Sherlock Holmes and the Ciphered List
My debut novel 'Sherlock Holmes and the Ciphered List' has just been published. It is written under the non de plume of Simon Trelawney and published by Breese Books, an imprint of Baker Street Studios, which specialises in Sherlock Holmes pastiche. It is a full length novel and written in the style of Conan Doyle (or so I like to think).
It is available from the publishers at www.breesebooks.com or from Amazon at £10.99 in paperback.
It was written chiefly during the Covid lockdown when I suddenly found I had a great deal of time on my hands and decided to try to fulfil my long held ambition to write a novel. After a few false starts I found myself inspired by my life-long immersion in the Sherlock Holmes canon and together with a few loose ideas for a plot I set to work. The whole project took me about 18 months from start to finish, during the course of which I was lucky enough to find a publisher in the person of Dr. Antony Richards of Baker Street Studios who very kindly agreed to publish my work on the basis of some sample chapters. At that stage the novel was not yet complete and still needed a lot of editing and polishing. There were a number of minor (and good-natured) disagreements between Antony and myself over certain aspects of the plot and characterisation, and he pulled me up on some anachronisms of which I was undoubtably guilty, lacking his very detailed knowlege of the era. A particular bone of contention was the matter of blood analysis, with me having Holmes utilising techniques that were not yet available in the 1890s. I was able to get round this by Holmes explaining, rather elaborately, to a long suffering Dr. Watson that he had been in correspondence with some Continental professors of forensic medicine who had informed him of their, as yet unpublished, discoveries!
Antony and I were finally able to agree on the text in early December 2021 but for various reasons of a technical nature there had to be a six month gap before publication. The novel finally saw the light of day on 6th of June (D-day) 2022 to my immense joy and satisfaction.
It is available from the publishers at www.breesebooks.com or from Amazon at £10.99 in paperback.
It was written chiefly during the Covid lockdown when I suddenly found I had a great deal of time on my hands and decided to try to fulfil my long held ambition to write a novel. After a few false starts I found myself inspired by my life-long immersion in the Sherlock Holmes canon and together with a few loose ideas for a plot I set to work. The whole project took me about 18 months from start to finish, during the course of which I was lucky enough to find a publisher in the person of Dr. Antony Richards of Baker Street Studios who very kindly agreed to publish my work on the basis of some sample chapters. At that stage the novel was not yet complete and still needed a lot of editing and polishing. There were a number of minor (and good-natured) disagreements between Antony and myself over certain aspects of the plot and characterisation, and he pulled me up on some anachronisms of which I was undoubtably guilty, lacking his very detailed knowlege of the era. A particular bone of contention was the matter of blood analysis, with me having Holmes utilising techniques that were not yet available in the 1890s. I was able to get round this by Holmes explaining, rather elaborately, to a long suffering Dr. Watson that he had been in correspondence with some Continental professors of forensic medicine who had informed him of their, as yet unpublished, discoveries!
Antony and I were finally able to agree on the text in early December 2021 but for various reasons of a technical nature there had to be a six month gap before publication. The novel finally saw the light of day on 6th of June (D-day) 2022 to my immense joy and satisfaction.
I have been interviewed by 'Your Harlow', the local online newspaper and the filmed interview has been posted on the 'Your Harlow' website and on their You Tube channel. It is available here
The Politics of the Rope
My book, "The Politics of the Rope: The Campaign to Abolish Capital Punishment in Britain, 1955-1969", has been published by Arena Books of Bury St Edmunds in 2012, price £18.99. It is a deeply researched academic study of the campaign to abolish hanging in Britain, based very largely on my extensive and intensive researches for my PhD of the same name. Details to follow. It is obtainable online from Amazon, or from Arena or from myself.
My book The Politics of the Rope: The Campaign to Abolish Capital Punishment in Britain, 1955-69 has just been published (Arena, softback, 400 pp., October 2012, £18.99). It is essentially the long version of my PhD thesis of the same title, which I have been trying to get published for a long time. It is a work of political history, being an account of the campaign to abolish hanging in this country, focusing more or less completely on the critical years from the mid 1950s to the late 1960s. It deals with the campaign from a very broad perspective, taking in the Parliamentary manoeuvring and pressure group activity, but covering also social, religious and cultural factors, and setting it in the context of the liberalising mood of the times and the raft of conscience legislation on abortion, divorce and homosexuality . It seeks to demonstrate the way in which social and cultural trends can flow into and out of politics.
It is based chiefly on primary sources, including much material hitherto largely overlooked, including the papers of the main abolitionist pressure group, much Home Office documentation drawn from the National Archives, and the papers of the chief political parties. It includes a discussion of the treatment of the hanging issue by the mass media, especially television, radio, film and theatre, and its coverage by the press, both popular and specialist; and draws, inter alia, on the written archives of the BBC; and demonstrates the way in which the question was woven into the fabric of popular culture. There is an analysis of the activities of the various professional bodies representing the police, the prison service and the legal profession and how important they were in influencing the course of political debate, and there is a lengthy discusion of the role of the various churches and how their position evolved during the course of the fifties and sixties. There is a chapter on opinion polls and the importance, or unimportance, of public opinion, and there is an analysis of the significance of the various miscarriages and causes celebre of the era, particularly the cases of Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis and to what extent they weighed on public opinion.
Later chapters deal with the governmental manoeuvring over the entrenchment of abolition and the attempts to beat off a strong campaign to restore hanging at the earliest opportunity in the wake of a number of high profile murder cases, attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the abolition of hanging; the tangentially associated campaigns about other "conscience" issues such as the legalisation of homosexuality, the liberalising of divorce and abortion, the abolition of theatre censorship and the relaxation of the Sunday Observance laws. There is an analysis of the reasons for the ultimate success of the campaign despite consistently adverse public opinion and in the teeth of institutional hostility from the judiciary, much of the Conservative Party, the police and prison service and much of the right-wing press.
The book is available on Amazon and from most major booksellers.
Amazon - Kindle edition here:
Amazon - Paperback edition here:
It is based chiefly on primary sources, including much material hitherto largely overlooked, including the papers of the main abolitionist pressure group, much Home Office documentation drawn from the National Archives, and the papers of the chief political parties. It includes a discussion of the treatment of the hanging issue by the mass media, especially television, radio, film and theatre, and its coverage by the press, both popular and specialist; and draws, inter alia, on the written archives of the BBC; and demonstrates the way in which the question was woven into the fabric of popular culture. There is an analysis of the activities of the various professional bodies representing the police, the prison service and the legal profession and how important they were in influencing the course of political debate, and there is a lengthy discusion of the role of the various churches and how their position evolved during the course of the fifties and sixties. There is a chapter on opinion polls and the importance, or unimportance, of public opinion, and there is an analysis of the significance of the various miscarriages and causes celebre of the era, particularly the cases of Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis and to what extent they weighed on public opinion.
Later chapters deal with the governmental manoeuvring over the entrenchment of abolition and the attempts to beat off a strong campaign to restore hanging at the earliest opportunity in the wake of a number of high profile murder cases, attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the abolition of hanging; the tangentially associated campaigns about other "conscience" issues such as the legalisation of homosexuality, the liberalising of divorce and abortion, the abolition of theatre censorship and the relaxation of the Sunday Observance laws. There is an analysis of the reasons for the ultimate success of the campaign despite consistently adverse public opinion and in the teeth of institutional hostility from the judiciary, much of the Conservative Party, the police and prison service and much of the right-wing press.
The book is available on Amazon and from most major booksellers.
Amazon - Kindle edition here:
Amazon - Paperback edition here: