Eamonn Vincent

  It is summer 1963 , the era of The Beatles and the first James Bond movies. Youth culture is taking over, but the shadows of the Second World War and its demon offspring, the Cold War, still loom, particularly for the older generation. Nowhere is immune to the mood of paranoia, not even the tiny east Hertfordshire village of Fordham Market, where skullduggery, with its roots in both conflicts, is afoot. Through a series of unexpected fatalities, Richard Warren, a well-educated, gay man in his mid-thirties, has inherited not only The Priory, his parents' impressive pile in Fordham Market, but also Wyvern Hall, his uncle's neighbouring, slightly more ramshackle, estate. The only problem is that Richard is broke and his dead relatives seem only to have bequeathed him debt. His old college friend Tony Smallwood offers to help him out of this predicament. But, unknown to Warren, Smallwood is an agent working for the Soviet Union. This is  Eamonn Vincent's  first novel. He has

When I published my memoir ' Me Neither ' in 2018 I started a blog in the hope of drawing attention to it. Ha! As if. Even then no one wanted yet another blog or website or tweets about your latest book. The focus had already moved on to Instagram and Pinterest, both studiously averse to textual matter. Now even those sites are old hat and all the action has moved to TikTok and, for the purposes of promoting books, to its offshoot BookTok. Stranger things have been known to happen, but somehow I doubt that Gen Z influencers are on the whole enthusing about Boomer memoirs devoted to the world of work in the 1970s and 1980s.  After a few posts I abandoned the blog and let my little book make its own way through the world. In the absence of any publicity or reviews in the public prints, sales were distinctly modest. I was not surprised, but it was hard not to feel a little disheartened. Perhaps memoir was not my forte. What about writing a novel instead?  Four years later I seem t

The main focus of the rather abbreviated period of training thereafter was to learn how to use the Setright machine, the device that printed the tickets. The Setright was a marvellous steampunk contraption all dials and hieroglyphics with a name that seemed to be a triumph of branding. But I subsequently discovered that there had in fact been a Mr Setright who had invented the device and simply given his name to the  company. This was no doubt one of the more obscure examples of nominative determinism, much more unlikely than Igor Judge eventually becoming Lord Chief Justice after passing through that phase of his professional life when he was Judge Judge. From Setright Conundrums, Me Neither Me Neither available here

Furthermore it was also well known that many of the roundsmen had houses where they might get a cup of tea or coffee with the lady of the house. And it would appear that some of them, got even more than that including, improbably as it seemed to me, Ron. I lived in a kind of queasy anticipation that I might soon be feebly fending off some Highsett Sophia Loren in a whirl of négligée. Alas I never got so much as a glimpse of winceyette pyjamas. From  Electricar Manoeuvres, Me Neither Amazon  paperback. Kindle edition  here . Image courtesy Dr Julian Paren, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42413097

I was fairly doubtful about this plan. What if we passed an inspector en route which was far from improbable at that time of morning. Speedy thought for a bit and then suggested that we avoid the city centre altogether. He reasoned that an inspector would have no reason to be on duty on The Backs for example. He sketched out the route we would take and then we’d resume our schedule at Mitcham’s Corner. I wasn’t even sure that there was enough clearance for a double-decker bus on the route he was suggesting but I could see that the longer we debated the issue the later we were likely to be. No doubt my lack of moral fibre was connected to the monumental hang-over I was nursing so I agreed weakly, put up the Not In Service sign and hid myself in the back of the bus. A Bristol Lodekka LFS 45 is faster than a Morrison Electricar milk float, but not much. Despite that fact Speedy managed to coax an impressive performance from the lumbering beast and we made up most of the time lost due to m

This meant that each morning I drove by Cherry Hinton Hall. Since 1963 this had been the site of the Cambridge Folk Festival. The Hall was not actually part of my round but I was aware from the many posters that the festival would be taking place during my Cherry Hinton tour of duty. The line-up was right up my street—Arlo Guthrie, Loudon Wainwright III and Alan Stivell. I was starting to work out ways that I could do my round and still attend the festival. In the end common sense or apathy won out and I had to resign myself once again to observing gilded youth frolicking in a sylvan setting while I got my finances in order. At least I got to sleep in a comfortable bed. From Electricar Manoeuvres, Me Neither Amazon  paperback. Kindle edition  here .