Up Periscope!
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Well, it’s taken a long time but finally the re-issue of Honoured By Strangers, my biography of legendary submariner Captain Francis Newton Allen Cromie CB DSO RN (1882-1918) as an e-book finally sees publication on October 9 by Little, Brown Ltd. through their subsidiary, Constable & Robinson. Honoured By Strangers has its faults; I had no idea how to go about writing a biography when I took this on 13 years ago. It was a learning curve but one which has served me well in the ensuing years. Perhaps I ought to have up-dated the book in some way, yet reading through it again recently, and looking at some of the positive reviews it received, I’m pleased I left it in its original state, warts and all. As to what chance it has sales-wise as an e-book is anyone’s guess, because one aspect of having such a launch would have been reliability on its appearance on Amazon.com. However, trust my luck - the one company to fall out with Amazon over terms and profits just happens to be the enormous global publishing behemoth, Hachette, the parent company of Little, Brown Ltd. So, I’m wondering if the Hachette/Amazon dispute will seriously damage sales on Amazon. Hachette do have valid issues about the way Amazon tends to hoover up every creative work and sell it on, often diminishing the benefit t both authors and publishers. But that’s capitalism for you. It has triumphed over all notions of fairness and community, and operates with just two driving motives; maximum corporate profits and the care and nurture of faceless shareholders. We in the creative sector are just wild flowers in an artistic meadow - stoop down, pick a free handful and sell them on to a public who don’t give a jot about the creative process which produces their daily entertainment.
Now I’m in my seventies, I’m just bordering on lucky that I have any literary product available for sale at all. If I was three decades younger, with a longer calendar ahead, then I would be manning some kind of barricade. All I can do is offer support from the side-lines for art’s angry campaigners, powered by the embers of my socialist outrage which still keep me railing against a world run by, and exclusively for, the super-rich.
Strange in the end, that this long-dead man who, alongside my passion for Crazy Horse, ends up as one of my heroes, should be the subject of my favourite bit of work. Strange, because if I could travel back in time to meet Cromie, we would have little in common. Me, an excessively over-romantic Trotskyist, him a dyed-in-the-wool Imperialist prepared to give his life for that most vacuous of notions, 'King and Country'. Yet they were different times, different attitudes, different men. What appealed to me about this somewhat naïve yet brave man was his sense of honour, his compassionate determination, and his hope of salvaging something from the crumbling, changing world he found around him. So, from across the divide on the political battleground, Francis, I salute you, despite our differences. You were that rare thing - a Good Man.