Trouble Brewing

There’s nothing here, he told himself.  Not here.  Not with the roar of the Tottenham Court Road traffic at his back.  Not in the very heart of London.  It couldn’t be here.

With shrinking reluctance, he walked to the window and looked into the room.  There was nothing in the room but the oddest moving black shadow in the middle of the floor.  And then he realised there was no light to cast a shadow; and the pool of darkness was composed of innumerable, languid flies.



Sorry about the slightly gruesome beginning, but that’s one of the big moments from the new book, Trouble Brewing. I wanted to start the blurb with that passage but the publishers preferred the more matter of fact approach of saying what the set up was.

Mark Helston, the rising star of Hunt Coffee Limited, was successful and popular, with plenty of money and everything to live for.  Yet at half past seven on the evening of the ninth of January 1925, he walked out of Albemarle Street flat and disappeared.

Desperate to know what happened to Mark, his uncle, old Mr Hunt, appeals to Jack Haldean.  Inspector Bill Rackham of Scotland Yard thinks it’s a thankless task.  Perhaps, says Jack, but why should Mark Helston vanish?  And the Jack finds a body…



And the rest of the book is so much more mayhem and confusion, as you’d expect.  As you’d also expect, Jack sorts it all out in the end, but only after being brilliant and incredibly brave, bless him.

The idea(s) for Trouble Brewing came from a few places.  One, there’s my love of coffee.  I love tea, too, as any Mancuinian worthy of the name does, but I do like my coffee and it grows in South America, which (to quote Noel Coward in Nina From Argentina) is exotic.  I’d just read Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure which is a terrific book and hugely recommended.  Anther spur was a half-remembered throwaway line in a Sherlock Holmes story which says that some bloke or other walked out of his house and vanished.  (My private theory about that one was that he got caught in a tractor beam from the Starship Enterprise on one of its frequent trips back in time, but that’s another story.)  Another inspiration was the student hall I lived in years ago, on Gower Street in London.  I absolutely loved the place and I had a definite twinge of guilt about putting a body there.  Ho hum.

Anyway, if you heard a popping sound during the week, that was me taking the cork from a bottle of champagne.  Trouble Brewing has arrived and, although I suppose I should have celebrated with coffee… well, there’s other drinks, aren’t there?  It’s out in bookshops and on Amazon now and, if you fancy a signed copy, just pop onto the Book page of the website, click the Buy A Signed Copy button (this applies to US readers too) and I’ll leg it down to the Post Office for you.

Cheers!