Hi Guys,
Tonight I launch at Paraparaumu Library on the Kapiti Coast of NZ my new thriller 'From My Cold, Dead Hands'. You probably recognsie the quote from Charlton Heston, holding a musket aloft in 2001 to defy Al Gore to restrict the NRA's constitutional right to bear arms. You may not know that Charlton came to NZ in 1966 to play tennis with rgeat NZ runner Peter Snell and lecture on movies. I saw and met the then top movie star in world, Oscar for 'Ben Hur' not long before. I interviewed him for a local magazine. The prologue to my thriller recreates that period when LBJ also came here a few months later druming up support for the Vietnam war. The thriller is set in the present day, with a local oil lobbyist still collecting Heston memorabilia after meeting him back then. NZ is on the verge of a major oil strike and the lobbyist is acting for a big international oil company. His cousin is a professor of geomorphology who has warned against the dangers of drilling into supposed dead submarine volcanoes. The lobbyist's son tells the story, caught in the middle of this eco pursuit thriller which follows the age-old curse of opil on a national and family level. Sudan of course is the latest casualty of finding oil, but think Russia, China, US, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, anywhere that the oil find curse strikes. I hearby announce I have launched my first blog.
David McGill
David McGill is a New Zealand social historian who has published 41 books, some fictional recreations and memoirs based on diaries, articles and research. Born and bred in Auckland, he trained as a priest in Christchurch before becoming a teacher in Wellington and then a feature writer on the NZListener, in Sydney for the The Bulletin and later National Times, in London for TVTimes and New Statesman. He returned to the NZListener and then columnist on Wellington’s Evening Post. There he won awards such as the Dulux Feature Writing, Cowan Historical, Jubilee Investigative and Reed Environmental. He was editor of New Times and W5 magazines before becoming a fulltime writer in the mid-1980s with a travel journey round New Zealand by goods train called The G’Day Country. His other books include twice reprinted Ghost Towns of New Zealand; five bestselling dictionaries of Kiwi slang; POW: The Untold Stories of New Zealanders as Prisoners of War; five books of heritage Wellington and the twice-published national heritage buildings of Landmarks; the futuristic volcano thriller Whakaari and the recent prequel From My Cold, Dead Hands; two Auckland-based thrillers about a valuable religious artefact first featured in The Monstrance; the commissioned history of the Customs Department Guardians at the Gate; the biography of NZ’s Rumpole of the Bailey Stacey; and recently a personal history of pop music, The Treadmill Tapes
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