One television programme that I loved during my childhood was The High Chaparral. I wasn’t born when the BBC first broadcast the show in October 1968, but I watched reruns during the late 1970s. As a boy I did not appreciate the quality of the acting and the storylines as I do now, but I always remembered it fondly.

As a novelist who thoroughly enjoys the fiction of secret cabals and conspiracies, I am alarmed at how the citizens of supposedly civilised Western democracies are becoming increasingly controlled by Big Tech platforms, the mainstream media and their allies in Western governments. Fiction has become reality.

I have read and watched a lot of commentary about the Manchester Airport incident on the 23rd July. The focus has been on a brief video clip which appears to show a police officer using apparently excessive force – two kicks to the head – against a male suspect who is lying belly down on the ground.

How have we arrived in such a forlorn era in British politics? How have we been cornered into choosing between Labour’s untrustworthy Keir ‘Weasel Weathervane’ Starmer and the inauthentic Conservative usurper ‘Fishy’ Rishi Sunak? They both appear to be empty vessels. But is it a Hobson’s choice?

A good novel is enhanced by thoughtful presentation, and one of the best ways to make the reading experience enjoyable is to use a clear font for the text of the book. A font which looks good on a screen is less likely to be suitable for the printed page, and there are different layout factors to consider as well.

The two most untrustworthy and odious men in British politics, Labour leader Keir Starmer and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, have been at it again. Eager to deflect from a historic breach of protocol in the House of Commons, they have thrown absurd and slanderous allegations of Islamophobia at Lee Anderson MP.

Tautology in written or spoken language is the repetition of meaning. It’s usually something to be avoided, but it can have a useful place in creative writing when a point needs to emphasised for dramatic effect. Everyone knows to avoid saying dead corpse, but a novelist might be inclined to exaggerate thus:

There are two types of critics of the police. One group would love nothing more than to see the institution abolished. We know exactly who they are, and destroying the police is just one of their anarchic values. Fortunately the second group of critics come from the sensible majority who believe in law and order.

In the previous post I discussed the perception of the police as a woke institution, looking at how various influences over several decades have led to a culture of identity politics that is endorsed by chief officers despite substantial public opposition. But there is another element which requires closer examination.

Anyone who has been paying attention to UK policing in the last five or six years will know that concerns are frequently voiced about the politicization of the institution and an apparent drift away from the principle of treating all citizens ‘without fear or favour’ toward activism rooted in identity-based grievances.

As a writer I see the world as divided into creators and critics. Politically a similar division exists between conservatives and dismantlers. There are stoics and worriers, contrarians and sheep, critical thinkers and the impressionable. Immunity from manipulation is not a natural state; we have to inoculate ourselves.

Autumn begins in August, according to my character Edwin Craugh, and I agree with him. In the corner of Essex where I was raised, the leaves on the horse chestnuts begin to brown in the first week of the month, and the blackberries start to ripen on the bramble a few days later. It happens like clockwork every year.

I’ll start this post by making the assumption you agree that the first draft of a novel is not the one that ought to be published. Every book needs to go through several stages of revision and correction. I’ll talk about the method I have refined as I’ve written more and more novels. I hope it gives you some ideas.

They tried to kill the channel before launch with a hate campaign. They predicted it wouldn’t survive six months on air. They decried it as a right-wing echo chamber for simple-minded bigots. But, two years after launch, GB News is proving itself to be a champion of free speech across the political spectrum.

If you publish Kindle books on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform, you may have seen that Amazon’s recommended method to format your e-books is to use Kindle Create. The software is free and easy to use, especially for novels written in Word, but it has some foibles. Here are my tips for using it.

I bring this three-part blog to an end with reviews of another nine manhunt thrillers. And while the chase theme is central to all the books discussed here, it is not the only point of merit, and there are qualities in these novels which I have not had room to adequately describe. But I hope I have encouraged interest.

In part one I began my review of manhunt books by reviewing nine notable titles in the genre. In this post I look at another selection of novels in which a character has to pit his wits against a cunning adversary. The chase story uniquely portrays the main character’s journey in both a literal and figurative sense.

The manhunt thriller, or chase novel, is the purest form of adventure story. The tale of a fleeing man in peril is the most basic of plots and yet the most enthralling. The chase novel does not require the intricacies of its mystery or crime siblings, for it is jeopardy rather than curiosity which drives the story’s momentum.