Showing results by author "C R Searle" in All Categories

Finding James Jones is the story of a gifted boys journey through life, from his neglected, unloved and lonely childhood, growing up in rural hardship, to the young man of distinction, he has become. It is also, and more importantly, the story of his conscious awakening, his slow but sure realization the repressively imbalanced social, political, religious and cultural realities of Victorian England, function to constrain and limit the lives of boys like him to endless poverty. His is not a life ordained by God, however God is defined, but is the work of men of rank and status who are ...

The title of this short story, The House of Women, is a metaphor for the life of women, or, perhaps more accurately, the perception women have of their lives. The reference to house is a shorthand, because no matter where women find themselves regardless of time, place or context, they are trapped, or feel they are trapped, in a world historically made by men and dominated by men. An unbending unchanging world men control, their power ever-present in the theological, political, ideological and philosophical narratives they ceaselessly tell, as women don’t. Their lives once defined by ...

Byron Blisset was the coming man who by stint of hard work and astute business sense has transformed his deceased fathers business, into a thriving international success. In part due to his business connections with the Union Army of the North American states in their war against the Confederate Army of the Southern states. The year is 1862. The civil war is just over a year old and has many battle to fight before it ends and Byron had made more than money out of this conflict he has made powerful enemies, who know him to be more than a businessman, know him to be a spy. Returning home one ...

What is the mystery that binds Joe, a talented young artist recently moved to an apartment in London’s Lime House, and Silke, the nine-year old girl who lives in the penthouse apartment upstairs. Who, unannounced, and never formally introduced to him, is brought to his door by her mother, a successful banking executive. Who asks Joe to baby sit her for the morning whilst she attends an important meeting giving him no chance to refuse, she promises to pick her up at lunchtime, Silke tells him she won’t. From the get-go both are deeply ‘attracted’ to each other, not in any disquieting...

Space and time have no beginning and no end and pasts we thought long gone, and futures we hope to come, are parts of the same thing and are separated only by the limits of our consciousness. But though they are, they frequently collide like bubbles in a soapy bath to reveal worlds we might enter as if through an open door, as many of us have; or will. As Captain William ‘Billy’ Kepple, newly and surprisingly promoted Captain of HMS Parrot, a 10-gun brig of war, Tom (not her real name), Polly, a servant girl with the gift of second sight, and Duffy his Boatswain, heroes of our timeless ...

This is a story of evil and the perpetrators of evil and the banal, dull, and commonplace lives they invariably live. Sadly, lives much like our own. But lives rooted in real or imagined hurt grown more real, paranoid, and distorted in their endless reimagining of the cruel misfortunes that have shaped their lives. And what they imagine is no less real than their sense perceptions, as Valeria, would insist is true for many! Both a conscious perception. It is also the story of murder and murderers, and so our thoughts must now necessarily turn to who the killer is or are, and why they killed...

What motive, if any, linked the brutal murder of Violet Casterbrook, the wife of the headmaster of Love Street School, on the morning of the 17 December 1962, her bludgeoned body left for dead on the snow-covered terrace of their riverside home and the two murders that soon after followed hers, two of his pupils? A teenage girl intoxicated with youth, beauty, and thoughts of her first love and a harmlessly silly, much bullied boy, the butt of so many unkind jokes, each known to the other but not friends. No, never friends. Or the two murders that preceded these. One, in the days before ...

With two pieces of the Rebus of Akhenaten now in his possession and with information he hopes will find a third in North America, and the remaining six where they have long been hidden, Billy, and his crew sail to New York. Arriving a month later he sets out to find Lauder Trompe, who has information vital to his mission. But before the day is done, Tom and Polly fall from a precipitous cliff in the Cave of Tarhuhiawaku and find themselves two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand years in the past, where they meet Gabe, one of the Nanochromes of Nogoback, but more importantly, meet Ethan, Isaac and ...

Shot by Lord Dasheart and saved from certain death by Queen Kiya and her unlikely friends, Ethan, Isaac, and India, and soon after escaping from prison, Billy, Duffy, and Marie-Ange, sail north to Albany. The gateway to the Adirondack Mountains and a meeting on midsummer morning with the Indian princess Pale Moon in the Morning, they hope will find the third piece of the Rebus of Akhenaten. And are helped by Madeleine Corbeau, Pierre’s twin sister, who in defiance of Montard’s strict instructions gives Billy the Totem of Tarhuhiawaku, which is vital to finding it. But it is a trap they ...

Is Valeria an incidental actor in the Love Street School murders or is she destined by Fates capricious whimsy to be unhappily employed in that third-rate, provincial English school at this time in her young, yet extraordinarily eventful life? If so, why? An attractive, highly educated, vivacious, sexually liberated and sophisticated young woman who sought to make sense of her damaged life and the realities of the terrible times she has lived through in peace and in war, through her love of French art, literature, poetry and her passion for philosophy. Particularly the Existential ...

What motive, if any, linked the brutal murder of Violet Casterbrook, the wife of the headmaster of Love Street School, on the morning of the 17 December 1962, her bludgeoned body left for dead on the snow-covered terrace of their riverside home and the two murders that soon after followed hers, two of his pupils? A teenage girl intoxicated with youth, beauty, and thoughts of her first love and a harmlessly silly, much bullied boy, the butt of so many unkind jokes, each known to the other but not friends. No, never friends. Or the two murders that preceded these. One, in the days before ...

Having reached Eden in 4930 in search of the last pieces of the Rebus of Akhenaten and the treasure it promises, a world populated by robots controlled by Montard, Billy discovers space, time and reality are an illusion of pulsating light and dark we perceive not outside but inside, in our consciousness of our unconsciousness. But amazingly learns our unconsciousness is the quantum unconsciousness of all things, solids, liquids and gases, the source of all that is real to us. And the future, once the home of Nanochromes is a virtual reality game controlled by the Toba Men. A game he must ...

Unaware, they have been followed to Brittany’s magical and mysterious Quiberon Peninsula by Pierre Corbeau, an agent of the Count de Montard, Billy, Tom and Polly meet the enigmatic professor Tollendal and learn their real quest is to find the Rebus of Akhenaten. A picture puzzle of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs inscribed on a round gold plate made of nine parts, which, when deciphered, will show where the Pharaoh Akhenaten hid the great horde of treasure he took from the Priests of Amun-Ra in 1336BCE. A plate the secret society of Templar Knights, he leads, who found it on Jerusalem’s, ...

Escaping from Captain Bauda and his Cuirassiers, Billy sets out to rescue his boat crew, captured, and imprisoned by Pierre Corbeau, but he is betrayed by Charlotte Desmoulin, one of the fugitives and must now fight a much more dangerous battle against the Drummers. The army of the living dead, Montard has sent to capture and kill her servant, Marie-Ange le Dantec, who, has in her possession, a piece of the Rebus, as he too, discovers, he has! But, as the battle overwhelms him, Queen Kiya, the wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten and mother of Tutankhamun, comes from the past to rescue Polly, her ...

With Queen Kiya safely returned to Egypt of 1335BCE with the help of the magic wand, Tom has given to her, and now determined to help her sister, Tefnut help Billy find the remaining seven pieces of the Rebus of Akhenaten, the Parrot sails for the Egyptian port of Alexandria and a journey to Jerusalem that will end their quest. But even as it does, Billy knows Montard has, in the future world of 4930 he now rules, eight pieces of the Rebus and only the dancing girl is missing. An impossibility because he has two pieces, Lauder Trompe has one, his late mother likely had three or four, Ethan,...