ME Short Stories

The long short-story Britannia’s Eye casts a new light on Nicholas Dawlish’s relationship with his uncle, an invalided naval officer who contracted tuberculosis and retired from Navy in the mid-1850s to settle at Pau in the Pyrenees. Nicholas loved him and as a boy spent almost a year with him there. He always thought of his uncle however as a tragic failure but he was never to know – or even guess – the truth about what his uncle had really been...

1914

Britannia's Eventide is a snapshot of a critical moment in the later years of Admiral Sir Nicholas Dawlish and his wife, Lady Florence

The world’s most famous frogman, and the inspiration behind Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, Crabb was underneath a Russian warship spying on Nikita Khrushchev – the most dangerous man in the world.

No one cared if he lived or died. Worse than that, the dive was pointless. Prime Minister Anthony Eden had forbidden it. Nobody wanted it to happen. Nobody, that is, except for MI6.

Nick Elliott, head of the London station, saw it as a mighty coup – and his dear friend Kim Philby thought so too. Crabb was too old for this – he was a 47-year-old diabetic with a major drinking problem, who smoked a hundred cigarettes a day. But known as the Robber Barons, this gung-ho mafia of the rich persuaded Crabb out of retirement for one last job. But it would seem that Philby is not to be trusted and the Russians were waiting for him, deep in the cold and murky waters of Portsmouth Harbour.

When Crabb fails to return from his mission an epic cover-up ensues - one that is still going on to this day. More than a year after the dive a body is found – headless and handless – but his mother swears to her dying day it is not Crabb. Rumours are epidemic. Conspiracies are rife. Someone knows what happened, but nobody is willing to talk. And the archives on the mystery of his death, in defiance of the Thirty Year rule, remain tightly closed.

That is until a hundred years have passed and it’s 2057...

In Too Deep is a gripping nautical thriller, overflowing with political corruption, espionage and deadly secrets that are guaranteed to set your pulse racing.