Machine Gun Jelly is a cynical black comedy thriller, a golden thread of deception and imagination woven into a carpet of reality.

A small time hustler and Tiger Woods lookalike named Monsoon Parker is compelled to borrow money from a vicious Vegas mobster, and is unable to pay the Vig. In desperation, he ransacks an old suitcase that belonged to his old man, who got greased in Vietnam. What he discovers, the titular Machine Gun Jelly, triggers a series of increasingly bizarre events, and entangles a picaresque cast of characters in a dangerous farce.

Only one man knows what they are really dealing with, and he doesn’t even know which planet he’s on. Pretty soon, people start dying. The action moves from Las Vegas to Vietnam to Australia before coming to a chaotic and explosive conclusion.

Machine Gun Jelly is the first installment of the Big Bamboo series, and introduces the principle characters, these being…….

Asia Birdshadow. Smart, sassy and sexy as hell. Initially found working as a lady of the night in Las Vegas. She has all the tools for the job, but not enough flint in her soul to survive very long in that profession.

Jordan ‘Baby Joe’ Young. A white knight in the black night. A middle aged hard as coffin nails ex Boston PD, Baby Joe makes his living extricating people from difficulties in Vegas. Not someone to be trifled with, but a complicated man who suffers from an excess of moral integrity. Not necessarily an advantage in the seas in which he swims.

Crispin Capricorn. Outrageously flamboyant gay lounge singer. Talented, witty, acerbic, petulant, emotional, loving and loyal, Crispin is Asia’s best friend. A gigantic heroic muffin man, who always stands by her and is not afraid to ante up when the chips are down.

Monsoon Parker. Unrepentant sleazebag of the first order. Bears a remarkable resemblance to Tiger Woods. As reliable as a chocolate clock, Monsoon slimes his way through life, always on the lookout for the big score, without ever seeing the big picture. Monsoon is invariably the catalyst for catastrophe. The butthole from which emanates all the shit that goes down.

These characters appear in all the Big Bamboo books. Except for the ones that get croaked, who are……..Dream on, pal.

At the conclusion of Machine Gun Jelly it looked like it was all going to be moonlight and roses from thereon in. Not so!

Asia and Baby Joe are separating. What they had together, formed in the firecracker adrenalin of excitement and danger, can’t handle the normality, and they’re drifting apart, both sad but both knowing the score. Monsoon Parker is on the bones of his arse as usual, and Crispin is living the life of a caged parrot with all his feathers falling out.

When Monsoon scores a gig as a celebrity lookalike golf caddie, not realizing that he’s being set up, and Asia goes back to Louisiana to celebrate her mother’s birthday, with Crispin on the team, things start to get lively.

Enter a frustrated fading beauty who writes purple prose spy novels while moonlighting as a jewel thief who calls herself the Caramel Cougar, a hideous psychopathic Cossack gangster with a corkscrew dick, a spotty snotty off the clock IQ cyber nerd who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, a mythical thirteen inch Faberge diamond dildo called the Fab 13, a revolutionary toy called the R3 that will transform the entertainment industry, at least until it kills everyone who uses it because it’s radioactive, and a pallid sicko ghoul looking vodun priest who wants revenge against Baby Joe for locking him into a suntan bed.

Just like I said. All moonlight and roses!

The characters from Machine Gun Jelly and The Chameleon Fallacy ride again as they get caught in the crossfire in a vicious, malicious, and devious game of cut and thrust between a deranged megalomaniac billionaire who wants to destroy the Greenland ice cap, and a batshit doolally eco-valkyrie who wants to reforest Madagascar.

Throw in a spectacularly inept secret agent, an extraordinarily disfunctional international agency, a piratical sea captain with a parrot that doesn´t know when to keep its beak shut, a beautiful but aloof genius, a rogue Chinese general with delusions of grandeur, and a panda that can play the piano, and you have a recipe for mayhem and confusion in spades.

And as usual, it´s Monsoon Parker stirring up the gumbo, Asia Birdshadow adding the spice, Crispin Capricorn providng the music, and Baby Joe Young left to clean up after the shit hits the fan. Big Style!

Ravi suffers from an extreme form of dyslexia and cannot read. He lives a lonely and unhappy existence, shunned by the other children, and constantly berated by his hectoring father who is a school principle embarrassed by his son’s condition.

The community at large are wary and suspicious of Ravi, believing him to be not quite right in the head. Especially after ‘the incident’.

Ravi’s only solace is in the company of his grandfather, a wise and learned ancient who reads to him and treats him with affection and respect. Ravi has been compensated for his illiteracy by a mental facility which allows him to remember in their entirety the books that his grandfather reads to him, word for word.

In his solitude and anguish, Ravi has invented an imaginary jungle world into which he can retreat when the real world threatens to overwhelm him. It is populated by animals who understand him and do not judge him, whether they like him or not, and which over time begins to appear to him as more real than the one in which he lives.

When, after another incident, his father threatens to have him put into care, Ravi runs away to the real jungle to seek the companionship of his imaginary friends.

Being an unabashedly sentimental, frequently funny, lovingly lyrical, warmly whimsical and wistfully inspirational tale about how one little pig, aided by his magically memorable menagerie of mates, learns how to conquer his fears and overcome his shyness, discombobulate the despicable deceiving dastards, and emerge victorious from a hair raising series of vicissitudinous cliff hanging catastrophes, and give the perpetrators a right proper pasting.

Something like that, anyway. Oh, and it has songs too! (And yes, I am aware that vicissitudinous is not a real word, but it should be. So there!)

Think a novel can´t be lyrical, creepy, funny, heartwarming, thought provoking, whimsical, scary, suspenseful, sexy, and tragic, all at the same time. Think again. Miranda’s Kitchen is a modern day Greek Tragedy, set in the Caribbean.

It concerns Ulysses ‘Ship’ Kilgallen, and his search for the illusive intangible that is missing from his life, and what happens when he finds it. Be careful what you wish for, as they say. Miranda’s kitchen will break your heart.

And if it doesn´t, you shouldn´t be allowed to have a heart!

Love Songs from the Tropic of Nowhere comprises two volumes, these being Humpty Dumpty Woman, and The Brigand’s Lament. Humpty Dumpty Woman is the true phonetic transcription of the words of Trinidad Joe Dog, who lives in the hills above Port O’ Spain, in Trinidad and Tobago, where every day he goes down to the sea to make his living with his hands and his lines, and every night he stabs his dreams to death with a broken rum bottle.

The Brigand´s Lament is comprised of the collective observations of John Highcloud while spending many years adrift between wind and tide after being shipwrecked in Mombasa harbour, before accidentally rescuing himself.

The Fishermen of the River Styx is a collection of connected short stories concerning the troubled existence of Victor Spleen, the self styled ‘Resolver’ as he battles with the bleak and dangerous underworld of the Hudson River littoral, and with his own increasing sense of hopelessness and moral ambiguity.

Vic Spleen is a hard drinking hard man, with a quick wit, an ironic sense of humour and an inherent nobility of character with is at odds with the way he makes his living.

The stories are oblique and unexpected, and seeded with plenty of references and clues planted in the text for the astute aficionados of this kind of fiction to uncover.

The Red Flower is an experiment that escaped, and I couldn’t get the slippery little bastard back in the bottle, so I just had to let it run free and go where it wanted to. It took me to a place I’ve never been to before, and don’t ever want to go back to.

It’s unlike anything I’ve ever attempted before. I’m not even sure myself what it’s about other than it has a really nice girl as a protagonist, is prone to oblique and unexpected changes of direction, defies genre, gives you a quick linguistic bite on the ass when you least expect it, and offers some incoherent and unsound existential musings about immortality and evolution.

As the title suggests, The Purple Tides of Hanga Roa takes place on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, one of the most remote inhabited islands on earth, famous for its mysterious and charismatic statues, the Moai.

The story concerns a financially successful Englishman who, disillusioned with the superficiality of his life, decides to leave it all behind in the hope that he might discover the answer to his malaise. Determined to get as far away as he can, he decides upon either Rapa Nui or Tristan de Cunha. In a pub opposite the airline office he flips a coin. It tells him Tristan de Cunha. But as he crosses the road, on a whim, he changes his mind and buys a ticket to Rapa Nui.

The island is everything he’d hoped for. He is beguiled by the light and the space, the spectacular views, the towering thundering waves and the moody changeable skies. But he also discovers an island society more complex than anything he anticipated, and begins to understand that beneath its apparent simplicity the echoes of its dark past still reverberate, and old ghosts still walk.

He meets local girl, coquettish and beautiful, but damaged, like a china doll that’s been glued back together. Wild and free, her capricious behavior mystifies him. They begin a relationship and it seems to him that in a strange way the island itself begins to approve. Trying to make sense of what he’s feeling, he consults his newfound island friends but their responses are enigmatic.

He begins to imagine himself at home, but what happens next reveals to him the depths of his folly, and he learns that there are things impenetrable to those not born to them.

The author had the privilege of living for three years on the island of Rapa Nui. It was my intention to render that magnificent and troubled island faithfully, with love and respect, but also with truthfulness. I hope that in this I have succeeded.

Although the conversations depicted are fictitious, some of the people portrayed are real people, still to be found hanging around in Hanga Roa. I hope that they will appreciate the way they are portrayed and that it was done with great affection. If they don’t, what are they going to do about it? I’m in Morocco!

If any discerning readers find this story to be derivative of The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy, that’s because it is. I swiped it. But only out of respect. It’s one of my favorite stories. And I doubt old Leo will mind. He’s been dead for a hundred and ten years.

The Diss 8. Part 1, is the first installment of a darkly humorous and deeply cynical science fiction novel written in the great prophetic tradition of HG Wells and Jules Verne, because sooner or later, some of this shit is really going to happen for sure. Spicy surreal, and surprising, The Diss 8 is the Avengers on acid, and an R rated salute to The Hitchhiker’s Guide.
The fundamental premise of the story is the attempt by a band of superheroes to defend the earth from the attacks of psychotic mushrooms, sentient homicidal goats, and a nasty piece of spontaneously animated living space plastic, while subject to the devious machinations of an unscrupulous and self-interested world government.
By way of introduction, one of the characters, A Plus, gives us his appraisal of the team, bearing in mind that despite being super powered, he’s a vain preening petulant selfish mammy’s boy who’s sulking because it’s not fair that people won’t do what he wants them to.
‘The Diss 8 indeed! You couldn’t come up with a more ludicrous name if you tried. And who are they, after all? A drug addict who literally doesn’t know what planet he’s on, an uncouth foulmouthed yokel from a third rate continent, a fat squidgy transparent whatever it is, that makes your eyes hurt to look at it, a talking carrot, a living fountain, and a flying overgrown Academy Award. What are that lot going to do to the enemy? Embarrass them to death? And then there’s Mr. Reasonable himself. Power Cut. Well he’s going to get his power cut alright, and no mistake. It’s all his fault anyway. Everything was going swimmingly until he showed up.’

And, floating above it all, literally, is a lonely and tragic figure who lives an anguished existence in self-isolation on a space station for fear of his terrible and terrifying affliction, cursed with the potential to destroy just about everything if he ever unleashes his power. He used to be called Jim. Now he’s called Plague!

The Heart of Porkness is a sequel to Pig Tales and concerns the further adventures of the noble Swinestein, the affable Shortstraw, and the lovely Porcetta.
After the events portrayed in Pig Tales, Porcetta and Shortsraw are living an idyllic life in their little cottage in Scratchingmudwallow in the Mead, but Swinestein is troubled. Now that his friend is gone he feels alone and without purpose, as if all the zest is gone from his life.
Then out of the blue comes resurrection in the form of an S.O.S from an old friend in Africa, the redoubtable Rumpo Hogwild. He’s come into the possession of a map, with a mysterious encryption which he wishes Swinestein to decipher, and proposes that Swinestein join him in Africa to undertake a search for the legendary Golden Hoard in the famed city of Antlantis. Of course Swinestein is instantly restored to vigor, and sets sail on the first tide.
In the port of Hambasa, Swinestein unknowingly encounters his old enemy, the nasty and embittered Rudy Rootsnuffle, transformed beyond recognition and a deserter from the French Furry Legion, which he joined after being rejected by Porcetta. With the help of the vainglorious and brainless Mug Robgabe, self-appointed President of Chimpanyika, Rootsnuffle gleefully plots to sabotage the mission and get his revenge.
News arrives of Swinestein’s disappearance in the jungle, and Shortstraw mounts a rescue expedition. All the old crew from Pig Tales are willingly recruited and a dark continental game of cat and mouse, or rather lion and lemur ensues, (Yes. I know there aren’t any lemurs in Africa, but it rhymes, so don’t be pedantic.)
Swinestein and Rumpo unravel the enigmas and follow the constellations across legendary landscapes, encountering a whole menagerie of new mates. Along the way they meet the sentimental white barracuda, Dopy Mick, and the Mighty Boarzan, Lord of the Jungle. (Unfortunately it’s the wrong jungle, but it all comes out in the wash.)
The rescue mission arrives and sets off boldly into the interior and from there on in it gets somewhat convoluted as a series of double crosses, crossed signals, river crossings and zebras crossing leads everybody to get everything asp about feces. It all concludes with an almighty dust up in which snakes get slapped, chimps chinned, bonobos battered, baboons biffed, hyenas hammered, pigs punched, and aardvarks get…..well never mind…..You get the drift.
It will not surprise you to learn that it doesn’t turn out the way anyone thought it would. Including you. But then, it never does, does it? In the end, some are left older and wiser, and some are just left.