biggles Archives - Mark Lord's - Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Science Fiction

I’m nearly ready to launch the first of a series of short mysteries featuring Roger Sotil and Jake Savage – the heroes of Hell has its Demons.

The story is called Death on the Lips and comes in at a hefty 10,000 words – so quite long for a short story.

The action take place after the events of Hell has its Demons, when Roger and Jake have settled down to a life of paranormal investigation in the City of London.

Here’s the draft of the blurb:

The Countess of Suffolk lies dead in her own bedchamber. Her body has been horribly mutilated. Clearly a case of a demon attack according to her chamberlain. The alchemist she retained has fled the house—and surely he must be to blame? But when Jake finds a pot of lip paint and a tally stick other possibilities emerge. It’s another case for Roger Sotil and Jake Savage, Sorcerous Investigators to the court of Richard II. And as usual things are not as they appear.

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Just to let you know what is coming up soon from me. I’ve been working on a lot of things recently, including researching and planning novels. Currently I am focused on writing short stories for publication in paying short fiction markets – so the likes of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, Asimov’s etc. We’ll see how that goes – it’s a hard market to break, but I have a feeling that I’m getting closer – I had some good personal feedback on one of my stories recently from a leading editor, so I am hoping that with some persistence I can write something that’s good enough for one of these publications.

So that means I’m not writing a lot currently that will be self-published. But I do have two stories that don’t really fit for these markets, so these will be coming out soon.

One is a Biggles-like story set in WW1 – but with a slightly more serious central character. So a setting that is quite a departure for me.

The second is a short story featuring my medieval supernatural detectives, Roger Sotil and Jake Savage. They are the main characters in my novel Hell has its Demons, and Jake also features in Chivalry and Bring on the Night.

More news on these will be available to newsletter subscribers soon, and then I’ll let blog readers know when they are published.