Ever since being a kid, English was always my favourite subject at school.
The only homework I ever enjoyed was being given the first line of an essay and then having to write a story off the back of it. Alas, my teacher always put a 500 word limit on essays – a number I found nearly impossible to stick to.
Based on my passion for English, I was always reading when not doing homework and I came to the conclusion that I should have a go at writing a novel. It was 1982 and I was 18 years old. I grabbed a stack of lined A4 sheets and began to handwrite a storyline. This was the beginning of what would later become JEWEL AGENDA. I wrote about 40 sides of A4 and then the project faded.
In 1989 I lost my mother and my priorities shifted radically. I managed to secure a job in Australia and after 18 months in Melbourne, I then moved to Sydney for three years. When I wasn’t working, I was driving and this Australian experience would prove invaluable years later.
Returning to the UK, more years rolled by until 2012 when I lost my father. My work generously gave me a month off and from somewhere I found the A4 sheets I’d handwritten 30 years earlier and transferred them to my laptop. There were 20,000 words. Carrying on from this point, JEWEL AGENDA became something real. The first three chapters are virtually identical to what I wrote in 1982. The other twenty nine chapters were all written after 2012.
Australia was never intended to be part of the original storyline but following my experiences, it became the focal point of the whole plot. Nearly everywhere quoted are places I’ve visited and fortunately, my English teacher didn’t limit my word count.
So, JEWEL AGENDA took over 30 years to write and I had already decided it would be the first in a trilogy. The sequel, JEWEL INTENTIONS was published in 2018 and took 18 months to write.
Running in parallel , I had began writing the final part of the trilogy, JEWEL CONCLUSIONS, but as the story progressed, it became clear I needed a 4th book to do the story justice. The trilogy became the quadrilogy and the word CONCLUSIONS disappeared from the title.
The 3rd book is now called JEWEL CONTROL and has been available since September 2019.
And what of the 4th book?
It is called JEWEL OUTCOME and was printed in the autumn of 2021.
All four books are now available as a set in PDF and hard copy format
What then? A friend of mine suggested prequels on the main characters up to the start of JEWEL AGENDA. The only problem with that is you'd have to read the Jewel books first as the prequels would give too much away.
Another idea is to take police characters from the series and write a crime story completey unconnected with the Jewel books but using them as the investigating officers.
There would be one book with Ducret and Valois in Paris, one with Bennett in London and a third with Dillon and Dot in Melbourne.
This would work regardless of which books were read first as there would be no references to the Jewel series in these stories.