Like millions of others, I watched a video clip of last year’s Armistice Day - the annual commemoration of the civilian and military dead of two world wars that takes place at the Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall and is marked by two minutes’ silence at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
Not to be confused with Remembrance Sunday, which is held on the Sunday closest to Armistice Day.
I think the clip was carried by the online versions of The Guardian or Independent. I don’t watch television, nor do I have a television set.
And there they were, that parcel of rogues, feigning a self-conscious solemnity, standing quite still, dressed in winter coats with red paper poppies in their buttonholes, and clutching wreaths: they included ex-prime ministers Boris Johnson, Tony Blair and Liz Truss, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman, lugubrious opposition leader Keir Starmer, and others.
I felt I was right there, staring at them in horrified fascination.
To me, they were the enemies of the democracy they claimed to uphold.
I glanced at the buildings opposite, red brick and stucco, on the far side of Whitehall, and up at the sash windows and slate roofs.
What if…
That was the start of it. I wrote the first scene right then, with only the vaguest notion of characters and plot. Four months later, I completed the first draft of 83,000 words. I don’t pretend it’s great literature, but I had to get something off my chest. Hopefully, Armistice Day is a political thriller that will at least hold the reader’s attention for a couple of hours.
When it comes to thrillers set in London and especially Westminster, I recommend Julie Anderson’s brisk and pared down crime thriller Plague, set in the city’s subterranean streams, tunnels and plague pits, the first in a series, and published by the independent Claret Press:
As for great writing, I confess I’m envious of David Mitchell’s historical fiction. I don’t know how I managed to miss his work until very recently.
Here’s my very brief review on Amazon of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, long-listed for the Booker Prize:
‘Beautifully written, so much so that it's enough to carry the reader through the first couple of hundred pages before the outline of the plot begins to show itself. It's also an extraordinary feat of research - achieved without falling into dead patches of authorial exposition. A wonderful historical novel, and I can't believe I haven't read the author's work before now, a deficiency I'll try to make up for as quickly as possible.’
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