R.J. Dillon's Blog

The Oktober Projekt

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The Oktober Projekt

For Nick Torr, a senior officer in the Secret Intelligence Service’s (SIS) Covert Directorate CO8, Operation Salvage was intended to be nothing more than a mundane collection from an SIS agent in Moscow. Betrayed, captured, beaten and tortured, Torr’s nightmare has only just begun as Moscow attempts to protect its Oktober Projekt, raising the stakes of espionage to terrifying new heights.

Retracing the trail from Moscow, Torr becomes locked in a gritty secret world wher...

Point of No Return

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Point of No Return

What does it really take to go beyond the point of no return?

Caught in the nightmare extraction of a Syrian defector that spirals into a bloody, ruthless vendetta against Britain and Israel, Nick Torr, the single-minded Director of the British Secret Intelligence Service’s Covert Directorate CO8, is tasked with discovering who betrayed the operation before more lives are needlessly lost.

Can a radical anarchist group in the Czech Republic be believed when they claim respo...

There’s Nothing New About Fake News

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Wouldn’t you just know it? As rapidly as one volatile bubble of ‘Fake News’ is popped, up floats another, and another, and another… Suddenly we are urged to be vigilantes scything down any fake news we may come across whilst innocently browsing that legendary receptacle of no-bullshit, that source of one hundred per cent accurate news stories, that grandmaster of unbiased, impartial knowledge – the Internet. If only this were some surreal joke, a prank, a fibble. Only it’s not.

It’s serious,...

My Character… my locations

My characters… my locations

When someone asked me recently – ‘Your characters are so strange and distinctive, surely they can’t be based on people you know can they?’ And ‘Why do your locations seem so real but so different?’ I gave a little appreciative nod, replied with some unsatisfactory catch-all response concerning merging fact with imagination and moved on to another less personal subject.

But it got me thinking…

The real answer, now I’ve had time to consider the reasons, goes like...

A Political Plot Fit for a Thriller

With the tinder-dry dust of the Brexit result having gently settled across Whitehall’s departmental desks during the summer break, this seems an opportune moment as any, to sit back, and relax in the soothing shade of hindsight to contemplate why Michael Gove so enthusiastically, so spectacularly launched his career into a very distant black hole?

By plunging his hastily sharpened official, gold plated ministerial letter-opener between Boris Johnson’s shoulders, Gove the once undisputed cham...

Return of Nick Torr

Having taken a break from the CO8 series to explore other projects, including catching up on some much needed house restoration, I’ve been back behind the desk for a couple of weeks editing the next Nick Torr/CO8 instalment – The Point of No Return. It was a welcome, immensely rewarding experience returning to a book I’d completed in first draft format almost two years earlier. It’s not very often that writers have an opportunity to enjoy such a critical distance from the ‘hot’ writing proc...

New Book Title Announced

The title for the next in the Nick Torr series is going to be…

Further details to be announced soon.

Memory Bombs of Childhood

Discovering fragments of childhood always causes unsettling moments – you sometimes are not sure what one may stumble upon. It is, I suppose, a weird return into a sealed time capsule fraught with danger. There are objects laced with the poisoned-tipped thorns of idle dreams and irresponsibility that you would prefer to forget, others that were once associated and tied-in to happiness, that in a mature, cynical and weary trawl for childhood gold, appear shallow and not quite up to the challen...

In the footsteps of Plato…

One of the essential themes that I explored in my academic work and continue to pick-away at in my fiction is the whole concept of how the current Western ideals of democracy impinges on freedom at a personal and collective level. As a gatekeeper of social cohesion, democracy operates through imposing subtle, and not so subtle spheres of control that are misleadingly spun as the noble act of quid pro quo.

Strip away the cynical political declarations that turn on or off that hallowed brand of...

The heart of writing or not, as the case may be…

I’m often asked – ‘What motivates you as a writer?’

The simple, and, honest answer is that I don’t know. Maybe I do, and I’m not telling, because the mechanics are so personal. The whole writing process, for me, at least, is a continuous struggle to improve on the last book in terms of plot, characters, locations and style. Having the seed of an idea, a concept, maturing and evolving inside your mind for a few months and then transforming that ephemeral spark into tangible chapters always fill...