Mind of Stone
Candy Jar Books
Second edition cover
First edition cover
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart has been remanded to Woodworms Scrubs Prison, and his team have no idea why. Secrecy surrounds his case, but his team barely have a chance to process anything before they are sent on a mission to Egypt.
Why does it seem like Lethbridge-Stewart is going out of his way to court trouble from the prison's most notorious inmates? And what does it have to do with well-known gangster Hugh Godfrey?
In the Ptolemaic Museum of Cairo, Anne Travers and her team are trying to uncover the mystery surrounding some very unusual stone statues.
One thing connects these events; the cargo transported by Colonel Pemberton and Captain Knight in August 1968. Notes: There are many things I love about my work... and one of them is that I get to spend time with characters who have been with me since I was a kid. My Dad was a soldier - a staff sergeant, and always disappointed that I never wanted to serve in uniform - so I always felt an affinity with the UNIT troops on Doctor Who. The Brigadier was the most prominent of them, and he stayed with the show for so long... yeah, he was always going to be a favourite. I'd written for him on audio, so the chance to write a novel about him was always going to be interesting for me. One of my other favourites back in the 1970s (and still) was Porridge, Ronnie Barker's prison-based sit-com. Once I'd decided I wanted to isolate the Brig by putting him in jail, I amused myself by using little motifs like vaguely related names for the characters in the nick. The interesting thing there was... if those names give you the picture of the characters and the set-up, then I can undermine all of that by making it a darker version of what the reader already knows. And that's what I did. I had a lot fun with it, too. By the way, all the stuff about Wormwood Scrubs during WW2 that I talk about in the novel? All true. Research is a lovely thing and doesn't half help a writer keep the story moving.
Why does it seem like Lethbridge-Stewart is going out of his way to court trouble from the prison's most notorious inmates? And what does it have to do with well-known gangster Hugh Godfrey?
In the Ptolemaic Museum of Cairo, Anne Travers and her team are trying to uncover the mystery surrounding some very unusual stone statues.
One thing connects these events; the cargo transported by Colonel Pemberton and Captain Knight in August 1968. Notes: There are many things I love about my work... and one of them is that I get to spend time with characters who have been with me since I was a kid. My Dad was a soldier - a staff sergeant, and always disappointed that I never wanted to serve in uniform - so I always felt an affinity with the UNIT troops on Doctor Who. The Brigadier was the most prominent of them, and he stayed with the show for so long... yeah, he was always going to be a favourite. I'd written for him on audio, so the chance to write a novel about him was always going to be interesting for me. One of my other favourites back in the 1970s (and still) was Porridge, Ronnie Barker's prison-based sit-com. Once I'd decided I wanted to isolate the Brig by putting him in jail, I amused myself by using little motifs like vaguely related names for the characters in the nick. The interesting thing there was... if those names give you the picture of the characters and the set-up, then I can undermine all of that by making it a darker version of what the reader already knows. And that's what I did. I had a lot fun with it, too. By the way, all the stuff about Wormwood Scrubs during WW2 that I talk about in the novel? All true. Research is a lovely thing and doesn't half help a writer keep the story moving.
