JAMES SWALLOW

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DARK HORIZON paperback: Ready for Take-Off!

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In just a few short weeks, my latest action-packed thriller DARK HORIZON will be on sale in a paperback edition, with eye-catching new cover art!

Only a handful of people know the reason why pilot Kate Hood left the military in disgrace… But to keep her secrets, she must take a last-minute assignment to fly a covert cargo out of the country to a non-extradition nation, with no questions asked.

The cargo is a prisoner who swears he is an innocent man. As Kate races through the night, a team of ruthless assassins are hunting the people she cares about, forcing the pilot to divert her aircraft. But is the endgame to liberate the captive – or kill him?

Here’s what some reviewers have said about DARK HORIZON….
“Bursting with intensity from the explosive opening… It’s a must-read.” – Best Thriller Books
“Will have you wishing your sofa came with a seat-belt!” – Peterborough Telegraph
“Absolutely compelling.” – The Secret Book Review
“Another fantastic yarn from James Swallow.” – Cloak & Dagger Stories

The new paperback is out on November 9th, and DARK HORIZON is also available in eBook and audiobook editions as you prefer, available from all good online retailers, your bookshop of choice and selected high street stores.

Pre-orders always help raise the profile of my books, so thank you in advance for your support – and remember to help out the smaller local independent bookstores in your area if you can by getting your copy of the DARK HORIZON paperback from them in person, or via Bookshop.org!

DARK HORIZON ONE MONTH LATER…

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The past few weeks have raced by since the release of my latest stand-alone thriller DARK HORIZON, and I wanted to say a heartfelt thank-you to everyone who has bought the hardback, eBook and audiobook! Your support means a lot, as does all the positive feedback!

DARK HORIZON has had some terrific reviews – here’s a few choice quotes:

James Swallow’s latest thriller takes the action 40,000 feet in the sky, bursting with intensity and anticipation of each subsequent page from the explosive opening… It’s a must-read that you will want to read with minimal interruption just because the unfolding of the action feels so addictive.
Kashif Hussain, Best Thriller Books

Will have you wishing your sofa came with a seat-belt… Wham-bam thrills galore.
Alex Gordon, Peterborough Telegraph

James Swallow is a master of the high-octane thriller. Dark Horizon grabs you from the very first page, takes you on a rollercoaster ride of thrills, spills, twists and turns until its satisfying conclusion. Everything a thriller should be.
Adam Hamdy, (author of The Other Side of Night, Black 13 and Private Moscow)

An absolutely compelling, gripping book full of mystery and suspense.
The Secret Book Review

Poignant, action packed… The author has done a brilliant job, it’s a heart-throbbing and gripping thriller.
Rudrashree Makwana, Goodreads

A brutal adrenaline hit of a book that blasts along at a thousand miles an hour.
Tim Glister (author of Red Corona, A Loyal Traitor and A Game of Deceit)

Another fantastic yarn from James Swallow.
Kaushik Karforma, Cloak & Dagger Stories

Wow! You’re in for a ride.
D.L Marshall (author of Anthrax Island, Black Run and 77 North)

A breath-taking action thriller.
Surjit Parekh, Surjit Reads and Recommends

This novel is a real page turner, it hooks you into the story and then you can’t put it down until you finish.
Mary H, Netgalley

Another high-octane action thriller from the master James Swallow and what an ending! Put your seatbelt on and your seat in the upright position and get ready for a wild ride!
Hanlie T, Bookseller

Pace, intrigue, well developed characters, unexpected turns, and a satisfactory ending! Dark Horizon delivers…
Nix C, Netgalley

Sometimes you just need a book to drag you away from reality, leave your questions at the opening pages and embrace a fast paced, page turning, thrilling, action-packed read. This book did not disappoint. A perfect summer beach read!
Deborah M, Netgalley

You can also check out “Flying in the Dark”, the feature I wrote about the making of DARK HORIZON for Shots Magazine at this link.

DARK HORIZON is available in hardcover and digital eBook editions from Welbeck Publishing and in audiobook format on Audible – find a downloadable sample chapter and audio excerpt here, or get your copy at this link!

TECHNO THRILLER HEAVEN: RED SUN RISING

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A change of pace in this month’s TTH blog; previously I’ve concentrated on prose fiction technothrillers with a western origin, but this time I’m taking a look at a Japanese manga series, the classic Cold War submarine drama Chinmoku no Kantai – The Silent Service.

In the depths of the ocean, one man pushes the world to the edge of Armageddon in a deadly game of nuclear poker… The captain of a ballistic missile submarine, capable of launching multiple ICBMs, he leads his pursuers on a dangerous chase as he races across the sea to gain his own kind of freedom…

Created by writer and artist Kaiji Kawaguchi, winner of the Kodansha publishing house’s Manga Award in 1990, The Silent Service was a modern-day military fiction tale of submarine warfare and political intrigue in the style popularised by authors like Tom Clancy, Larry Bond, Mark Joseph and others. Serialised in the weekly Japanese manga magazine Comic Morning from 1988 to 1996, it was later republished in 32 paperback-sized ‘tankōbon’ volumes.

The Silent Service opens with a collision between a Japanese and a Russian submarine, in which the Japanese sub sinks with all hands – but the incident is actually a smokescreen for a secret project between the Japanese ‘deep state’ and the United States Navy to launch Japan’s first nuclear submarine. But when the sub – the Seabat – begins sea trials, its commander Captain Shiro Kaieda leads the crew to take over the sub, and run for deep water.

In subsequent issues, Kaieda tangles with the American navy, running rings around them as they desperately attempt to capture him and his war-load of nuclear missiles. Re-naming his sub Yamato, Kaieda declares his vessel an independent state, heightening nuclear tension around the globe, pushing the governments of the world steps closer to conflict. The sub’s new name is freighted with meaning – not only the name of the ill-fated World War II battleship that was the pride of the Japanese navy, but it’s also an ancient term for the nation of Japan itself.

Finally, after trouncing the fleets of the Soviet and American navies (including sinking the aircraft carrier Midway and the battleship New Jersey) the Yamato‘s captain reveals his true intentions – to force the major powers of the world accept a United Nations mandate over the control of nuclear weapons. The plot thickens when the Japanese Prime Minister allies with Kaieda and offers to place all of Japan’s Self-Defence Forces under UN command to accomplish that goal. American response is less than warm, and tensions flare as the Yamato is pursued by hunter-killer subs intent on destroying the renegade and restoring the world’s nuclear status quo.

Kawaguchi’s presentation of contemporary military hardware and equipment is dead on, as he draws attack submarines of all nationalities, destroyers and frigates, battleships, aircraft carriers, helicopters and jet fighters. His views of the cramped interiors of subs accurately convey the atmosphere of tension around the characters; even the uniforms are detailed, right down to the shoulder braid on the uncannily always-pristine Kaieda. The style is crisp and uncluttered, working to highlight the technology of the world’s navies, as well as their sailors. The action sequences are swift and fluid, and the constant baseline of danger is always evident – among the most dramatic sequences are a sub-versus-sub battle beneath the Arctic ice pack, and a missile-laden battle in New York Harbor, concluding with the dramatic ramming of the Yamato by an F-14 Tomcat.

At the time of release, in a period of political and economic change in Japan, the manga’s challenging plotline was the focus of great media attention, to the extent that it was publicly debated in the Japanese parliament. Kawaguchi was no stranger to controversy, having previously created Eagle, a series about a Japanese-American senator on the road to win the US presidency, and he would later write Zipang, about a modern Japanese warship thrown back in time to the Battle of Midway. Like The Silent Service, these stories take a hard, uncompromising look at Japanese-American geopolitics.

Viewing it from a 2020’s perspective, The Silent Service can be thought of as a modern-day Captain Nemo tale, with nuclear-tipped ICBMs frightening the world into peace and disarmament. But the nationalist themes in the plot made uncomfortable but compelling reading to many Japanese, throwing a spotlight on the relationship between Japan and the USA, and the Security Treaty between the two nations forged in the wake of WWII; and some American readers saw the series as jingoistic wish-fulfillment, as the Yamato humiliates Western military forces again and again. But it’s interesting to note that the right-leaning elements of the narrative are later balanced out by Captain Kaidea’s leftist ideals of unilateral nuclear disarmament. However, as happened with so many Cold War technothrillers of its era, The Silent Service was undone by the pace of real world events, with the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble, shifts in Japanese political and military spheres, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the final analysis, Kawaguchi presents a story of a man who has taken a side, and for whatever reasons will fight to bring about what he thinks is right.

With over 25 million copies published, The Silent Service was a bestseller. Along with video game adaptations, a three-part anime series was produced (the first two episodes of which were translated for the US market), and it also inspired a South Korean version in 1999 (Phantom: The Submarine). A similar concept also appears in the 2012 TV series Last Resort, centring the action on a US Navy sub that, like Kaidea’s Yamato, declares itself an independent nuclear power after a “deep state” conspiracy goes awry. More recently, Amazon Studios and Toho have collaborated on a live-action TV version of The Silent Service to be screened later in 2023.

[This blog is based on an article that originally appeared Anime UK Magazine #5 in 1991]

TECHNO THRILLER HEAVEN: SPLINTER CELL

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This, the first of my irregular TTH blogs for 2023, may come off as a little self-serving, as I’ll be looking over a series of novels that I’ve written for – and not so coincidentally, one that has a new release in the UK this month! I apologize for nothing! I’m as much a fan of these books as I am a contributor – an action packed series of “operator thrillers” based on a blockbuster video game franchise, endorsed by none other than that technothriller titan, Tom Clancy himself…

Published by Ubisoft in 2002, the first Splinter Cell video game was the second original project under the “Tom Clancy’s” banner following the previous year’s Ghost Recon, building out the franchise from titles based directly on Clancy’s fiction. Set in what was then the near future of 2004, the titular Splinter Cell is grizzled covert operative Sam Fisher (voiced by the iconic Michael Ironside), a former US Navy SEAL recruited to become a lone wolf agent for Third Echelon (later evolving into Fourth Echelon) – a secret program created by America’s National Security Agency to conduct covert intelligence-gathering missions in hostile territory, and to seek out, engage and destroy hi-tech threats to global security.

Splinter Cell helped define the “stealth-shooter” genre of games, and over the next decade the series became a firm favourite with gamers, followed by sequels Pandora Tomorrow (2004), Chaos Theory (2005), Essentials and Double Agent (both 2006), Conviction (2010), and Blacklist (2013). Sam Fisher would also make appearances in several other games and two comics miniseries (Echoes and Digging in the Ashes) – but this is a blog about thriller novels, so it’s the prose spin-offs that we’re looking at here…

Berkley Books published the first tie-in novels under the house pseudonym ‘David Michaels’ (along with other fiction based on games from the Tom Clancy’s banner like Ghost Recon, EndWar and HAWX), starting in 2004 with Splinter Cell.

Like all of the novels to date, this was an original story spinning off from the established continuity of the games; in it, Fisher faces The Shadows, a terrorist cadre in league with The Shop, international arms dealers who are targeting Third Echelon personnel for assassination.

Splinter Cell the novel was a hit for Berkley, posting on both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal’s bestseller lists, followed a year later by Operation Barracuda, which mirrored the success of its predecessor. In the second book, Fisher goes after The Shop, ultimately uncovering a deadly plan to trigger a nuclear device off the US coast. Written in the first-person to emulate the perspective of players in the Splinter Cell video games, the first two novels were penned by Raymond Benson, an author known for his work on James Bond fiction in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s. Benson’s other work adapting game-worlds to prose covered franchises like Homefront and Hitman – and notably Metal Gear Solid, a popular series of Japanese stealth-shooter games to which the Splinter Cell titles were seen as the Western equivalent.

Benson left the series with the third book, as Grant Blackwood took over behind the house name for the next two Splinter Cell novels. Blackwood, an experienced thriller writer known for collaborations with Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler and James Rollins, dropped Benson’s first-person perspective for 2006’s Checkmate as well as plot threads set up in the previous books. Instead, the third novel concentrates on new antagonists as Fisher races to intercept a cargo ship loaded with radioactive material before it can be used against the United States. Blackwood continued a year later with Fallout, which introduced a revenge plot based around Fisher’s adoptive brother, a coup in the nation of Kyrgyzstan and a plot to destroy global oil resources.

With Splinter Cell: Conviction, the fifth game in the series, planned to be released in 2010, Ubisoft and Berkeley engaged more closely, presenting novels that dovetailed with the narrative of the new game rather than being purely stand-alone tales. And in 2009, another new writer came in under the ‘Michaels’ pseudonym, this time Peter Telep, an experienced tie-in novelist with a thriller pedigree (having penned the Force 5 Recon, Armored Corps and Night Angel 9 series, among others).

Telep’s first Splinter Cell novel, also titled Conviction, was released a few months before the game, acting as a prequel to its narrative where Fisher is cast as a rogue agent out on his own and is no longer a part of Third Echelon. In the novel, Fisher is being hunted by a new team of Splinter Cell operatives, and their perspective on these events is presented in Telep’s next book Endgame, which was released shortly after.

There would be a three year gap until Sam Fisher returned in the video game Splinter Cell: Blacklist, which rebooted the franchise with Eric Johnson taking over the role as a younger iteration of the series’ protagonist. Published several months after Blacklist’s release, Telep returned for the tie-in novel Blacklist: Aftermath, which followed up the events of the game with Fisher and the new Fourth Echelon agency racing to track down a Russian computer genius being forced to create an unstoppable virus program.

Aftermath was the first Splinter Cell novel to drop the ‘Michaels’ pseudonym, and the last to be published by Berkley Books’ parent company Penguin. With no new Splinter Cell games on the horizon and only guest-starring appearances for Sam Fisher in other titles like Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, the franchise laid fallow until the early 2020’s when hints of a new iteration began to bubble up.

In the interim, publisher Aconyte Books began producing tie-in fiction based on several Ubisoft games, including Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs and another Tom Clancy’s title, The Division. Their association also returned the Splinter Cell to prose in 2022 with the eighth novel in the series, Firewall, written by…me!

Set several years after the events of Blacklist, Firewall has Fisher forced to work alongside his estranged daughter Sarah as he faces off against an assassin from his past, in the search for a powerful cyberwarfare technology on sale to the highest bidder. Firewall was the first Splinter Cell novel also to be released in audiobook, and in late 2022, it was adapted into a full-cast audio drama series for BBC Radio 4. This year, I’ve followed up Firewall with Dragonfire, in which Fisher is disavowed and left for dead deep inside North Korea, while Sarah desperately works to assemble an off-the-books mission to rescue him before it is too late.

What I enjoy about these novels is how all the different writers who’ve taken on Sam Fisher tap into the essential elements of the character – the cold-eyed lone wolf, the wry veteran with nerves of steel and a set of high-tech kit, the one man on a mission against impossible odds. Playing as Sam in the games is a lot of fun, and reading him is just as good. If you play the games, the books are a must-read – and if you don’t, they’re a great addition to the “Clancyverse” for anyone who enjoys some fast-paced technothrills.

I stated up front that I’m a fan of the Splinter Cell saga, and so I’ve done my best not only to hold to the lore of the games but also to give a nod back to the work of Benson, Blackwood and Telep in the earlier novels. Click on the titles to read about my novels in the Splinter Cell series, Firewall and Dragonfire.

But what does the future hold for Sam Fisher and the Splinter Cell program? A remake of the original Splinter Cell game is currently being developed at Ubisoft’s Toronto studio, and an animated series (see above) is in the works at Netflix, with John Wick writer Derek Kolstad in the driving seat.

And as for more novels; there’s certainly more stories about Sam Fisher yet to be told…

Something Borrowed (2022 Edition)

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January means I get my yearly report on the Public Lending Right from the British Library, detailing all of my UK library book loans for the previous 12 months! This is always great to see, because I warms my heart to know that readers are reading my stuff and that libraries around the country continue to do their most important work of putting books in the hands of people who may not otherwise have access to them.

If you’re not familiar with how the PLR pays back writers (and also editors, illustrators and translators), here’s my annual explanation:

The PLR is a system where people who’ve worked on books that are in public libraries get a little revenue each time somebody borrows them. It’s a way to repay writers (and others) who won’t be earning a royalty from a sale in a bookstore. The PLR pays a nominal fee from a communal ‘pot’ of money based on how borrowed you were, and in the interests of fairness, you can’t earn more than around £6000, so the big name authors out there don’t get to hog all the cash.

If you are a writer/editor/illustrator/translator and a resident of the UK or Ireland, and you ever need a reason for donating your books to the library – on top of all the obvious ones like promoting reading and supporting this valuable and increasingly undermined public service! – this is it.

Here’s my Top Ten Library Loans of my novels for 2022 (with 2021’s position in brackets)

1 (1) Rogue
2 (-) Outlaw
3 (3) Ghost
4 (2) Shadow
5 (4) Exile
6 (5) Nomad
7 (-) Airside
8 (6) Garro: Weapon of Fate
9 (-) Firewall
10 (9/7) Ghost in the Shell / The Buried Dagger

Last year, my 5th Marc Dane novel Rogue held on to the top spot, with the 6th book Outlaw coming in just below; all six of my Marc Dane books filled the top half of the top ten, with just under 10,000 combined loans between them. Also new in the chart this year was my new stand-alone thriller Airside and my Splinter Cell tie-in novel Firewall, and the number #10 position was shared by my co-authored novelization of the Ghost in the Shell movie and my last Horus Heresy tome The Buried Dagger.

I often get readers telling me apologetically that they got one of my books from a library to read instead of buying it – but that’s okay! I still get a few pence each time a book of mine gets lent out, so don’t feel guilty about using libraries. In fact, for some creators, that bit of PLR cash might be the only money they ever see from that work.

I say this every year because it’s true – I wholeheartedly believe that libraries are the lifeblood of many communities and a vital resource that builds lifetime readers, and as always, I want to show my appreciation to everyone working hard in our libraries across the UK and Ireland, and to all the people working to keep them running.The PLR and our libraries are constantly under threat from government cutbacks, so if you are a writer or a reader, please do your bit to help support both as best you can – and keep on reading!

2K22 Books

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Year-end blog #3 compiles my reading for 2022; this year I tried an experiment to shake up my book genre choices and make an attempt to get stuff read that was otherwise not getting a look-in.

How? I made an IF-THEN flowchart breaking up my massive TBR pile into science fiction, thriller and non-fiction categories, with sub-categories for tie-ins and a once-a-month ‘wildcard’ choice. It’s worked pretty well and got me to pick up books that might otherwise have languished, so I’m going to keep it up in 2023. Other stats of note: I broke my reading goal last year; over half my 2022 reading was in eBook format; and I read a bunch of advanced copies and as-yet-unreleased stuff, which was cool.

Top picks for 2022 were Chris Thompson & Andrew Clements’ brilliant Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual, Mike Sutton’s Typhoon and Jake Avila’s Cave Diver.

Here’s the full list:
The Autobiography of Mr Spock (Una McCormack), Steel Fear (Brandon Webb & John David Mann), The Art of NASA (Piers Bizony), Crises and Conflicts (Ian Whates, ed.), Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual (Chris Thompson & Andrew Clements), Storm Dragon [aka Sea Strike] (James H. Cobb), Inferno Squad (Christie Golden), Typhoon (Mike Sutton), Watch Dogs: Stars & Stripes (Sean Grigsby & Stewart Hotston), The Kaiju Preservation Society (John Scalzi), Space: 1999 volume 2 – Earthbound (Various), Escape from New York: The Official Story of the Film (John Walsh) , I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Trevor Paglen), The Island (Adrian McKinty), Aurora: The Pentagon’s Secret Hypersonic Spyplane (Bill Sweetman), No Man’s Land (Kirsten Beyer & Mike Johnson), The Unsettling Stars (Alan Dean Foster) Winter’s Gifts (Ben Aaronovitch), Harrier: How to be a Fighter Pilot (Paul Tremelling), Watch Dogs Legion: Daybreak Legacy (Stewart Hotston), Genocide Mage (Ben Counter), Airfix: Celebrating 50 Years of the World’s Greatest Plastic Kits (Arthur Ward), 10 Stories (Andy Farrant), BadAsstronauts (Grady Hendrix), Foxbat (James Barrington), Police Helicopter Operations Manual (Richard Brandon), Sympathy for the Devil (Seth McFarlane), Double or Nothing (Kim Sherwood), UFO: Destruct Positive! (Andy Lane), The History of the Stealth Game (Kirk McKeand), Foxbat (Peter Cave), They Shouldn’t Have Killed His Dog (Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman), Hard Reboot (Django Wexler), Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (Peter Pomerantsev), Alias Emma (Ava Glass), More Beautiful Than Death (David Mack), The Men Who Created Gundam (Hideki Ohwada), The End (James Patterson with Brendan Dubois), Strike Fighters (Tom Willard), Celestial (M.D. Lachlan), Estate Planning For Authors (M.L. Buchman), Sharuq (Bill Keith), Crysis: Escalation (Gavin G. Smith), A History of Heavy Metal (Andrew O’Neill), Armored (Mark Greaney), The Launch Party (Lauren Forry), The Buckaroo Banzai Collectors’ Compendium (DeWayne Todd), Night Stalkers: Twilight Justice (Duncan Long), Star Cops – The High Frontier Vol.1 (Various) Twilight Company (Alexander Freed), Letters of Note: Space (Shaun Usher, ed.), Cave Diver (Jake Avila), Titanium Rain Vol.1 (Josh Finney), When The Sparrow Falls (Neil Sharpson), Blank Spots on the Map (Paglen), Black Ops: Jungle Kill (Jim Eldridge), Rebel Rising (Beth Revis), Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (Dan Hampton).