Frankie's Letter

Whisper it softly, but I think I’ve just published a book.  Yes, I know, it’s normally something anyone’s in two minds about, but this is an ebook, you see, and I’ve got nothing to hold in my hand.  You know when you go onto Amazon? Well, buried in the reviews and the ratings and all the general gubbins, there’s a bright little message saying words to the effect of, “Are you an author or publisher?  Then publish on Kindle!”

Now, I’ll be honest.  I’m not a Luddite, exactly, but I’d never really fancied ebooks all that much.  And then our Jenny celebrated her 16^th birthday with an ipad.  Wow.  I mean, seriously, wow.  It works like greased lightning and the books on it are amazing. Ebooks suddenly seemed like a really good idea.

So I thought okey-doke….  As it happens, I have a book – a book that I’m very fond of – that’s never seen the light of day. It’s called Frankie’s Letter – remember that title.  Make a note.  A note to the tune of, “Frankie’s Letter.  What an enthralling title for a book.  You know, I’d love to read a book called Frankie’s Letter.  Frankie’s Letter sounds terrific.  I wish I owned a book called Frankie’s Letter.”  Bounce up and down on the spot if you like – I’m not at all judgemental and, besides, it’ll entertain the kids and bewilder the cat.   Frankie’s Letter. It’s not a Jack Haldean but a complete new venture.  It’s a First World War spy thriller, which I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing.  I’ve always wanted to write about the period of the First World War, but I didn’t want to write a war story as such.  The war was so immense and so shattering to the people in it, that simply telling a straight-forward war story seemed – well, irrelevant, somehow.  After all, with the world crashing round your ears, hunting out fingerprints and pondering long and hard about how deeply the parsley had sunk into the butter on a hot day or whatever seemed trivial.  I mean, I’m as fond of sunken parsley as the next person, so to speak, but the circumstances have to be right.

And then I got my big idea.  Yup, write about the war but write about the war from a distance.  I needed someone who was capable of acting on their own (as a hero who has to keep trotting off for orders is not very heroic!) who was affected by the war and, ideally, could affect the war too.  Hang on a mo.  What about a secret agent?  What indeed. And so Anthony Brooke was born.

He was and is a doctor, but, because of his fluency in German (Hey!  He’s my hero!  He can have whatever attributes that come in handy!) he gets swept up and sent of to Germany at the start of the war as an undercover agent.  All is well until another agent comes staggering into his room and, with his dying breath, tells Anthony there’s a spy in England who knows Big Stuff and, if Anthony reads Frankie’s letter, it’ll tell him all about it.  That’s the start and I think it’s pretty good, not to be overly modest about it. Anthony ends up back in Dear Old Blighty where there’s some very dodgy dealings going on, with beautiful, jewel-encrusted women, mysterious deaths, more spies (it was sort of “buy one, get one free in the spy shop” that day) grand country mansions, a spot of romance (see the jewel-encrusted woman above) and so on and so forth.  Ace.

So back to the Kindle process.  There’s a nice little message when you’ve finished uploading the book to say that for the next 48 hours your precious book is going to be “Previewed” (a sort of electronic limbo, I suppose) and then… Well, hopefully it’ll be on my Amazon page and everyone can get stuck in and start reading.  But it is odd about all this electronic stuff.  Somehow or other it’s hard to believe it’s real.  Fingers crossed.  Oh, and did I mention the title? Frankie’s Letter.