Hope Springs Eternal

WITH the January blog tour of my first three titles in the DS Thoroughgood series now a distant – but happy – memory the ensuing period has been busy on a number of fronts not least but due to the fact that my family and I are moving to a new house next week!

But before I go any further, I’d like to thank the folk who have been in touch via this website asking when the next book in the DS Thoroughgood series is coming out.

What will be the sixth outing in the series, ‘The Hammer’, is tentatively scheduled for a release later this year by publishers MJP, yet there are many factors that impact on the timing of this and of course the ongoing COVID pandemic is principal among them.

Publication will be tied in with a WHSmith tour and of course right now it is hard to work out just where we will be in terms of people coming into shops and feeling safe enough to linger and chat with a hapless scribbler like the one in this pic below back in the good old, bad old, good old days!

So, from that point of view, I guess all I can say is watch this space!

Returning to the first three titles in the DS Thoroughgood series, all of which can be bought at matthewjamespublishing.com, I am pleased to say that the first book, ‘Parallel Lines’, is under consideration by a major UK TV production company for adaptation.

Throughout my writing career I have been told that my writing style is very visual and would be ideal for TV or film but despite a couple of very near misses early on it has been a case of close but no cigar…so, just maybe, this time I will be able to enjoy that Hamlet moment!

However, while I wait and see how the wind blows this spring and summer with regard to Thoroughgood’s next outing, I have plenty to be busy with on other fronts!

For the last four years in between writing the Thoroughgood adventures and the first in my other series ‘The Shadow of Fear’ revolving around the disgraced but decorated ex-SAS soldier Ludovic Fear, I have been working on a Second World War epic entitled ‘Operation Parsifal’.

This is inspired by the greatest conspiracy theory of the last great global conflict…the suggestion that Hitler escaped from the bunker.

Well this process has finally reached the editorial stage thanks to my friends at ‘Read Panda Editing’, which will lead to the synopsis and sample chapters going out to respected publishers who specialise in this thriving area of fiction.

Scribbling Parsifal on top of my other writing projects has been a challenge not just because of the juggling of different genres but also the intensive level of research required.

Clearly, for once I have no first – hand experience to draw upon as I wasn’t around in Berlin in early 1945…. hard as my daughter Ava finds that to believe!

But the biggest challenge has been centring the novel around a hero who is conflicted like no other character I have developed or written about.

For Dieter Wolff is a Lutheran Christian by birth and upbringing but a member of the Waffen-SS by profession and from this conundrum stems an almighty internal conflict and his overwhelming feelings of guilt become a key part of the plot.

Could a member of the SS serve in such an organisation and yet disagree with the atrocities his organisation perpetrated and ultimately attempt to atone for them on the grandest scale imaginable?

Wolff is soldier first and a Nazi second and time will tell if his inner angst is his undoing or if indeed his part in Operation Parsifal ever sees the light of day!

Like I say hope springs eternal…especially when the sun shines in Scotland!!

Adios!

RjM