This year the fourth in my series of historical naval fictions was published by Broadsides Press.
Like its predecessors - The Spithead Nymph, A Fine Boy for Killing and The Wicked Trade - it portrays the British navy in a way that some people would rather not confront.
One critic described the first one thus: "A powerful story of lost humanity, its violent emotions and unremitting bleakness are shattering." Coming from a family with close naval and military connexions as I do, I can only say that that is how I really see it.
Many of my other works of fiction, over the years, have also caused me problems. I would not exactly describe myself as a man with a mission – but I have tended to get up people's literary noses from time to time.
A comedy I wrote about the nuclear industry – Don't Tell the Frogs – was pulled just before performance after pressure was applied, and the Government tried to ban my television serial, A Game of Soldiers, about the Falklands war.
My Mate Shofiq caused teachers
to ban me from addressing a conference on realism in children’s
books – I had been invited as the keynote speaker – and my alternative
version of The Wind in the Willows, called Wild Wood, was held up from publication
for several years.I'm glad to say that Shofiq has been constantly in print now for nearly thirty years, and A Game of Soldiers for twenty.
Jan Needle
Undertaker's Wind - the fourth in the William Bentley series of nautical fiction - was published by Broadsides Press in 2006
