Nothing is created in a vacuum, and I am grateful to many people for their help in the creation of WOLF IN SHADOW. My thanks to Elizabeth Reeves, my editor, for bringing me out of the mist; to Peter Austin, for the wagon-master; and to Jean Maund, Stella Graham, Tom Taylor, Ross Lempriere, Ivan Kellham and Tony Fenelon for invaluable assistance.
Thanks also to Jeremy Wells, for loyalty and friendship, in a world that rarely understands either.
Foreword Of the many characters I have created over the years, few have captured the imagination of readers as powerfully as Jon Shannow, the Jerusalem Man.
Alan Fisher, the award winning author of Terioki Crossing, and a fan of the film Casablanca, has a phrase that sums up characters like Shannow. ‘They walk out of Rick’s Bar, fully formed and real. The author doesn’t have to work on them at all. There is no conscious act of creation. One moment they don’t exist – the next they stand before you, complete and ready. I remember the moment Shannow walked out of Rick’s Bar.
It was at the end of a miserable, wet day in Bournemouth at the start of autumn in 1986. I was the group managing editor of a series of newspapers stretching from Brighton to Portsmouth on the south coast. The previous week I had a call from my father to tell me that my mother was in hospital and that surgeons feared she had terminal cancer. They were right. A year before she had suffered the amputation of her right leg, and fought back to make a dramatic entrance at a Christmas Dance. This time there would be no fight back.
