"Adventure on the high seas in the best gay pirate tradition." -- Millivres edition, 2000.
"A fine example of this genre." -- Gay Times, 1995.
In the spring of 1588 Dermot Channon, an Irish mercenary serving the Spanish ambassador in London, and Robin Armagh, the son of an English earl, meet by chance and discover a love as dangerous as it is
overwhelming.
Too soon Dermot must leave when the embassy is expelled at the onset of war. Robin despairs of
ever meeting again, and as the two remake
their lives apart, time is as great an abyss as separation.
When Robin's brother is held for ransom
in Panama , years after the war between England
and Spain
"The couple’s adventures together on the Spanish
Main make a swashbuckling romance in the best gay pirate
tradition. Mel Keegan’s action-packed adventures already span the twentieth century to the twenty-third. […] Ice, Wind and Fire was described as "rip-roaring and colourful", and […] Death's Head and Equinox as "unputdownable". Turning his gaze back to the 1500s, Mel Keegan conjures up
once again a world where men both fight and love." -- GMP edition, 1995.
Novel length: 150,000 words
Rated: adult (18+; sex, violence, language)
ISBN-13: 978-0-9750884-9-4
Publication date: August 2005
Publisher: DreamCraft
Price: $6.99 - ebook; $22.50 - paper
Cover: Jade
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Mel Keegan comments on FORTUNES OF WAR
I grew up on Errol Flynn movies on TV (noooo, I'm not that old! Well, not yet, anyway). FORTUNES could easily be a Flynn movie, so long as you re-cast the Olivia De Haveland (spelling?) part with a young man who's delicious enough to take the place of an individual who was a screen icon in her own right! The research for this one consumed me for months. I've always had an interest in the sea, sailing ships, nautical history, but the era, 1588 to 1595, narrows all of history down to a seven year slice of time, and I was amazed by just how much we still know about that time. Writing the book was a challenge, because on the one hand I had the most delicous romance (Dermot and Robin) and on the other I had a monster adventure story trying to escape. The published version of FORTUNES is something like the fouth or fifth draft, and the hardest work was in cutting the book back to the 347pp which finally went ahead. It was originally much longer, and even after two months of cutting and pruning, FORTUNES wound up being the longest of the GMP books. I had a ball writing it, and it's one of five historicals I prepared. Only three saw print with GMP. Two more have been on the shelf for the better part of a decade; one of those is caught in limbo following the apparent dissolution of the paperback branch of Millivres (which bought out GMP and continued the paperback line for a short while after the merger). I have no idea what's to become of these novels at this time, but I love to write in the historical context. Will DreamCraft go ahead with them? It's far from impossible -- though the success (or otherwise) of the HELLGATE series, plus the EQUINOX re-issue this year, will go a long way to determining the future of these stories. (Hint, hint: tell your friends about this webpage ... take a look at HELLGATE and, if you like it, tell your friends about that too!) GMP did a great job of presenting the text ... I had reservations about the cover, because I felt it depicted the character of Robin as too young. My character certainly isn't a child in the narrative ... and I don't dabble in fictions pairing kids with adults. The cover did bother me a bit. The Millivres (second) edition cover also bothers me, because the similarity between the models depicted photographically and my characters in the book can only be measured in negative numbers!
RESEARCH TALES:Ships of the Francis Drake Era
The research for this one was a bear, but when you're interested in your subject, it's also a lot of fun. FORTUNES was researched long before the Internet really existed: back in the Telnet days, and I confess, though I used Telnet once or twice I never really got into it. Instead, I used about a dozen books to get the backgrounding for my novel; and two in particular were invaluable. George Malcolm Thompson's biography is another 'text book' that reads more like a novel. There's no big color pictures inside (!), but it's actually a better book than the other tome I used extensively: 'Campaigns of the Spanish Armada' may be beautifully illustrated, mostly in color, but ... yawn. It was still an invaluable research tool, but good lord, you were conscious of the fact it's a text book!
The major characters in FORTUNES are certainly fictitious, but a lot of the minor players are real-life personalities. Drake, Hatton, and the leading players in the politics driving the situation. I did take a bit of artistic license with the Spanish Ambassador. I usurped the real-life Ambassador and replaced him with Mauricio, Dermot's uncle. I wanted and needed to create a whole family history for Channon, and the Spanish side of his family are pivoral to the plot of FORTUNES ... they're also as fictitious as Drake, Hatton and others are real. The line between fiction and reality blurred, and I liked it that way!
The research took me into the history of ships, and also the history of maps and map-making. Some questions were never really answerable (such as the fine points of actually STEERING a galleon of the C16th, and in particular, Drake's ships, Revenge and Golden Hinde. A lot of the ships of the era were steered from a gigantic tiller ... others, you're starting to see a wheel. None of the research I was able to do regarding the *real* vessels (not the modern day replicas which appear in the movies, guys), answered the question as to which I should write about ... so I chose to go with the wheel when I spoke of the frigate which takes Robin out to the Americas and the gallizabra which brings them home ... why? Because it's far easier for folks of our generation to envisage a big ship being steered by a rudder-turned wheel than by a monstrous tiller. We associate a tiller with a small boat. None of the ships of that era have survived, apparently; and records are incomplete, at least as far as I was able to dig, and that was pretty deep. It's too bad, but it's also a minor point in the story and nothing to do with plotting. If I'd found major references to the tiller up on the steering deck, sure, I'd have gone to great lengths to describe it ... but there's nothing clear in this area. So why not simplify, and move the story along?
I would love to have seen a gallizabra. The popular tradition is that the Spanish ships were big, cumbersome, clumsy, and the 'little English ships' danced rings around them, ran in under their guns and pounded them to hell. This was true in 1588 ... but the Spanish ship designers learned fast, and it's tough that the popular tradition doesn't pass on what happened next! The gallizabra was more than a match for anything else on the water in those days, and I'm fascinated.
I described the clothes, food and houses of that world with every bit of detail I could get away with (without the book getting wordy, dry-bones or pedantic), and I think I did pretty well. It was amusing putting this webpage together ... the books came out for scanning-in of covers, and Dave's jaw dropped when he actually SAW the clothes. "They used to wear all that ...???" Yup. Maybe it was damn' cold and they needed the layers?The research for this one was a bear, but when you're interested in your subject, it's also a lot of fun. FORTUNES was researched long before the Internet really existed: back in the Telnet days, and I confess, though I used Telnet once or twice I never really got into it. Instead, I used about a dozen books to get the backgrounding for my novel; and two in particular were invaluable. George Malcolm Thompson's biography is another 'text book' that reads more like a novel. There's no big color pictures inside (!), but it's actually a better book than the other tome I used extensively: 'Campaigns of the Spanish Armada' may be beautifully illustrated, mostly in color, but ... yawn. It was still an invaluable research tool, but good lord, you were conscious of the fact it's a text book!
The major characters in FORTUNES are certainly fictitious, but a lot of the minor players are real-life personalities. Drake, Hatton, and the leading players in the politics driving the situation. I did take a bit of artistic license with the Spanish Ambassador. I usurped the real-life Ambassador and replaced him with Mauricio, Dermot's uncle. I wanted and needed to create a whole family history for Channon, and the Spanish side of his family are pivoral to the plot of FORTUNES ... they're also as fictitious as Drake, Hatton and others are real. The line between fiction and reality blurred, and I liked it that way!
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