has created a book which feels big in scope, an adventure story with a supernaturally gifted protagonist that still feels absolutely real.

I was expecting a light throwaway read with Mission: Prague, but was glad I got something far more ambitious."

Thank you, F.R. Jameson for commenting on Goodreads.

The full review can be read there. 

Mission: Prague

Available on Amazon as a paperback and an e-book here

International Women's Day - strong females!

It's International Women's Day today. 

Why they have to have a special day for it is beyond me. 

We should be celebrating women every day.

A number of my published novels feature strong female protagonists; all of which are available on Amazon.

Chill of the Shadow

Tagline: In her search for truth she found love – with a vampire!

Paperback and e-book available here

A modern romantic thriller set in present-day Malta, involving black magic, vampirism, Knights of Malta and, perhaps topically, corrupt Maltese politicians. Malta and Gozo are colourful photogenic islands, steeped in history... 

The Bread of Tears

Tagline: When she was a cop, she made their life hell. Now she’s a nun, God help them!

Paperback and e-book available here

The Tana Standish psychic spy series (Cold War faction)

Before Salt. Before Atomic Blonde. Before Red Sparrow. There was Tana Standish, psychic spy! Although ‘historical’, these adventures will still resonate as the Cold War has definitely returned.

Mission: Prague

Czechoslovakia, 1975.

Tagline: Orphaned in the Warsaw ghetto, she became a spy. And she’s psychic, which gives her an edge!

 Paperback and e-book available here

Mission: Tehran

Iran, 1978.

Tagline: She’s an assassin and has no regrets about killing evil men.

 Paperback and e-book available here

Mission: Khyber

Afghanistan, 1979.

Tagline: Psychic against psychic as the Soviets invade Afghanistan!

  Paperback and e-book available here

The Avenging Cat crime series

Tagline: Catherine Vibrissae. Orphan. Chemist. Model. Avenging Cat.

Catalyst – set in England and Spain

Paperback and e-book available here

Catacomb – set in France and Morocco

Paperback and e-book available here

 

Cataclysm – set in Tenerife and China 

Paperback and e-book available here