Blockade Runner

This fast-moving Civil War novel pits the British iron steamship The Great Eastern, against the Union blockade. Combine this action with an intense love affair between a Confederate naval ensign and a beautiful but treacherous Confederate female spy and you have a story whose plot twists and turns more than the knots in a hangman s noose.

My writing started in 7th Grade, when I was the Sports Editor for the school s magazine, The Sentinel. I found out I liked to write and was told by my English teacher that I was good at it As a freshman in college, away from family and friends, I was very unhappy. But I found a way to escape my unhappiness; by writing. Influenced by J.D. Salinger s character, Holden Caufield in The Catcher in the Rye, I reinvented myself into Chris Butler, another screw-up in his freshman year in college. My English professor, praised my writing and characterization. At one point he wrote in the margins of one episode ...I can t wait to see what happens next! The idea for this book stemmed from a series of articles in The New Yorker Magazine, published in the early 1950s. Like so many things in the unconscious part of one s mind, the impression about the ship The Great Eastern lay dormant in my mind until it surfaced in the early 1990s when I sat down to write the book. If you enjoyed following the characters of Susannah Eddings and John Beauregard, you ll also enjoy the follow-on to Blockade Runner, currently being written. It tracks both of them out West, where many Southerners fled after the South was devastated. I live in the historic village of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, which may have something to do with my writing historical fiction.