I’ve had six books published in print: The Faust Conspiracy, The Dutch Caper (originally published in the UK as The Radar Job), Emerald, Gold Run (with Ralph Gordon), The Alaska Project and Piccolo. However, I completed two novels between Faust and Caper, The Cromwell Exercise and Phoenix (neither of which have ever seen the light of day despite constant revision and, now, at least in the case of Cromwell, never will). As a result, The Radar Job was actually my fourth novel and I think that explains why, in my view, it works so much better than Faust did (at least in its print version) – I learned from the mistakes made in the second and third manuscripts. Phoenix may yet rise from the ashes (sorry!) but will only do so in a vastly different form, but The Cromwell Exercise has been consigned to the great slush pile in the sky, even though, at one point, it was a close run thing as to whether it would actually be published by Malvern ahead of Faust. Both books were close to completion, but the publisher felt (rightly) that Faust was slightly more developed than Cromwell, so we pushed on with Faust, with the idea that Cromwell would be the second book.

So what went wrong with that plan?

The Cromwell Exercise actually started out as a prequel to another idea I’d had, which was for a novel set in a United Kingdom ruled by a military dictatorship (provisionally titled A State Of Denmark). It occurred to me that it would make more sense to have a novel describing how this authoritarian state came to be, and so The Cromwell Exercise was born. Basically, it revolved around a plot to assassinate a Labour Prime Minister as he was laying a wreath at the base of the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. It was set up by a conspiracy of right-wing politicians and leading military figures in order to remove what was seen as being an extreme left-wing government; the Provisional IRA would be implicated in the assassination, and in the aftermath of the killing, calculated to provoke maximum outrage, martial law would be declared ‘for a limited time’. In fact, the seizing of power would be anything but temporary, and would only be relinquished once the IRA had been totally annihilated – and probably not even then. The main character, Vinter, is a member of an ultra-secret unit in British Intelligence that, effectively, has carte blanche in dealing with the IRA; their role, purely and simply, is to eliminate Provos. Vinter does not have a problem with this – his fiancee has been killed by the IRA – until he discovers the outlines of the Cromwell Exercise, the codename given to the planned military coup. He tries to prevent it, and almost succeeds, but the final scene shows the Prime Minister lying dead on the steps of the Cenotaph; the coup will inevitably take place.

The point was that it was very much a book of its time; once Margaret Thatcher came into power, the likelihood of there ever being an extreme left-wing government rapidly disappeared. Thus, Cromwell, which had mostly been written in the late 70s and early 80s, became less and less plausible; in any case, there were various plot holes that resolutely refused to be closed. It gave way to The Radar Job as the next in line to be published, then Emerald and so on… I attempted a rewrite of it in the 90s, with the military coup idea being dropped and the assassination being set up by the head of Vinter’s unit because he did not want the unit to be shut down and felt that, by implicating the IRA, it would not be. Unfortunately, in the real world, the peace process was taking place in Northern Ireland and the IRA were no longer seen as being the force they were – and the plot holes were still there, anyway. On to the back burner again…

When I decided to convert the books to ebooks, I had another look at Cromwell, before finally consigning it to history. The IRA were no longer a remotely plausible threat, so I would have had to change the bad guys to Al-Qaeda or some similar group, which would then have meant scrapping entire sections set in Belfast and the Irish Republic; in addition, I found that I had ‘cannibalised’ a number of action sequences from it, adapting them for other novels, so there wasn’t very much left to work with anyway.

Would it have been a success if it, and not Faust, had been published first? Who knows… Like Faust, it had been corrected and revised a number of times, but had never quite ‘gelled’, somehow. And from then on, it became outdated very rapidly. To be honest, I’ve never managed to generate any real enthusiasm in terms of revising it – apart from the plot holes, the characters now seem embarrassingly stereotypical. The strange thing is that Cromwell probably came within about five minutes of being my first published book – but it never happened. And now, it never will…