Author: navalairhistory
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The Devil At 4 O’Clock and the disaster boom
In 1961, almost a decade before the golden age of the disaster film, one film appeared that presaged almost every element of the main cycle of the 1970s and the subgenre’s revival of the late 1990s. It was this film that arguably had the greatest effect in establishing the structure, tropes and cast of characters…
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Songbirds and Stray Dogs
Songbirds and Stray Dogs – Meagan Lucas, Mint Hill Books 2019 I was familiar with Meagan through her roles as fiction editor of the excellent Barren Magazine so it was with some anticipation that I received her first novel. My interest was piqued even further by the quotation from which the title is drawn (from…
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Frank Barnard – on ghosts and remembrances
I have been a fan of Frank Barnard’s work for years, first becoming aware of his writing back in 2006 with the novel Blue Man Falling, based around a Hawker Hurricane squadron in the Battle of France. Frank has a fascinating background, including a career as a journalist, national service in the RAF and even…
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Fiona Erskine interview – The Chemical Detective
THE CHEMICAL DETECTIVE by Fiona Erskine is published by Point Blank, an imprint of Oneworld, in hardback on 4 April (see review on Goodreads) I’m privileged to be able to interview Fiona Erskine, author of the brilliant new thriller The Chemical Detective. Back in September 2017, OneWorld announced that it had signed up for two…
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My Publishing Nightmare – the story of a book deal gone bad (Part 3)
Parts one and two of this blog series covered what happened when I signed a contract with a publisher for my novel and it turned out badly, with a product I was unhappy with, poor sales and a deteriorating relationship with the publisher, and then my initial, unsuccessful attempts to retrieve my rights to the…
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My Publishing Nightmare – the story of a book deal gone bad (Part 2)
To start off with, I should say that I gave this blog its title before I heard about the shameful business involving Amélie Wen Zhao. Now that really is a publishing nightmare. Suffice to say that what happened to me was bad enough, and the kind of thing that befalls a lot of aspiring authors,…
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My Publishing Nightmare – the story of a book deal gone bad (Part 1)
This is the story of how bad things happened to an author. Me, as it happens. I was naive, disorganised, and arguably lazy with how I sought to get my novel published, but ultimately I don’t think that excuses the bad things. The short version is that I got stuck with a publisher who wasted…
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Historical fiction – where to draw the line
The issue of factual inaccuracy in historical fiction is a perpetual source of debate, and occasional outbreaks of controversy. Reports in the media today pick up on this issue with aspects of the new film Mary Queen of Scots labelled ‘problematic’ by a historian in a BBC report with the Telegraph going as far as…
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Interview with Amanda Berriman, author of ‘Home’
I am very pleased to welcome to Air and Sea Stories, Amanda Berriman, whose fantastic debut novel Home will be published next month (February 2018) by the Transworld imprint of Penguin. Home is a beautiful novel with a unique voice – that of four-(and a half!)-year-old Jesika, who, with her mother is forced to negotiate…
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The last roundhead returns – This Deceitful Light review
The Last Roundhead, by Jemahl Evans, was one of the best historical novels I’ve read in a long time. The voice of the main character and narrator, Blandford Candy, was as authentic as it is possible to get in a work written in the 21st century. Better, he existed in a world of such effortlessly…
Air and Sea Stories 
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