Still Publishing on Paper

I can't believe I haven't written  anything here in six weeks, but dates don't lie. By way of explanation, I've been busily putting the final touches on the last of my Post Cold War Political Thriller Trilogy. The title is Overture to Disaster, and it should be ready for publication in a couple  of weeks. Meanwhile, I have news on another front.

The second book in the trilogy, The Poksu Conspiracy, is now available here as a paperback on Amazon.com. That makes all of my current nine mystery and thriller titles available both on paper and in digital format. If you like big books, this one is a monster at 532 pages, at a price of only $15. Actually, Amazon currently has it discounted to $14.25.

The Korean word "Poksu"is translated as "Vengeance." It's a tale of the destruction resulting from one man's oath of vengeance for the death of his father sixty years earlier. On one level, the novel is an amalgam of a spy story and a Korean police procedural. Burke Hill, the main character from the first book, Beware the Jabberwock, now directs the clandestine side of a Washington public relations firm that's a CIA spinoff. His task is to find the truth about a report that Israel is helping South Korea develop nuclear weapons. Yun Yu-sop, a Seoul Metropolitan Police Bureau homicide detective, has been tracking the assailant he believes responsible for several murders of leading citizens who have supported friendly relations with the United States.

Captain Yun's investigation leads him to a Korean assassin who has his sights set on both Yun and Burke Hill. Reviewer John R. Lindermuth's review concludes with:

"Campbell's tale is well-drawn with richly defined characters, enough action to satisfy even the most jaded of readers and an absorbing plot. Highly recommended."

If you prefer the ebook to the paperback, you'll find it here.

Genisis of a Fiction-Writing Career

When I retired from the workaday world back in mid-1989, I knew my replacement at the trade association I had run for eighteen years would want to redo the office. I had been working at a roll-top desk I painstakingly finished in walnut stain after buying it at an unpainted furniture store. The association president said take it home, along with some matching wooden chairs. I had told everyone I planned to write novels after I retired, so I set up my computer beside the roll-top and attacked my new career.

Beware the Jabberwock will be FREE in the Kindle store July 12-14.

Being a long-time fan of the Cold War thriller, I naturally turned to that genre. Problem was the Berlin Wall's days were numbered, and the Soviet Union wouldn't be far behind. I had avidly followed the Soviet KGB's shenanigans and the CIA's countermoves. So I began to speculate on what might happen as the two long-time adversaries watched their playground plowed up.

Looking back at page after page of handwritten notes in the Jabberwock file, I recall doing a prodigious amount of research before getting far into the story. Much of it wound up on the cutting room floor, to use a film expression. I read extensively about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as spies for leaking nuclear secrets to the KGB. I came up with a scenario for a character whose mother had been a friend of the couple, then scrapped it when a better idea came along.

I originally had a long list of character names, only a few of whom made the cut. The female lead, Lorelei, was originally conceived as the daughter of a once-prominent Virginia family. Her background changed completely when I got into the tale and made her the daughter of CIA officer Cameron Quinn with an intriguing background. I stayed with Burke Hill as the protagonist and gave him the complex past of an ex-FBI agent I had known several years before.

When I opened the book with a clandestine meeting in Vienna of a KGB general and a high official  in the CIA, I read up on ways to detect electronic surveillance devices. My old file contains several pages from an electronics magazine describing the equipment I used in Chapter 1. I did other research on such subjects as mortars, secure telephones, small sailboats, World War II LCMs (Landing Craft, Mechanized), the city of Toronto and much more.

At the time I had no writing credits, but I wrote the Metropolitan Toronto Conventions & Visitors Association with a detailed list of seven questions regarding parades and security in the city. A gentleman named John Hamlton, assistant director of public relations, sent me a two-page answer providing everything I needed. New writers who are afraid to ask people for information are wasting their time. People are eager to help writers.

In those days I depended on my internet service with CompuServe to do online research, though most of it was done with books and magazines from the Vanderbilt University library. My simple word processing program would only create small files, so I wound up with seventeen files to cover the entire book. It required printing one file at a time to get a complete manuscript. When I finally converted to Word, I got them all in one file.

As the Soviet Union fell apart, I kept up with the news of what was happening in Russia and imagined how things would play out of the situation kept deteriorating. Fortunately, what I imagined didn't take place but it made for a chilling story of what might have been. Beware the Jabberwock is available for the Kindle at Amazon.com. It will be released later this month in paperback by Night Shadows Press and at Smashwords.com for other ebook readers.

Beware the Jabberwock Has a Cover

Here's the long-awaited cover for the first book in my Post Cold War trilogy featuring ill-starred former FBI agent Burke Hill. Beware the Jabberwock will be out soon as an ebook. Here's the plot blurb:


As the Cold War sputters to a close and the Soviet Union disintegrates, international telephone intercepts trigger a CIA investigation into the nebulous codeword "Jabberwock." Burke Hill, whose tarnished FBI career ended years earlier after dismissal by a surly J. Edgar Hoover, is recruited to help an old CIA buddy, Cameron Quinn, whose superiors doubt Jabberwock's dangerous potential. When an accident stops Quinn in Hong Kong, the CIA brass warns Hill to drop the investigation. Knowing Quinn's fears about the operation, Hill and Quinn's daughter, Lorelei, continue the chase. Rogue elements on both sides of the old Iron Curtain work to stop them, along with a relentless Federal bureaucracy. As the clock ticks down on Jabberwork, Burke and Lori realize they alone are the only hope of stopping a plot to assassinate the American and Russian presidents.


An international thriller,  Beware the Jabberwock starts out in Vienna, then switches to the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, after that Washington, D.C. The characters take us to a beach on Cyprus, to Tel Aviv, Israel and Hong Kong before swirling about the eastern half of the U.S. from New Orleans to Niagara Falls. Much of it takes place on an island off the Gulf Coast of Florida.


It's a tale about what people accustomed to having power will do to cling to it when circumstances threaten their hold. Sometimes they form unholy alliances in an attempt to maintain the status quo. That's what Burke Hill and Lorelei Quinn encounter when the end of the Cold War threatens to leave groups of old enemies out in the cold.


The life-threatening spiral accelerates after Burke and Lori attempt to prove Cam Quinn was not drunk when his rental car crashed on a dark night in Hong Kong. You'll have a chance to read the whole exciting story shortly when Beware the Jabberwock appears as an ebook for the Kindle.

Dead Men's Harvest - a review

A blurb on the cover of Matt Hilton's Dead Men's Harvest tells it all: "If you like Jack Reacher, you'll love Joe Hunter." Reacher can be counted on for a high body count, but Hunter's toll would keep an undertaker busy for a couple of months.

Unlike Lee Child's protagonist, Joe Hunter is no lone wolf. He has his own team of associates who can be just as deadly. Interestingly, Matt Hilton, like Child, is a Brit who writes action adventure that takes place in the U.S. Hilton still lives in England. His character is English, an ex-military man who was an anti-terrorism agent with the CIA.

In Dead Men's Harvest, Joe Hunter is called on to take out a psychopath who calls himself Tubal Cain, a man he thought he had killed in the first book of the series (this is number 6). It's non-stop action all the way to the ultimate face-off at the end.

The complex plot involves a wealthy businessman who is a drug kingpin. He hires Tubal Cain to find and kill Joe Hunter's half-brother, reported to be in the federal witness protection program to provide key testimony that would wreck the criminal mastermind's business. Hunter's old CIA handler sends him after Cain to save the case for the government.

The book is filled with interesting characters, both good guys and bad. It includes the sister of a woman Hunter loved who was killed earlier. The sister becomes his new love interest. He works to save her, as well as his sister-in-law who is abducted from her home in England.

Joe Hunter's actions are over-the-top at times, though probably not as much as Jack Reacher's. He's been trained to kill bad guys but has qualms about those who are little more than bystanders. If you like lots of action and nasty characters getting their comeuppance, get a copy of Dead Men's Harvest.

Beware the Jabberwock

That's the title of the first book I finished after taking up mystery writing on retirement in mid-1989. It was an end-of-the-cold war thriller. After completing the manuscript, I sent out a few queries to New York agents and got a positive response from one. The agency began sending it to editors and sent me copies of their responses. One referred to it as "creepily plausible and nicely audacious." Another commented on the timeliness of the book but said their fledgling thriller line was taking a style and characterization different from the genre as a whole. An editor at the Berkley Publishing Group wrote, "It is a very well written thriller, but this genre is just too hard to sell in mass market at the moment. Maybe this would work well in hardcover." Another said, "It's a competent and entertaining piece of work." But it wasn't the type of novel published at his house.

After about six months, the assistant handling my manuscript left the agency. The principal agent wrote that she was concentrating on non-fiction and wouldn't be able to represent me. So the manuscript went onto the pile on my office floor. It had been created in one of the early word processing programs before I knew much about Windows. I later converted it to Word and it has been on a succession of hard drives since.

I followed Jabberwock with two more thrillers in a trilogy featuring disgraced FBI agent Burke Hill, who was hired to run a CIA spin-off disguised as an international public relations firm. The second book went to an agent who sounded like an old guy when I talked to him on the phone. He kept telling me post cold war spy stories were difficult to sell in those days (early nineties). After nearly a year, I tried to call him and found he had died. By then I had the third book finished and this one landed with a major New York agency (the one that handled John Grisham). I finally learned the manuscript had been sitting on the shelf until when it finally went to an editor, he wrote that it was too dated.

In the hindsight of two decades, the Cold War spy story has made something of a comeback. I'm too jaded now to venture back into the agent search business, however. So I decided to revise the manuscripts and make them available as ebooks. I have about completed work on Jabberwock and hope to get it up soon for the Kindle and on Smashwords for other ebook formats.

The character of Burke Hill was based on a former FBI agent I met back in the sixties when I was editing Nashville Magazine. His name was Jim Scott and he had quite a tale to tell. We talked about my writing his story for a book, and I taped a few hours of reminiscences. He wrote the FBI to get a copy of his files under the Freedom of Information Act. I still have a copy of the reply he received, asking for money to pay for making copies. But before anything came out of it, he moved on and I eventually lost touch with him. The last i heard he had died in his home state of South Carolina. My character followed Scott's story about being chosen by J. Edgar Hoover to attempt to infiltrate the Mafia. In preparation, he resigned from the Bureau and committed a few bank robberies to establish his bona fides. When he failed to get close to the mob, he went back to Washington and was rebuffed by Hoover. Then the FBI blocked his attempts to find another job.

Jabberwock opens in Vienna shortly before dissolution of the Soviet Union with a clandestine meeting of a high CIA official and a KGB general, where a plot is hatched that would change the course of the two countries.