Tales of Empire is free on Kindle until Saturday 5 October. If you’re reading this after that, you will have to fork out a whole 99p. Here’s why you should grab a copy.
Tales of Empire is a book of four short stories showcasing the work of four very different but uniformly excellent historical fiction writers. (Well, three excellent writers plus me.)
The authors were asked to submit a story set anywhere from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the end of the century. Although they all write conventional historical fiction with no revisionist agenda, all four stories ended up challenging some of the more traditional approaches to Empire.
These are the authors and what they write about.
Antoine Vanner is the author of the Dawlish Chronicles, a series of novels (and the odd short story) about the adventures of Nicholas Dawlish who joins the Royal Navy in the second-half of the 19th century as the Navy is moving from wooden sailing vessels to the modern world of ironclad steamers. The stories show Dawlish developing from a very young man to a seasoned mariner, his own progress mirrored in the development of the ships that he sails in. Vanner is fascinated by the technology of naval warfare and his stories are full of solidly researched detail, but they are adventure stories too with Dawlish caught up in espionage and fighting alongside regular army forces as well as engaging in the sea battles that you would expect of a naval series.
Antoine’s contribution to this collection is a story about the Royal Navy’s attempt to suppress the slave trade and how difficult this could turn out to be in practice.
Jacqueline Reiter is a professional historian whose biography of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham, The Late Lord, is the definitive work on his life. The Late Lord is a joy to read and Reiter’s affection for, and understanding of, her subject shines through. A fictional account of a real episode in Pitt’s life is her contribution to this collection.
Penny Hampson writes mysteries set during the Regency. A Gentleman’s Promise is the first book in her Regency Gentlemen Series. She also enjoys writing contemporary mysteries with a hint of the paranormal, because where do ghosts come from but the past?
Her story looks at how social and technological change during the Regency led us from the world of the 18th century to the country we live in today.
Tom Williams (that’s me) writes the James Burke stories about a James Bond figure during the wars with France. The Burke stories have an enthusiastic following but the books he is most proud off are the John Williamson Papers which deal with more serious issues at the height of the Age of Empire. The first, The White Rajah is about the real-life James Brooke who became the absolute ruler of a chunk of Borneo in the mid-19th century. The novel looks at how his idealistic approach to government collided with the realities of the day. The short story is about a fictional tiger hunt that shows the kind of person he was and the effect his style of rule had on those around him. It was written after The White Rajah but it could well have been a chapter in that book. I hope it will encourage you to read the novel.
So there you go: four writers presenting their talents in the hope that you might read more of their work. And free. I do hope you pick up a copy. Here’s a link: mybook.to/TalesofEmpire
Next week (1st to 5th October) Tales of Empire – four short stories by four historical fiction authors – will be FREE on Amazon. One of those authors is Jacqueline Reiter who dabbles in fiction but whose main writing efforts are impressive works of historical non-fiction. The latest is Quicksilver Captain, her biography of the man famous for developing the flag code used by Nelson at Trafalgar (“England expects that every man will do his duty”). Arguably, he was responsible for the British invasion of Buenos Aires that features in my book, Burke in the Land of Silver. He did much, much more in his remarkable life and I’m delighted to host Dr Reiter to introduce him on my blog.
Quicksilver Captain
Quicksilver Captain: The improbable life of Sir Home Popham is about one of the more under-appreciated characters of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Popham (1762–1820) was a Royal Navy captain for most of the period, the era of Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower. In contrast to his fictional counterparts, however, Popham’s real-life exploits were almost too strange – too improbable –for a novel.
Popham is best known as a scientific officer who invented the naval signal code used by Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, and as the instigator of the British invasion of Buenos Aires in 1806 (he appears in Tom Williams’s Burke in the Land of Silver, which uses this campaign as a backdrop). But Popham first came to prominence helping the British army evacuate from Germany in 1795, where it had been abandoned by its allies and was being hounded by the French. This made Popham’s reputation as an expert in amphibious operations and got him promoted to post-captain through the personal intercession of the army’s commander, the Duke of York. This did not make Popham popular in his own profession: his Navy peers always considered him, to quote my book, “as a charlatan who had got lucky with the Army”. [1] He didn’t care. His exploits in Flanders allowed him to stand out from the crowd of other post-captains looking for employment, and he usually took on the trickier, often dirtier, jobs nobody else wanted to do. He was, as one military man put it, ‘very useful upon all occasions and in all ways’. [2]
Popham was much more than just a ship’s captain – in fact the one place he was almost certain not to be, throughout his career, was aboard his own ship. He acted as an agent for transports, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, a Member of Parliament, a hydrographer, a scientist and inventor, a publicist, and a government adviser. He muscled himself into the trust of some of Britain’s most prominent politicians, including prime minister William Pitt and Secretary of State for War Henry Dundas. Despite only being a post-captain for most of the wars with France, his political contacts meant he punched well above his weight: he influenced several important British campaigns all over the world, not just at Buenos Aires but in Europe, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean, and Africa.
Britain, with its nascent empire, had trade networks and military concerns all over the world, and much of British strategy revolved around protecting its colonies and securing strategic naval stations – as well as destroying, or more preferably capturing, those of the enemy. The foremost proponent of this ‘blue-water’ strategy during the wars was Popham’s main patron, Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville, who believed ‘It is … as much the duty of those entrusted with the conduct of a British war to cut off the colonial resources of the enemy, as it would be that of the general of a great army to destroy or intercept the magazines of his opponent. … Exertions of that nature ought to admit of no limitation’. [3] Popham wholeheartedly agreed. Fuelled by ambition and supreme self-confidence, he became very good at shaping his ideas to suit the inclinations of the politicians – in other words, at telling his patrons what they wanted to hear.
Popham’s career involved taking risks and pushing boundaries, which often led to controversy (as at Buenos Aires), and his schemes were not always successful. His reputation was mixed in his own lifetime: he was described by one disapproving contemporary as a kind of ‘Naval Quack’. [4] Historians have mostly agreed with this; the most recent assessment of his career described him as ‘a gambler … a fiddler, a filibuster, a raider, a buccaneer and a freebooter’. [5] It did not help that Popham had once run his own smuggling vessel, and his exploits at Buenos Aires, which led to his court-martial, did not help. Still, Popham should not be dismissed so lightly. His rollercoaster career shows how one man could help shape an unfocused, but dynamic, British strategy during the wars against Napoleonic France. I definitely found Quicksilver Captain a story worth telling – and I hope readers will agree.
Notes
[1] Jacqueline Reiter, Quicksilver Captain: The improbable life of Sir Home Popham (Warwick: Helion & Co., 2024), p. 233
[2] Francis Culling Carr-Gomm (ed.), Letters and Journals of Field-Marshal Sir William Maynard Gomm, GCB … (London: John Murray, 1881), pp. 131–132
[3] Speech by Henry Dundas, 25 March 1801, as reported in William Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England … to 1803 … (London, 1819), vol. 35,cols. 1072–1073
[4] The British Library G.19449, p. xxv: marginal comment by Benjamin Tucker in his copy of A Full and Correct Report of the Trial of Sir Home Popham (London: J. and J. Richardson, 1807)
[5] Chris Coelho, ‘The Popham Code Controversy’, in J.E. Pearson, S. Heuvel, and J. Rodgaard (eds), The Trafalgar Chronicle: New Series 5 (Barnsley: Seaforth Publications), pp. 133–147, p. 133
Picture credits
Sir Home Popham, by Anthony Cardon after Mather Brown, 1807 (Public domain, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
Attack upon Buenos Aires by General Beresford, engraver unknown, 1806 (Public domain, Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library)
Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, by R. Freeman after Henry Raeburn (Public domain, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library)
Further reading
Hugh Popham, A Damned Cunning Fellow: The Eventful Life of Rear Admiral Sir Home Popham KCB, KCH, KM, FRS 1762–1820 (Tywardreath: Old Ferry Press, 1991)
About Jacqueline Reiter
Jacqueline Reiter received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2006. Her first book, The Late Lord: the Life of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham (Pen and Sword, 2017), illuminated the career of Pitt the Younger’s elder brother. Her articles have appeared in History Today and the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research; she has written for the History of Parliament and co-written a chapter with John Bew on British war aims for the Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars. Her latest book, Quicksilver Captain: The Improbable Life of Sir Home Popham, is published by Helion.
Tales of Empire
Tales of Empire is free on Kindle next week (1 – 5 October). Here’s why you should grab a copy.
Tales of Empire is a book of short stories. There are only four, which is why even when you have to pay for it, it costs only 99p. The four showcase the work of four very different but uniformly excellent historical fiction writers. (Well, three excellent writers plus me.)
The authors were asked to submit a story set anywhere from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the end of the century. Although they all write conventional historical fiction with no revisionist agenda, all four stories ended up challenging some of the more traditional approaches to Empire.
I saw a picture somewhere on social media posted by an author who is writing their first vampire book. I can’t find it now, but it showed a couple (presumably vampires) in a dance hold.
It will be fun if someone else produces a vampire tale featuring dancers with, let’s say, specialist dietary requirements, but I hope, dear readers, that you won’t forget that you saw it here first. My ‘Galbraith & Pole’ series (three so far, but there will be more) started with Something Wicked which features murder, mystery and tango.
They say you should write about what you know and I’m putting together this blog post between Monday night’s tango and Wednesday night’s tango with a couple more evenings of tango planned for the weekend. It’s fair to say that the references to tango in the book are well researched.
The idea of tango-dancing vampires came on one of my many visits to Buenos Aires, a city almost as famous for its spectacular cemeteries as for the celebrated dance. You seem to see so many more people after dark then are around in the day and, first thing in the morning, it’s easy to believe that the weary, somnambulant creatures propping themselves up on public transport are related to the Undead.
Buenos Aires street scene. Note that the dancers stay in the shadows
Chief Inspector Pole is not your typical vampire. He’s urbane and sophisticated and has been known to cook with garlic just to make a point. But mess with him and you can see a more ruthless side to his character. Fortunately, he uses his powers for good – mostly.
If you haven’t read my Urban Fantasy books before, give Something Wicked a go. It’s just £2.99 on Kindle.
Amazon reviews
Here are some of the things people have said about it on Amazon:
If you enjoy light, amusing and elegant humour and would relish the thrills and chills of the supernatural kind, then Something Wicked is definitely for you.
Cleverly-conceived, well-written and excellently plotted
I shall never look at Brompton Cemetery in quite the same way again!
A really great read! Who knew a story about vampires, detectives and tango could be so entertaining?!
Last week I mentioned that I’m trying to cut back on the amounts of time I spend on social media, including this blog. So this week, instead of writing about something new, I’m just revisiting the first novel I published, The White Rajah. Join me on a quick trip down Memory Lane.
It was in Borneo around 1980 that I came across James Brooke, the first White Rajah. I was fascinated by his story and decided to write a book about him. It was laboriously typed out on a manual typewriter and submitted to a leading agent who sent me to an editor to do more work on it.
Looking back, this was clearly the opportunity of a lifetime, but I was young and had no idea how lucky I was. The editor was helpful but I just wasn’t able to produce the sort of thing that he was looking for and in the end he said that I was clearly getting tired and should rest the book and come back to it later. So I rested it for something over a quarter of a century.
When I came back to it, I wrote a completely different book. It benefited from the research I had done for the first one and a few pages were actually directly lifted from my previous attempt, but the structure was now completely different. I had always believed that James Brooke was gay, but back in 1980 this wasn’t something that I would have mentioned. Now, though, it seemed okay to write a book with a gay hero, so I did.
The White Rajah was sent off to agents and, again, it was picked up. The agent (who really did seem to know his job and have the right contacts) offered it to four major publishers. It seems that I might have felt the world was ready for a mainstream novel with a gay hero, but publishers disagreed. It was “too difficult” for a first novel. I should go away and write something else first, so I produced Burke in the Land of Silver with a hero (also based on a real person) so heterosexual he goes through three lovers in the course of the book.
The White Rajah, meanwhile sat in a drawer for years before it eventually saw the light of day. It was first published by a tiny publisher in the USA (thank you JMS Books for giving it its chance) and then by a larger publisher in the UK before I got the rights back and self-published. It’s the only book of mine which has had serious tweakings between when it first saw the light of day and now. It’s always had a special place in my heart because it’s my first baby and the version that you will buy nowadays is something I’m very happy with. It’s just £3.99 on Kindle. If the idea of committing to a full-length novel worries you, the characters also feature in a short story that introduces the world of The White Rajah. It’s called The Tiger Hunt and you can find it in Tales of Empire – four lovely stories from four different authors for just 99p.
Everyone seems to be talking about social media these days, largely because of the controversies about Twitter.
Social media are important to writers like me because they provide an important way to tell people about our books. This blog is a form of social media and I’ve been writing it pretty well once a week for very many years. It used to be hosted on Google’s Blogger and you can find an archive going back to 2011 at thewhiterajah.blogspot.com. It can be frustrating because the number of people reading it varies a lot, not just only depending on what I’m writing about but on the vagaries of Google’s algorithms which sometimes point people to small blogs like mine and then switch to focussing on larger sites. I’m not sure that it actually sells many books, but I quite enjoy writing it so, although I am always threatening to cut down on the amount I post, I’m still here. (Either that or you’re imagining reading this, which is a sort of spooky idea.)
If I write the blog to encourage you to read the books, I then have to encourage you to read the blog. I used to do this mainly through Facebook and I have an author page there at https://www.facebook.com/AuthorTomWilliams. I still post there but Facebook is a rotten way to reach people these days. I think its time has passed.
Twitter and its like
After Facebook, of course, came Twitter. I used to hate Twitter but gradually grew to love it. Then came Elon Musk…
Twitter is now problematic. It’s lively and I’ve met some lovely people there, but you have to wade through an awful lot of extreme right-wing nutjobs and cryptocurrency sellers to find them. I’ve got over 2,000 followers there which, even if a lot of them are fembots, is too many to just ignore but I am looking at other possibilities. The problem is that refugees from Twitter have scattered all over the place so there’s no single obvious alternative.
Threadsseems fun. There are interesting conversations and I enjoy visits there while reading my feed on Twitter often leaves me feeling quite depressed. I don’t get a lot of interaction, probably largely because I have only 27 followers. That’s the problem with starting again from scratch and it takes a long time to build things up.
Blueskyseems quieter than Threads and I get even less interaction despite my 74 followers.
Is any of this worth the effort?
The thing is, social media take a lot of time. If you want to build a following you have to post regularly and respond to posts from others. Even if it’s enjoyable, it takes time away from life and, specifically, writing. That’s why I don’t do Instagram and make only occasional weak efforts on TikTok. I have cut down on Twitter a lot lately as, thanks to Mr Musk, it seems likely to die. A lot of the time saved has now been lost to Bluesky and Threads, mainly double (or triple) posting but also responding to stuff (easier on Threads because it has genuinely fun stuff on it and I learn things).
In the end, I have to ask myself if any of it is worth it: using Twitter (or whatever) to drive traffic to my blog to try to drive readers to my books. I do think that cutting off social media depresses book sales but do you know what boosts sales? Writing more books, that’s what. Perhaps I should concentrate on that.
Social media is such a minefield at the moment. What do you think?
