Maxim Gunn and the Leopard Legion

Magunta, the Witch Doctor, Wizard and Master Criminal who first appears in THE CHAOS PROJECT plans to take over West Africa by resurrecting the infamous Leopard Men. Fear is his key, and the Great Black Leopard his weapon. Gunn is called in by his old friend, the Emir of Ladi, and tracks the leopard to its mountain lair.

Location: Northern Nigeria.

Maxim Gunn and the Sun Fortress

It was a fortress carved out of a living cliff in a time before history, and dedicated to the Sun God. Devlin, revolutionary and anarchist has taken it over to house the Princess, kidnapped for an impossible ransom. Maxim Gunn is called upon to do the impossible: find her and get her back before a country is brought to its knees. Simple search and rescue, he thought: but he hadn’t reckoned with the Sun God and the horrors that went
with his worship.

Location: Central America, West Coast.

Maxim Gunn and the Stolen Waters

Was the really such a place as Atlantis? And was there a super race ahead of its time, or something so different we wouldn't want to know? Trapped for thousands of years beneath the ocean until a submarine earthquake frees them, a few survivors emerge on a mission of revenge against the "Dry Landers" whom they blame for the Great Catastrophe. Kidnappings, blackmail and ugliness keep Gunn fighting to stop them - and the world will never know how close they came to success.

Location: West Coast of Scotland.

Maxim Gunn and the Serpent Force

The alignment of all nine planets will bring the Serpent Force, a mysterious power known to the ancients, to its maximum effect. One man has the secret and must be stopped. Once more Maxim Gunn is on the trail which takes him from Stonehenge to the temples of Greece and the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan. Earthquake, unseen powers, duels with the forces of evil, and time running out leave Gunn little time for sight seeing. It's a race which must be won, for the consequences of failure are unthinkable.

Maxim Gunn and the Demon Plan

Witchcraft in the twentieth century? Computer controlled demons? Maxim Gunn didn't believe it either - until his old enemy Wanda Liszt, miraculously returns from the dead with another plan to control, the world. Ambushes, a booby trapped tomb, a demonic attack by the fiend Wanda controls keep Gunn on his toes, until, with a little help from the giant Swedish archaeologist, Torquil Tornquist, the crashing finale is reached.

LOcation: Turkey

Maxim Gunn and the Chaos Project

Maxim Gunn, agent extraordinary, takes on one last official mission before resigning from the Organization. Wanda Liszt, arch criminal: dark, beautiful and deadly, has found Sheba's Necklace, the legendary rope of emeralds that bestows great powers on its possessor. Her plan: Chaos in Africa, after which she, as Great White Queen, will pick up the pieces and rule the greatest empire the world has ever seen. Gunn is ambushed by a Mongolian archer, fights a starving jaguar, wrestles a monstrous freak, and pits himself against an albino swordsman in his desperate efforts to thwart her. The explosive climax takes place in the Swiss Alps.

The Maxim Gunn Series

Right at the beginning I said this blog would be more or less about the Maxim Gunn series of Action-Adventure books - so this is what they're all about.

These action adventure novels will appeal to the adventurer and armchair agent in all of us. Maxim Gunn's wiles are a match for the most twisted of villains. Follow the saga in this riveting series of books.

Experience the flare of Maxim Gunn as written by Canadian author Nicholas Boving.

Travel Books

Most travel books are dull, with the dullness only a mélange of facts and figures, dates and timetables can produce. But there is a better way. The Portuguese café-philosopher Fernando Pessoa says that “Travel books are worth only as much as the imagination of the one who writes them, and that if the writer has imagination he can enchant the reader with the detailed, photographic description of landscape’s he’s imagined as well as with the necessarily less detailed description of the landscapes he thought he saw.”

Online piracy

Putting your work online risks piracy, just as has happened with the music industry. Only it doesn’t seem to be doing the music industry much harm. Look at Apple’s iTunes which, after a bit of a painful transition is now making money as if it had its own mint. And as one writer so rightly said, obscurity is a much worse fate than piracy. Apparently Brazilian author Paulo Coelho thinks so too, because, since he’s been actively pirating his own books his sales have increased. I wonder how many he pirates? I wonder if it's true?

A spokesman for the London based Society of Authors said that “book piracy on the internet will ultimately drive authors to stop writing unless radical methods are devised to compensate them for lost sales.”
I think we should wait and see what the technology brings – what do you think?

First lines I have in my head

“He broke a rose.”

No idea what it means: it came to me in a dream so it’s probably rubbish.

“Because the Governor hath said thou hast so great a heart.”

Also words from a dream. Go figure.

First line I did write

“The most dreadful thing you can do is not live up to someone’s expectations of you.” The Disputed Barricade.

First line I'm glad I didn't

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents ... Paul Clifford. Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

First lines I'd like to have written

According to Donald Maass, “The best first lines make us lean forward, wondering, ‘What the heck does that mean?’ ... The one thing all good first lines have in common is the intrigue factor.”

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness .....

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Scaramouche.

And inevitably ... “Call me Ishmael.”

Stalin

Now there’s a name to make any writer sit up and look over their shoulder. He’s supposed to have coined the unforgettable description that writers are “engineers of the human souls.” Actually it was a minor Soviet novelist in a toast to a writer’s gathering in 1932. No one knows what happened to the man, but he probably vanished into the Gulag ......

John Fowles on writing

Narcissism or pygmalionism is the essential vice the writer must have. Characters (or situations) are like children or lovers: they need constant tending to, caressing, listening to, watching, admiring. All these occupations become tiring for the active participant --- the writer--- and only something akin to love can provide the energy. I’ve heard people say, “I want to write a book.” But wanting to write a book, however ardently, isn’t enough. Even to say, “I want to be possessed by my creations,” isn’t enough, all natural or born writers are possessed, and in the old magical sense, by their imaginations, long before they even begin to think of writing.