Fiction

Fiction Backlist

The following stories are currently available under the name of Derek Wilson:

The Cromwell Enigma

Thomas Cromwell was a man with many friends – and not only in England. News of his arrest for treason ran like a shockwave through Europe. One man who heard it with dismay was the scholar and poet, Nicholas Bourbon, who owed his own life to Cromwell's intervention years earlier. Bourbon was currently serving in the household of Queen Marquerite of Navarre, the most cultured ruler in Europe and at her behest he travelled to England charged with obtaining first-hand knowledge of the situation there.

Thus began a series of strange and dangerous adventures that led him to London, Antwerp, Florence and then, once more, to England and the court of Henry VIII. It turned out to be a journey back through time for Bourbon as he sought out who had known Cromwell in his early years – family, friends, business associates, those who shared his Reformed faith, as well as those who hated the 'upstart from Putney' and all he stood for. The dark quest uncovered many secrets – but none darker than the one that finally revealed the traumatic events that overturned the life of Thomas Cromwell – and, therefore, of England.

Magnificent Malevolence

In the dark days of World War II C.S. Lewis tackled the problem of evil in his wholly original Screwtape Letters – Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil. But what has the Satanic top brass been up to these last 70 years? Read the eye-widening autobiography of Crumblewit, SOD (Order of the Sons of Darkness, 1st Class) for an update in the strategy of the Low Command.

Published in March 2013 by Lion Hudson under the Lion Fiction imprint.

Buy your copy now.

Two crime series from my fiction backlist below are published by Little Brown.

Tripletree

Dr Nathaniel Gye, lecturer in parapsychology at Cambridge and a controversial presenter of TV documentaries on the occult, tends to get involved in criminal investigations in which normal police procedures become confused with supposed supernatural activity. Tripletree is the first published extract from his personal journal. At an exotic party in the Cotswold Jacobean manor house of Coln St Ippolyts the festivities of the great and the good come to an abrupt end when the body of a woman is dragged from the lake. Nat Gye is pressed to share his expertise and finds himself sucked into a raging whirlpool of local feuds, passionate hatreds and conflicting ambitions, complicated by manifestations of witchcraft, mind-manipulation and ghostly manifestations. There will be more deaths and personal danger to Dr Gye and ‘Tripletree House’ itself will play a sinister role before the unsavoury truth is finally discovered.

“Well constructed, bags of atmosphere and an exciting denouement to keep you on the edge of your seat”

Daily Mail

The Nature of Rare Things

This is the second extract from the Gye Journals. When, at a backstreet spiritualist séance, Dr. Gye is 'commissioned' by a departed spirit to clear his name of the stigma of art theft and suicide, he reluctantly agrees to investigate a problem which seems insoluble. How can an Old Master painting simply vanish from a locked security van. His probing leads him into the sinister world of international crime and he and Kathryn will be plunged into real danger before this 'sealed room' mystery can be solved.

Unquiet Spirit

This is the third extract from the Gye Journals. St Thomas's College, Cambridge, has a ghost - or so some people say. The Cambridge branch of the Psychic Investigation Unit is invited to carry out an experiment. Professor Hockridge insists on being present. Alas, during the proceedings he collapses with a heart attack.

The master of the college wants to keep everything under wraps but he also wants a multi-million pound benefaction offered to the college. There must be no hint of scandal. Anonymous letters have been received claiming that the undergraduate whose unquiet spirit supposedly disturbs the peace of F staircase, did not commit suicide ten years ago, but was murdered.

Would Dr Nathaniel Gye, lecturer in parapsychology, make some discreet enquiries with a view to closing the whole sorry business. Find out by reading the latest instalment of the Gye Journals.