To say I'm flattered to be compared on Amazon.com to Agatha Christie by the former chairman of EMI, the company which produced Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile is MAJOR understatement. But sometimes you just have to roll with the punches ...
I was enormously lucky to grow up in a house on Summergangs Road in East Hull, because it backed on to one of the most magical places in the city: East Park. You could get to it from our tiny back garden just by wriggling under the wooden fence, and once there the imaginative child was in a cornucopia of delight. Even today, in far away Southern California, whenever I think of the great floral clock in the middle of the park, and remember the scent of the Sweet William...
Janet Rudolph, on her excellent website Mystery Readers Inc, got me to write about why I decided to explore the second half of the 1940's in my detective novels, and in answering the question, I discovered some things I didn't know when I began! Here's the link: https://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2017/05/exploring-roots-of-baby-boomer-era.html ...
A big shout out to the kind people who have begun reviewing #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks on Amazon - and particularly to New York Times Best Selling author Bruce Cameron with a hit movie based on his delightful "A Dog's Purpose". Here's hoping at least some of his millions of readers follow his wise lead into the world of Duncan Forrester!...
Title: The Age of Olympus Series: Duncan Forrester Book Number: 2 Read this book for: detailed historical setting, post-WWII espionage, whodunnit mystery, archaeologist adventurers, romance subplot, multiple murders Quick Review: Even better than the first outing, this book fuses Christie-style whodunnit with the archaeology of Indiana Jones for a suspenseful adventure in Greece. THE AGE OF OLYMPUS is the SECOND of the Duncan Forrester novels by Gavin Scott, following shortly after the events of THE AGE OF TREACHERY. THE AGE OF OLYMPUS takes Forrester to Greece, where he had spent a portion of the Second...
Great review of #AgeOfOlympus @Titan Books on alwaystrustinbooks.wordpress.com. "High stakes thrills, ancient mysteries and rich history as well brilliant mythological stories are what Gavin Scott has brought to us via The Age of Olympus...
Second day of the #AgeOfOlympus @Titan Books Virtual Book tour, talking about how John Buchan influenced me as a writer - especially in creating The Age of Olympus. Feel free to check it out at https://www.thedreamcage.com/2017/04/book-age-of-olympus.html ...
April 24th: visiting AlexxMarie74's excellent literary website Angel Wing and Petticoats, https://angelwingsandpetticoats.wordpress.com/ which features a sneak peek at Chapter One of #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks. Thank you Alexx!...
My first Virtual book tour for #AgeOfOlympus starts tomorrow @TitanBooks. I'm not actually sure what it involves, but my first host is Angel Wings and Petticoats @Alexx Marie.com and I'll keep you posted about my adventures in cyberspace...
I'm still basking in the warm glow of all the people who came out to support #TheAgeOfOlympus at Book Soup in West Hollywood this Thursday. I got to read from the book and talk about the characters and answer a barrage of really smart questions, including "What exactly is written on the mysterious Minoan stone" from my executive at Sony Pictures! I'll have an answer for him soon ...
The famous independent bookstore Book Soup, at 8818 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, is hosting the launch of the new Greece-set Duncan Forrester novel The Age of Olympus at 7pm on April 20th. I'll be reading from the book and signing copies and it would be great to see you there. If you can't make it, just get in touch with Amazon and they'll make sure you get a copy one way or another! @TitanBooks ...
The Age of Olympus is my second novel about Duncan Forrester, the Oxford archeologist and former SOE operative who returns from the Second World War searching for a peaceful existence and finds himself caught up in the great events which shaped the post-war world. He first appeared in The Age of Treachery, set in early 1946, in which he found himself racing across Europe trying to save a friend wrongly accused of murder, and among the real life characters who appeared there was Thor Heyerdahl, Ian Fleming and the young Margaret...
Here is my fourth miniature found-objects Beatles assemblage, celebrating the wonderful movie and album A Hard Day's Night in 1964, which is when at 13 in deepest New Zealand, Beatlemania finally swept me away. #Beatles #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks ...
This is my third miniature Beatles sculpture, which I've put together to celebrate their third album, With the Beatles. Love their little bobbling heads! #Beatles #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks ...
My author copies of the new Duncan Forrester adventure, The Age of Olympus, have now arrived and I'm going around with a huge grin on my face because they look so great! Titan Books have done a great job and Los Angeles' best independent bookstore, Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, have agreed to host the official launch at 7pm on April 20th. All welcome! PS: it's set in Greece in 1946! #AgeOfOlympus #Book Soup @TitanBooks...
Here's the second in my series of miniature Beatles assemblage sculptures using found Beatles figurines. This one commemorates their first album, Please Please Me from 1963. #Beatles #AgeOfOlypmus @TitanBooks ...
According to the Times, the inventor of a robot salad maker designed to replace restaurant staff has admitted defeat because robots can’t handle avocados. Who knew humans would be saved from the rise of the robots by a Mexican fruit?! #Robots #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks...
There's a delicious story in today's London Times giving pretty conclusive evidence that the "1520" portrait of Michelangelo as painted by Sebastiano now being shown as part of a big exhibition in Britain's National Gallery was actually created in about 1959! Egg (tempera) on faces all round, I suspect ...
Here is the first of a series of cigar-box style sculptures I have begun to make, incorporating Beatles figurines I have collected over the years, many of them wonderfully bad! I got these models of the early Beatles, which are made of some kind of metal, in a shop, long since disappeared, in an alley behind Regent Street. No idea who made them, but they fit the Cavern perfectly. #Beatles #AgeOfOlympus @TitanBooks ...
I’ve just read Beatles ’66, The Revolutionary Year, a terrific book by Steve Turner about what changed the Beatles between December 1965 and December 1966 as they made the leap from Rubber Soul (1965) via Revolver (1966) to the extraordinary achievements of Sergeant Pepper in 1967. On Rubber Soul, Turner points out, 13 of the 14 songs were about love: but on Revolver, 9 of the 14 were about other things entirely, starting, of course, with Taxman. And then came Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields … Most of the book is...
This amazing drawing by an eighteenth century French artist called Edme Bouchardon reveals a woman who was clearly going around Paris in the reign of Louis the Fifteenth showing movies. She’s winding a barrel organ and carrying a portable projector on her back - and presumably a portable screen in the box. Here’s one of the actual projectors from that era she might be using, and another with the slides inserted. #AgeofOlympus @TitanBooks And we are talking about movies: if you slid the glass plate back and forward it did look...
I'm pleased to announce that in two months' time Titan Books will be publishing the sequel to last year's Duncan Forrester novel, The Age of Treachery. This one is called The Age of Olympus and it's set in Greece in 1946. Forrester has gone back there to retrieve the mysterious Minoan stele he came across in a cave in the Gorge of Acharius during the war, and finds himself in the run-up to the Greek civil war. A famous poet is murdered, a heroic general is implicated, and Forrester and Countess Sophie...