Covered

 Here's something special:  first sight of the stunning front cover of 'The Judas Case'. I am absolutely knocked out - couldn't have wished for a better design.

Heartfelt thanks to the wonderfully talented Jack Wedgebury at The Book Guild for his superb work on this. 

And thanks too to Dr James D Tabor of UNC Charlotte for his generous words of praise. 

The Literary Consultancy - Showcase

Delighted to announce that The Judas Case has been chosen by The Literary Consultancy to be this month’s talent showcase - https://literaryconsultancy.co.uk/talent/showcase/

Big thanks to Aki Schilz and her team for making this happen.

And you can read a special preview of a scene from the book via this download - https://literaryconsultancy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Nicholas-Graham-Showcase.pdf

(Hat-tip to the excellent Tom Barker Photography for the author headshot . . .)

Genesis - II

In autumn 1998 I spent a few days revisiting old haunts in Washington DC, a city I’d briefly lived in at the start of the previous decade.  So I went back to Adams Morgan, wandered through Rock Creek Park to Dumbarton Oaks and strolled down the yellow and gold-strewn streets of Kalorama.  And I spent an afternoon browsing the bookshops around Dupont Circle.  It was in one of these that I picked out a copy of this, and immediately knew that I had to buy it, not knowing quite why but certain that at some point in the future I would need it:

TLDR:  Allen surveys attempts to recover knowable facts (as opposed to credo, theological or polemical statements) about the man Jesus.  She does so from the perspective of Catholic belief (which may seem an odd though entirely plausible starting point for such an enterprise) and concludes that all such attempts are doomed.  Scant facts are known, nothing further is knowable.  History fails us.

The scale of this challenge from within the community of faith took some time to sink in but the conclusion was unavoidable:  historical fiction finds its openings in the gaps and spaces that join together (or just possibly keep apart) historical facts.  And any attempt on this subject would require ambition, courage and a certain thorough-going determination.

I flew back to London with the author’s-proof copy in my luggage & still no idea how it came to be in a bookshop on 18^th St NW.  Then I started to read deeply among existing fictions set in the world of antiquity.  And I started at the top – with Gore Vidal’s Julian. 

But that must wait for another post . . . .

Judas and the unreliable witnesses

If it please the court to consider: 

Matthaios:

“I have sinned,” he said.  “I have brought an innocent man to his death.”  Then he threw the money down in the Temple and left them, and went and hanged himself

 

Apollinaris:     

This Judas did not die by hanging . . .  he fell headlong, his belly burst and his guts spilled out.

 

Loukas:

This Judas, after buying a plot of land with the price of his treachery, fell forward on the ground and burst open, so that his entrails poured out.

 

Papias:

He was crushed by a wagon, and his guts fell out. 

Genesis - I

 I began to draft The Judas Case in the last week of November 2013.  This followed a frantic three weeks of plotting, note-taking, character-discovery and scene-setting, all stimulated by a single thought that had come to me one evening in a budget hotel-room in Coventry:  what if Judas had been working for the Temple police all along?   

At that point the idea of writing fiction about the historical Jesus had long since been put aside.  I was on the point of drafting a novel about something else entirely, set not in 1^st Century Jerusalem but 21^st Century London.  Then my subconscious, obviously sensing that I was about to commit a fatal creative mistake, sidled up and jolted me with the solution to a question I thought I’d given up wrestling with nine months earlier:  how do you make fiction out of a life about which virtually nothing is known but practically everything is believed?

I had wanted to make fiction out of gospel for a very long time – the thought first occurred to me when I spent the summer of 1980 travelling around the eastern Mediterranean and I imagined, Dunning-Kruger naif that I was, how wonderful it would be to write about a life in which psychology, social realism, myth and theology all rolled along in a harmonious whole. 

The long road to Coventry November 2013 really began a year after that Mediterranean summer, in Greensboro North Carolina.  In the middle of a conversation with the great Theodore Hines, a man of deep wisdom and a bewilderingly rich intellectual hinterland, we got on to the subject of Vietnam.  Not the American involvement, but the French colonial regime.  He mentioned that he had once read an interview with the commander of the French paratroopers at Dien Bien Phu, whose experience was turned into fiction in The Centurions.  The paratroop colonel was a devout Catholic.  Given that, and given his experience of fighting a colonial war, he was asked - if he had been a Roman centurion in 1^st Century Judea, under Pilate’s command, how would he have dealt with Jesus? 

The colonel did not hesitate. 

“I would have had him quietly murdered up in Galilee,” he said.

And that, completely unrecognised at the time, was the seed from which the idea of The Judas Case shot.

Publication

 

Absolutely thrilled to announce that my novel The Judas Case will be published in August 2022 by The Book Guild Ltd.  It’s an historical detective fiction set in 1^st Century Jerusalem and Judea with a background of the events of the gospels.