The Lady in Black and Other City Tales

"The short story should enlighten, excite and above all, entertain the reader from an early stage. It is the skill of grasping interest from the outset and retaining such that remains the aim of any writer. THE LADY IN BLACK and Other City Tales collects fourteen short stories set in a different city at a time of particular interest in each chosen destination’s history. When better to visit Venice than at the time of Casanova (BECKFORD’S VENETIAN AFFAIR) or Vienna in the dying days of the belle epoch of Emperor Franz Josef ? In THE LADY IN BLACK , the mystery of Gustav Klimt’s last missing portrait is solved in a thrilling journey through the battlefields of the second world war to the present day (and where a particularly chilling twist is revealed at the story‘s conclusion!). In DUPONT’S REVENGE, the French Resistance is reactivated in 1970’s Nice to deal with a troublesome neighbour, and in present day Liverpool, a journalist discovers to his cost the consequences of meddling in the affairs of THE TOXTETH VAMPIRE. The futility of Britain’s celebrity obsession is evaluated in all its puerile glory where, in FALLS ROAD DON JUAN, a Belfast lothario accepts a sexual wager which if won, will see him fifty thousand pounds better off. It is common knowledge that the invasion of Britain by the German war machine seemed inevitable in 1940, but few appreciate the even greater threat to the security of the nation which occurred twenty three years earlier when Winston Churchill ordered tanks into a major British city on the verge of Bolshevik revolution. THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN tells the story of Brennan, the charismatic anarchist who came dangerously close in bringing the world’s greatest Empire to collapse. Britain is again under threat in THE LAST TARGET. Set in a future London on the brink of civil war a young intelligence operative hunts the world’s most elusive assassin on the eve of the reopening of the House of Commons destroyed by Islamic terrorists. Join three middle aged men in a touching tale of lost youth in THE INTERESTING ACCOUNTANT as they attempt to relive old times in modern day Cuba, and in DIET, a young Calgary lawyer finds success in her endeavour to loose weight but at a terrible cost. In FRANKIE AND BENNY a young Scots entrepreneur lives the American dream at the dawn of the twentieth Century in New York and gives the Marx Brothers their first break in entertainment along the way.. If the purpose of the short story is to seek a response from the reader, to make them laugh, cry, sulk, shudder, frown or wince, THE LADY IN BLACK and Other City Tales delivers."