James Martingell is a self-made explorer, hunter and prospector, and few men know war-torn Southern Africa better than he. He also sells guns to whoever can afford them. Offered a fortune to deliver a huge stock of weapons to would-be Boer rebels in the Transvaal, he supposes his fortune is made. Instead, he finds himself facing betrayal, imprisonment, open warfare and eventually murder as he becomes involved with international traders. Will he survive long enough to become the best known, and most feared, gun-runner in the world?
Christopher Robin Nicole was born on 7 December 1930 in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana), where he was raised. He is the son of Jean Dorothy (Logan) and Jack Nicole, a police officer, both Scottish. He studied at Queen's College in Guyana and at Harrison College in Barbados. He was a fellow at the Canadian Bankers Association and a clerk for the Royal Bank of Canada in Georgetown and Nassau from 1947 to 1956. In 1957, he moved to Guernsey, Channel Islands, United Kingdom, where he currently lives, but he also has a domicile in Spain.
On 31 March 1951, he married his first wife, Jean Regina Amelia Barnett, with whom he had two sons, Bruce and Jack, and two daughters, Julie and Ursula, they divorced. On 8 May 1982 he married for the second time with fellow writer Diana Bachmann.
As a romantic and passionate of history, Nicole has been published since 1957, when he published a book about West Indian Cricket. He published his first novel in 1959 with his first stories set in his native Caribbean. Later he wrote many historical novels set mostly in tumultuous periods like World War I, World War II and the Cold War, and depict places in Europe, Asia and Africa. He also wrote classic romance novels. He specialized in Series and Sagas, and continues to write into the 21st century with no intention of retiring.
Sex, guns, subterfuge, gunrunning; what’s not to love? Lots of blood and guts, travelogue of virtually all of the Horn of Africa to Afghanistan, with characters as intriguing as the hero (the gunrunner) to the Mullah (meant to be the savior of Somalia)! Love interests die, main characters are routinely threatened, kidnapped, raped, and sullied in all fashions, and then almost always rescued. Almost always. If you like action, and an insight into a historical period of the development and exploitation of swaths of Africa by European powers and amoral entrepreneurs, this is your kind of novel. As for me, I’m off to read the next rendition of this exciting set.
Enjoy all the adventures of the author. Some are interesting and some are unbelievable, so take your pick. But it is all very enjoyable and hard to put you book down once you start.