Thursday, July 30, 2009

Maxim Gunn on Smashwords.com

The complete “Maxim Gunn” six book series of action-adventures is now available at Smashwords E-Books. Take a look, read a few chapters for free, maybe buy them, and tell your friends.

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Nicholas

Friday, July 24, 2009

A Little Touch of Zenda in the Night

Revue by David L. Vineyard

In “Maxim Gunn and The Sun Fortress”, the fourth volume in Nicholas O. Boving’s entertaining series about secret agent and adventurer Maxim Gunn, the author produces not only another fine adventure in the series, but adds a hint of Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe as we learn some surprising facts about Gunn’s history. Readers of the series will know Gunn is a former agent of the Organization headed by the cool headed and cold blooded splendidly named Vileman. Despite having left the service Gunn can’t sit on his laurels and enjoy his life with beautiful lady friend Lady Cynthia ffoote and his man James Sweetstory, he keeps getting drawn back into the Great Game.

In Sun Fortress Gunn is drawn back into a very personal battle when Princess Alicia Flavia of the small but key nation of Ruritania is kidnapped by mercenary terrorist Devlin and his small army. The kidnapping has a personal tie to Gunn who it seems is a direct descendent of Rudolph Rassendyll, an adventurer who was involved with the Princess’s great grandmother and Ruritanian intrigue, the story fictionalized in Anthony Hope’s adventure tale The Prisoner of Zenda.

Almost as soon as Gunn is drawn into the case it becomes apparent this is no ordinary kidnapping for ransom or extortion. The Princess has been taken so she can be sacrificed by an insane Mayan priest who believes that a coming disaster can only be averted by spilling royal blood. Meanwhile she is being held in a remote fortress by Devlin and his mercenary army, inaccessible on one side by jungle and the followers of the mad priest, and on the other by the sea and nearly vertical cliffs.

But one or two men could perhaps get close, scale the cliffs, and rescue the Princess before the deadline --- especially if one of those men is Maxim Gunn.

Boving continues to weave Gunn’s adventures with elements of the fantastic and old fashioned swashbuckling, while in Gunn he has created a classic adventure hero who is equally at home in the company of James Bond or the Saint, Dirk Pitt or Richard Hannay, Modesty Blaise or Rudolph Rassendyll ... These books are grand adventures, playful and inventive and written in a literate and civilized manner that makes them ideal escapism. In Sun Fortress he has also created a fiery and intelligent heroine in the Princess, who proves equal to Gunn and his dashing ally Don Sebastian as they dare the sheer cliffs and ruthless army that guards the inaccessible fortress.

It all builds up to a suspenseful conclusion as Gunn and Don Sebastian find themselves alone facing an angry army with their backs to a sheer cliff ...

These books are a wonderful blend of modern thriller and old fashioned adventure and readers who enjoy Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider, Ted Bell’s Alexander Hawke, or James Rollins Sigma Force books should give them a try. Nicholas Boving is a most civilized and entertaining writer, with a touch of savagery and a delightful tongue in cheek sense of humor. Get on the Maxim Gunn bandwagon now. The call to adventure has never rung so clear. The entire affair runs as coolly as Gunn’s Lagonda and goes down as smoothly as his favorite Glenmorangie whiskey, with the solid kick of his .357 Colt Python. Superior escapist fun for all readers.

Enter a Hero

Revue by David L. Vineyard

“Maxim Gunn and The Chaos Project” introduces the world to Gunn, Maxim Gunn, Nicholas Boving’s entertaining and clever twist on the cool eyed British hero of lore. Of course it’s impossible to escape the comparison with James Bond, and Boving cleverly manages to play his own clever variations on all the tropes of Fleming’s popular works, but Boving is holding his cards close to his vest and if Gunn occasionally offers a glimpse of Fleming’s world of glamour and danger he also plays --- in a different manner --- some of those same notes that Fleming himself drew on from the rich past of the British thriller while keeping his tongue in cheek with a panache that may remind readers of the late George McDonald Fraser’s cheeky Flashman. Maxim Gunn is no Flashy, he’s true blue, handsome, dashing, and with impeccable manners, but he also manages to touch on that same wealth of earlier heroes from Anthony Hope’s Rudolph Rassendyll and Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond to C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower.

Nor is Boving content to put his man up against anything as tiresome as the Russians, terrorist fanatics, or the usual run of megalomaniacs. Gunn, who is contemplating retiring from the Organization to escape his tiresome boss, the perfectly named Vileman, finds himself arrayed against the beautiful and deadly Wanda Liszt. Seems Gunn killed Wanda’s super criminal father and Wanda and her allies have been seeking revenge ever since. And what revenge it is. Wanda has gotten her hands on the legendary necklace of Sheba, and with it’s powers she plans to seize all of Africa as her own little fiefdom -- but first she has to gather her forces in a splendid set piece of a gothic unassailable castle fortress --- replete with its own version of the Jacob’s ladder that threatened the real king of Ruritania in Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda --- where Gunn, with the help of a former SAS man and a Union Corse godfather, has to literally bring the house down on Wanda’s head.

Tongue firmly in cheek, Boving orchestrates it all with clever byplay, fast action, and a knowing nod to what splendid fun all this nonsense can be if the reader will just relax and go along with it. The author has a real gift for capturing the feeling of exotic locales and creating exciting, colorful, and bizarre dilemmas for his hero to extricate himself from with the proper mix of derring-do and the well placed mot juste.

It all runs as smooth as Gunn’s Lagonda and with the kick of his trusty .357 Magnum, at a rapidly evolving pace and with just the right balance of action, character development, and colorful background and locales. I won’t be giving away too much to reveal Wanda Liszt meets a just end, but I suspect she won’t be quiet long, and Boving hints as much in a clever coda at the books end. It’s no small thing to create a hero as attractive as Gunn (think Stewart Granger in The Prisoner of Zenda) or a villain as wickedly inviting as Wanda, and Boving plays the two off each other with all the right notes. If Maxim Gunn deserves to stand in the company of such heroes as Bond, Drummond, and the Saint, as well as more modern entries like Dirk Pitt or Ted Bell’s Alexander Hawke; Wanda deserves a place alongside Carl and Irma Peterson, Fu Manchu and his daughter, Fleming’s Ernst Stavro Blofield, and of course the immortal Professor Moriarty.

I can’t say enough about Boving’s literate and highly readable mix of old fashioned adventure with a pleasingly gothic touch of what the Scots like to call the uncanny and a whiff of the kind of world threatening science we’ve come to associate with Clive Cussler, James Rollins, and Mathew Reilly’s bestselling novels. Long live Maxim Gunn --- and the good news is there are six more already available. You won’t regret meeting Mr. Gunn, and you will be eager to make his acquaintance again and again.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Maxim Gunn in West Africa

West Africa is a more dangerous and treacherous place than when I was working there in the 60’s, and there certainly weren’t any Leopard Men that I knew about, but Maxim Gunn is the type of man I wouldn't have minded meeting during a few of the more dicey moments in my own more sedate career in the wilds of Northern Nigeria, like the terrible day when the world went mad and the killing started. They called it the Biafran War, but it was more like bloody retribution and the fulfillment of a prophecy.

But most of it was good, very good, and I still remember arriving all those years ago. We landed at Kano in the wee hours, and after customs I went up onto the airport roof to wait for the local plane - a DC3 - to Jos. And as I waited the sun rose. It was a Rider Haggard moment. It was "King Solomon's Mines" and "She". It was P.C.Wren and "Beau Geste". The blood red ball shimmering through the desert dust, the smell of camel dung cooking fires, and the muezzin’s call to prayer. It was glorious, that first sunrise over Africa. I sat and watched it with a feeling of intense excitement and awe and it has stayed with me and I can still smell it although it was nearly fifty years ago.

Maxim Gunn Downunder

Western Australia is perhaps a bit less wild and woolly than when I was a mining engineer there in the late 70’s but Maxim Gunn finds it challenging enough in his latest adventure. Marble Bar in the old days really was a one pub town, the famous Iron Clad, and the roads weren’t blacktop; just rutted tracks that billowed dust in the dry, and turned to mud in the wet. But otherwise it was pretty much as Gunn sees it: bloody hot, prone to mind-numbing cyclones, and a cold beer is still a cold beer. As for aliens, well, anything’s possible I suppose.

After Western Australia I chucked mining because as I’ve said somewhere else, it became my unalterable opinion that working in 40 degrees Celsius in the shade was for the birds.

Friday, July 17, 2009

The Disputed Barricade

This is with my agent. Anyone interested, drop me a line.

We have the distinction of living in a time in which our collective acts will decide the fate of all nature on Earth. Many of Earth’s billions are justifiably worried and embittered by the state of the environment and the results of multinational summits have had disappointing results, bringing further outcry and demands that those in power exercise that power for the good of the Earth and its people. The notion that we are at the mercy of big business and governments has been reinforced by each failure to make positive progress. But there is a movement gathering strength and the people feel betrayed, and that can be dangerous for those who fail in their duties.

Virgil Conlan, the protagonist of “THE DISPUTED BARRICADE” embodies that frustration as he leads the way through thought, beliefs and actions that will validate the feelings of those who read this novel.

“THE DISPUTED BARRICADE” is a novel in tune with the world pulse, and will strike a sympathetic cord in that like so many flawed heroes he is to some extent out of sync with society’s norms.

After half a lifetime as a mining engineer in many parts of the world, I have seen both sides of the environmental fence, seen the appalling destruction uncontrolled industry can wreak, and played a part in achieving positive results. This had placed me in a unique position of having had real experience when it came to writing this novel.

There may have been other novels about the environment, but none have the angle of a biography, none have the combined elements of decline, redemption, violence, tenderness, love and loss, and as powerfully as “THE DISPUTED BARRICADE”.

“THE DISPUTED BARRICADE” is the story of a man with a mission, driven to mount a one-man crusade to save the last great wild places from the depredation of industry. He has talked to those in power, tried reason, and having come against a stone wall of vested interests, political obstruction and industry whose god is money, decided to get their attention the hard way and hit them where it hurts: the balance sheet.

The story is a biographer’s exploration of the man, which takes place at an old beach house on Tasmania’s wild West Coast, inter-spaced with four chapters in which he successfully sabotages an off-shore mining dredge in the Chilean islands, a mining operation in the United States’ Rocky Mountains, and a logging project in British Columbia, Canada.

Conlan’s background, from a young man of Anglo-Irish descent in London’s post-war slums, through independence, a failed marriage, a disastrous affair, alcoholism and despair, to his final awakening and new found sense of purpose on a sheep station in New South Wales’ Blue Mountains, is explored over a spring and summer of wild days and calm, in which the biographer and narrator uncovers his curious semi-religious beliefs about the earth, and comes to understand the roots of his near fanatical love for it.

It is also a love story, and culminates violently in a contracted attempt on Conlan’s life, and his return to Chile to finish the uncompleted job: his rendezvous with death at the disputed barricade.

Think about a man ...

Have you ever thought it was time for a different kind of hero? Well ...

Think about a man: suave, hard, devil-may-care, an ex-agent, the best that ever was. Call him MAXIM GUNN.

Think about the dark realms, the hidden corners, the places where things lurk, things that live only in our imaginations, things that just should not be.

Think about hostile aliens, and vampires and werewolves. Think about priceless jewels with unearthly powers, and demons controlled by computers.

Think about the people who come to MAXIM GUNN for help, help he cannot deny for that’s just not in his makeup.

Think about MAXIM GUNN the man. A man who avoids violence, but meets it head on if he can’t. A man who’d rather think his way out of trouble, but whose fighting skills are legendary.

Think about a contrary man who might say that knowing there is a trap is the first step to avoiding it, and then smiles and adds, but into battle, murder and sudden death, good Lord deliver me, right up to the neck.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The Storytellers Creed

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge,
That myth is more potent than history,
That dreams are more powerful than facts,
That hope always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death.