James Warden – författare

Born into a world of many races, the Black Dwarf must come to terms with his own nature if he and his companions - Gavellan the wizard, Laleef the Light Elf and Twan of the Council of Grim - are to succeed in their quest for the Runestone of Mimir and defeat the Witch of Shroud, Minerva Spindleshanks. This novel was inspired by my own sons' interest in the myths of the Norsemen, and remains true to the spirit and characters of these legends. Here is portrayed an uncompromising struggle between the cold and dark of Nifleheim and the fire and flame of Muspelheim.

Andrew Mansell, perturbed by the suicide of a colleague, questions the nature of his marriage and its inevitable compromises. As the gulf widens between him and his wife, he takes what he sees as an irrevocable decision. He has reckoned, however, without the power of his family and friends to impose their will and the price he will pay. As their ranks close about him, Andrew must question the value of freedom.

Dave Roach, fresh from his two years of National Service in 1955, visits relatives in the Suffolk village of Butley, which is on the eastern edge of Rendlesham Forest. Two children have disappeared in open view of their friends and stories emerge of strange craft in the sky and strange visitors in the forest. His curiosity draws him into making a few enquiries and he becomes involved in an act of invasion both subtle and far-reaching. The story is told by his friend and is taken largely from the diary Roach kept at the time.

"My failure to find that little girl will haunt me to the grave." Bingham looked at the speaker and gave his old friend a sympathetic smile. Neither spoke but each shared the same thought. What had happened to Natalie Beddoes? Little girls deserved better than to disappear at the age of six, never to be heard of again; a flash of anger appeared in Bingham's eyes. Thinking about her and remembering the photograph that had dominated the front page of every newspaper in the country for weeks, and thereafter occasionally for years, as the fruitless search took place, Bingham felt guilty at his own good fortune.

Bingham shared the feeling of exhaustion he saw in the youth's face as he relived the day his mum ran away, and that was what Bingham wanted. Soon, he hoped, memories would be stirred, old loyalties and disloyalties restored: the passing of time and the slip of the tongue. Slowly, a picture of this woman was forming in his imagination. Bingham wasn't one to be hurried. 'There will be time ... to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet'. Eliot's phrase came back to him as he sat in the family's kitchen pondering and watching the son of Helen Sanders.

In 1963, two groups of young people, inspired by such ideals as Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country", train as teachers and nurses. As they make their way along their own 'road to freedom', the events of those years affect their determination to create a better educated, culturally aware, politically conscious, morally alert and more tolerant country. The students experience the changes that shape events: Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Martin Luther King in the United States, politicians, religious leaders and cultural icons throughout the world.

Set amidst the London riots of 2011, Benjamin Rudge is a story of society’s concept of what constitutes right and wrong, beginning with a protest about the shooting by police of a man suspected to be engaged in crime and going on to involve looting, theft, arson and murder.Throughout the course of the novel, we meet absent and disengaged fathers, police officers who question their role in modern communities, politicians who seek to apportion blame, residents wishing only to protect their homes and their livelihoods and the varying agendas of the rioters.  As the mobs rampage through the streets and London erupts into chaos, Benjamin Rudge, the autistic son of a single mother, struggles to make sense of what is happening around him.  With dialogue and events taken from those involved at the time, Benjamin Rudge presents a disturbing picture of a country where the rule of law and order is forsaken.  The idea for the story was suggested, originally, by the author’s re-reading of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, which was set during the Gordon riots of 1780, and came to fruition through his reading of Michael Matthews’s account, The Riots, of the experiences of police officers on the front line during the riots and the interviews conducted by the Guardian newspaper with the rioters themselves, Reading the Riots.

A series of hauntings in a Norfolk town, apparently unrelated, attract little attention until the first death occurs. Even then, it is difficult to link the death, which has not been witnessed by any of the townspeople, to the hauntings in any sensible way. Life goes on until further deaths occur, once again unwitnessed. No one is ready to commit themselves to a point of view and, therefore, a plan of action, because no one wants to be seen to believe in ghosts. Eventually, after the publican’s psychic supper has created terror in the medium, two ghost hunters (who prefer to call themselves ‘paranormal investigators’) are called in by the vicar and events take a turn for the worst: several villagers are threatened, a stranger plays his hand with disastrous consequences, the doctor’s wife returns from the dead and the village historian (perhaps the only person who has any chance of understanding the connection between the hauntings) is driven to the edge of sanity. The vicar, who has been a central figure all along, decides he must act with or without his bishop’s permission or even his wife’s agreement, and decides to call upon the help of an old priest, once the Deliverance Minister of his diocese.

Bingham, his reputation as a searcher for missing people coming to the ears of the traveller community, is approached by the grandfather of a young woman to find her. She is believed to have disappeared with a boyfriend but the truth is not always as it seems and Bingham, not a man to jump readily to conclusions, pursues his usual policy: ‘quick to listen, slow to judge’. First, he must infiltrate and then survive in a community that is often hostile and always silent towards outsiders. Two of his several talents gain him an early, if guarded, acceptance and his search takes him across Britain from traveller site to traveller site and to the annual Appleby Horse Fair. Along the way he meets travellers who treasure their traditions and those who have broken from them; he meets enmity and friendship, benevolence and malevolence. Persistent as always, he pursues the truth to its bitter end, an end that involves confrontations with the young woman’s mother and father in a struggle between unwritten laws and those who would cast them aside.This is the fifth in the Bingham series of novels and the first in which we meet his eldest son’s family for the first time, a family destined to play a significant part in the eleventh Bingham novel Bingham’s Cambridge Christmas.

On holiday in Australia, Bingham and Lina come across a stranded motorist, his car hung partway up a tree, the result of avoiding a kangaroo. Their act of kindness takes them to Yulara, the staging post for the sacred rock, Uluru, where they meet Nellie Doolan, an Aboriginal of mixed race, and, eventually, her father. While there, they are told that Helen Lewis, who runs the local Aboriginal art gallery, has gone missing. Arriving in Alice Springs, they visit a similar gallery where the owner, Marjory Fink, has also disappeared. Talking with the locals, particularly the woman’s son, Henry, and her former lover, Ben Evans, they find little cause for concern. Bingham, however, takes the view that coincidences are for Russian novels and he begins asking questions that leads to an investigation by him and Lina that takes them back and forth along the Stuart Highway, visiting the roadhouses as they go. Their search is marked throughout by an awareness of the strange and startling Aboriginal culture which leads Lina, alone in the region of the sacred rock, along the Pathways of the Dreaming and a simple truth. This is the sixth in the Bingham series of novels and the first in which he and his wife, Lina, are both involved in an investigation from the very beginning.

At the Cannes Film Festival – where Lina has been invited to view a film, Puccini: Lust for Life, on which an old flame of hers from the world of opera has functioned as executive producer – Bingham finds he is not entitled to an accreditation badge. Bidding adieu to his wife who he leaves with her former lover, Bingham wanders to a patch of grass opposite Café Potiniere on La Croisette, where he noticed a group of locals playing boules. While he watches, Bingham gets into conversation with a young boy, ill at ease, playing with a toy car. The boy is in the company of an old woman and it soon becomes clear to Bingham that the boy doesn’t speak a word of French and the woman doesn’t speak a word of the boy’s own language, English. Perturbed by his concern for the boy, who he sees as vulnerable, and eager to put his mind at rest, Bingham follows the couple through the back streets of Cannes, where they briefly visit a café, La Canape, run by Isabelle Couchet. The bar is rundown but comfortable and Bingham begins to feel at home among the locals; an old man, who he later follows home, a prostitute and a sailor. He leaves, having roused the anger and suspicions of the patronne. His subsequent search takes him further into the private lives of the people of Cannes; he reacquaints himself with the old man, the sailor and the prostitute and meets her pimp; he finds the boy’s father, his mistress and mother among others and, eventually, his search takes him to the English Lake District where Bingham faces one of those decisions in his life that he should have found difficult. This is the seventh Bingham novel and one in which we learn more about Lina and her life as an opera singer before she met Bingham.

On the pretext of enjoying a walking break, Bingham’s youngest son, Ben, supported by Bingham’s wife, Lina, persuades his father to investigate the case of a young man, Raymond Dowdall, who has been imprisoned fourteen years for a murder of a young woman, Janet Bawley – a murder his family and friends insist he did not commit. Troubled by the young man’s helplessness in the face of authority rather than convinced of his innocence, Bingham begins encouraging the people of Upton-on-Churnet to talk. On his first night in the small, Staffordshire town, he seeks out Raymond’s parents; walking back to the public house, where he and Ben are staying, through a fine autumnal drizzle, he is threatened. His curiosity piqued and his ever-present faith in the value of women’s gossip intact, he goes for a haircut at the local salon, where he rouses old memories, and then speaks with the young man’s employer, an estate agent. While Ben pursues their search, Bingham immerses himself in what he calls ‘a sense of place’, in his view important in the search for any truth, and meets a young policewoman, Mehreen Choudhury. She offers her help, while at the same time expressing the force’s view that previous investigations merely left a bad feeling behind, reinforcing the public’s opinion that police corruption was involved, a judgement the force has found it impossible to live down.  Ben turns up a witness, a young woman police did not take seriously and who received threats to mind her own business, obliging her to move away from the town and forget what had happened. Bingham meets the murdered woman’s best friend eager to clear the town’s view of Janet’s morals, and the newspaperman, John Hayes, who has never given up on his belief that Raymond Dowdall was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. As their search progresses and memories are shaken, those powers in the community who value friendship above integrity act: Ben is run down, Lina is drawn into the fray, Bingham’s home is the target of an arson attack and the murdered woman’s husband at last opens his wife’s notebook – a book he has kept in a closed drawer since her death. This is the eighth Bingham novel and the first in which Bingham’s youngest son plays an active role.

Seeking adventure and the desire to experience life, Young Jamie Douglas, armed with a law degree from Edinburgh university, sets out for Alaska, spurred on by news of the Klondike gold rush of 1896-99.On the voyage from Seattle, he meets his first friend, Robert Banks, a young American averse to hard work but keen to make his fortune in the gold fields. He also meets Soapy Smith, a conman determined to become the Boss of Skagway.Arriving in Skagway, he finds a lawless town, a town ruled by the gun, a town of saloons, dancehalls, gambling dens and brothels, and engages with his first enemies. He is befriended by a native of the Frozen North, a member of the Athabascan tribe, a young man known as Charlie Half-Breed, who comes to his aid and suggests they join forces in their search for the yellow metal. Charlie introduces Rob and Jamie to Gwyn Thomas, a derelict Welshman about to give in to the hardships and wanting to return home.The four young men set out along the White Pass Trail, a trail that has broken many before them, eventually reaching Lake Bennett, where they build their boat ready for the journey down the Yukon River to Dawson, a town in Canada under the jurisdiction of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It is while they camp for the winter at the lake that Jamie makes further enemies and befriends Flora, a sled dog abandoned by her master.Reaching the gold fields, they stake their claim along with Charlie’s father, an American, sink their shafts and, at the end of summer assay their gold, after meeting Charlie’s sisters, Jenny and Margaret. Gwyn decides to spend the winter on the gold fields, guarding their claim, Rob to spend his money in Dawson; Charlie and Jamie return to Skagway.On their return, now wealthy men, they come across Soapy Smith and his gang, men who have both terrorised and befriended the town for their own ends and where justice, Skagway-style, breaks out involving the whole town.Again, back in Dawson, each young man faces his destiny, one brought about by their own natures and inclinations: Gwyn on the gold fields, Rob in Dawson, Jamie and Charlie back in Skagway, where the final conflict between the law of the native people faces white man’s justice.This novel is a work of fiction but many of the characters in the story are real people who lived and worked in the Yukon at the time. Whenever I have taken the liberty to use such people I have done so with respect, attributing to them what they said and did at the time or ensuring that what they say and do in this story is in character.My wife and I visited Skagway in 2014 and it was what I learned there from the National Park rangers and my admiration for the writings of Jack London that led me to write this novel. I hope I have done justice to both.

Samuel Warden of the Detective Police had been forewarned. A message reached him at home that very morning suggesting he should ‘settle his immediate affairs’ and arrive at the detectives’ headquarters, Great Scotland Yard, just off Trafalgar Square, ready for ‘a few days in the country’. He was to travel to Cloisterham, a town on the Medway, where six months before a young man, Edwin Drood, had disappeared, and find him “whether he be dead or alive”.

The couple had moved to Spain when they retired and were 'odd' in as much as they never came home. They seemed quite content in each other's company, 'always locked in each other's arms', as one of their children said to the newspapers... They were expecting friends round, but when the guests arrived at the villa there was no one to be seen. The place was completely empty, but a meal had been prepared. Various salads were waiting in the kitchen and a rabbit casserole was simmering on the stove...

Robert Courtney had been missing for several months along with a quarter of a million pounds from some Treasury budget. There had been the usual splash in the papers, the usual rush and tear of reporters in the village and then all had gone quiet. The police seemed unable to find the young man, which had puzzled Bingham and annoyed his friend, Simon Brockie, the retired Detective Chief Inspector, who had seemed disinclined to discuss the matter.

The story is a fantastical adventure, originally devised by children. Women and men, adept at home baking, are disappearing all over the country. When Mrs Cherry (from their corner shop) vanishes, Emily and Sam decide to investigate. Their curiosity leads them to a fairground: here they are separated. Sam meets the Mad Puppeteer and reaches the North Pole, with Mrs Cherry, on the ghost train; Emily seeks the help of Mr Wong and his hot-air balloon. After several adventures they come face to face with the awesome Gobbler, and a final confrontation in his factory. Along the way, they learn something about themselves and the power of real imagination.