Steve Howell's Blog

My second novel tells the story of a Lebanese-Palestinian woman’s battle to discover the truth about the death of her British partner.
Collateral Damage will be published on April 15 and can be pre-ordered via my website - www.steve-howell.com.
Set in 1987, it follows Ayesha Khoury as she tries get to the bottom of how and why her lover, journalist Tom Carver, died on a beach in Tripoli while attending a peace conference to mark the first anniversary of US air strikes against Libya.
Ayesha has made a life for herself in London - studying at LSE and living with her aunt - having left Beirut traumatised by the Shatila refugee camp massacre five years earlier.
When Tom is found dead, the Libyan authorities – anxious about the diplomatic fall-out - decide it was an accident, and Tom’s family aided by the Foreign Office exclude Ayesha from the official inquiries.
But she won’t be deterred and enlists the help of fellow peace activist Hannah Kennedy and her solicitor friend, Jed McIntosh, to search for the truth – putting their own lives at risk and revealing a shocking abuse of power.
The book’s publication coincides with the 35th anniversary of US air strikes against Tripoli that killed 37 civilians in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi.
The air strikes, which were condemned by the United Nations, were the first US combat operation launched from British soil since end of World War Two and marked the beginning of the era of regime-change wars.
I was active myself in the peace movement in the 1980s and went to Tripoli for a conference on the first anniversary of the US attack in 1987, during which a Canadian journalist was found dead.
Though that experience informed and influenced Collateral Damage, the story of Ayesha’s battle to discover the real reason for Tom Carver’s death is entirely fictional. The death of Christoph Lehmann-Halens remains a mystery to this day.

“You Rhys Davies?” he asks, saying the Rhys like rye with an ‘s’. “I need to talk to you about the incident yesterday.”

My new short story is a tale of a Welshman in Long Beach who gets caught up in an everyday American drama......

Free to read on my website:

https://www.steve-howell.com/short-st...

Season's greetings and best wishes for 2017

Steve

If you missed out on my recent giveaway but are still planning to read Over The Line, you can pick up the Kindle version for only 99p on Amazon until Tuesday (then it goes back to £1.99).
The cheapest way to buy the paperback is either via a bookshop (Waterstones or independents will be able to order it if it's not in stock) or my own website, where there's a secure PayPal facility and it's available post free in the UK.
Many thanks to all those who've reviewed and/or rated the book so far. It's great to know what you think, and I'm happy to answer questions if you have any.

Many thanks to the 986 Good Read members in the US, Canada and UK who entered the recent Over The Line 'giveaway'. Unfortunately, there could only be three winners (whose signed copies have been dispatched today) and I'm sorry to have to disappoint the others who took part.
I do hope those who were not successful will be able to borrow or buy the book another way. I appreciate it can be expensive being an avid reader, but the Kindle edition is only £1.99 and Kindle Unlimited subscribers can access the book free.
If you prefer paperback, I think you'll find the best deals are via my website, which has a secure PayPal facility, but you can also order the book on Amazon and at many bookstores in the UK, including Waterstones.
Finally, a big thanks to those who have taken the trouble to review or rate Over The Line - your views are ultimately the only ones that really matter and I read them all.

A note in my 1969 diary, when I was 15, suggests that my fellow pupils should “discuss the possibilities of comprehensive education in this school and then make a motion which will be put to the staff”.

Reading it now, I am not sure whether to be proud that I was politically precocious or embarrassed I was so naïve. In the cocoon of Hendon County Grammar School, it seems I thought political change could be ordained by my teachers when even five years of a Labour Government committed to abolishing the 11-plus had failed to shift the Dinosaurs of Barnet Borough Council.

But there were grounds to think Hendon County staff had special powers. They did, after all, march around in gowns and run the school like we were all destined for Oxbridge and great things beyond.

The architect of this quasi-public school atmosphere was E W Maynard Potts MA MSc, as he liked to sign himself. Potts had been running the school in an elitist way for three decades and his resistance to change matched the stubbornness of the council.

The local primary schools were feeder factories for Potts’ delusions of grandeur. I had attended the nearby St Mary’s Church of England School where at the end of the second year (Year 4 in new money), the children were divided between two classes deemed to have the potential to pass the 11-plus and a third for the ‘no hopers’ who were put in the temporary classroom in the playground.

By what cruel thinking 9-years-olds could be dumped on the rubbish heap like that is beyond me, but this was an era when there were still children’s books about ‘Little Black Sambo’ and our school uniforms were supplied by an outfitter who was renowned for squeezing the backside of every boy who ventured into his changing room.

The St Mary’s 11-plus treadmill duly discharged most of the chosen ones into Hendon County and other nearby grammar schools, and the social divide between peers from the same area became entrenched. I cannot recall having any friends from secondary modern schools, not – I like to think – because I was a snob but simply because that was the way it was. Yet Hendon County was by no means at the top of the social tree: above us were the private ‘direct grant’ schools such as Haberdashers and UCS and beyond them were public schools we viewed mainly through the lens of Jennings and Billy Bunter novels.

Like a manager of Cardiff City competing with Manchester United, Potts did his best to give the truly-elite a run for their money. He rooted out anyone deemed fit only for “selling matchsticks” (as he would put it to some of the girls) and compelled everyone to choose their A level subjects at 14 so they could by-pass them at O level and start the A level curriculum early. It worked if you measure success purely by university admissions, but two of my most successful friends were among the casualties of his limited vision.

What I did not know when I wrote that diary entry in 1969 was that Potts was fighting a losing battle and that my naïve desire for change would play a part in his downfall. Around that time, my Labour stalwart grandmother, Winnie, had persuaded me and a schoolfriend, Peter Mandelson, to form a branch of the Young Socialist in Hendon. Supported by another friend, Keren Abse, we managed to draw around a third of our school year into a YS campaign to turn Hendon County into a comprehensive school through a merger with the nearby St David’s School. That campaign was almost certainly destined for success without our modest contribution because of the wider winds of change, but what really finished Potts was his miscalculation of the mood in the school.

In a transparent attempt to buy us off, Potts made Peter and me prefects in the summer of 1970, ready for the start of the sixth form that autumn. For Peter, becoming a prefect was expected. But I was somewhat perplexed, especially as I had been caned by Potts for being disruptive in class only a year or two earlier.

I didn’t give it much thought, though, because I had more exciting things on my mind: my father, who was from the US, had been invited to be a visiting professor at Berkeley and I was about to spend most of the summer travelling from New York to California. The trip required the approval of Potts because I would miss the start of term, and he was typically ungracious in giving his blessing. In a letter to my father, he said: “(Stephen) is very interested in the formation of public opinion through pressure groups. Even fleeting contact with an American university campus would give him first-hand experience of techniques which have become so professional as to be self-defeating.”

But, in fact, no professionalism was needed to oust Potts. When I came back from the US, while my parents remained in Berkeley, I decided to suggest that Hendon County’s separate prefects’ common room should be open to everyone in the sixth form. The proposal, which Peter supported, was narrowly carried at a prefects meeting. However, the next day, Potts sent his deputy head to a reconvened meeting to tell us the common room wasn’t ours to share and would be turned into a stock room if we didn’t reverse the decision. That swayed enough people to over-turn the vote, and the dissident prefects – a dozen of us – were now so incensed we resigned and demanded the replacement of the prefects system itself by a school council.

Our stand was spontaneous, taken within hours of the second meeting without any plan or professionalism, but it struck such a chord with fellow pupils of all ages that those who remained as prefects were labelled scabs and booed as they walked around the school in their gowns. Potts was apoplectic and, as Peter describes in his autobiography, The Third Man, denounced us in a school assembly as “industrial militants trying to tear apart the fabric of our school community”.

That proved to be virtually his last gasp as an autocrat resisting change. He had – to return to football language – lost the players. At the end of that term, he took early retirement and was replaced by an acting head from outside the school who abolished the prefects system and delivered the merger with St David’s ready for the start of our upper sixth year.

It was too late by then for comprehensive education to have much impact on me personally, but what I do remember is how well the two football and athletics teams came together and the brief friendship I forged with Frank Attoh from St David’s. Frank was a good footballer and a brilliant athlete, and would prove to be an even better coach. He went on to represent Great Britain in the triple jump and, more recently, to nurture some of our best athletes, including double world indoor champion Ashia Hanson.

It was undoubtedly my loss that grammar school elitism had kept us apart – but, more importantly, I wonder how many thousands of 9-year-old spirits were crushed in 11-plus ‘no-hoper’ classes like the one at St Mary’s.

Steve Howell

It’s 1989, and I’m on my own on a long haul flight returning to Britain from Central America. I had been visiting Esteli, Sheffield’s twin city in Nicaragua, with two other people who were travelling back by a different route. Esteli was near the military frontline of resistance to a US-backed insurgency, and we had visited a village in the war zone under armed guard to deliver the proceeds of a public appeal to build a nursery. My mind was overloaded with impressions of spirited people living in harsh conditions. I was brimming with ideas for a novel and writing furiously, filling a thick notebook before the plane touched down at Heathrow.

Twenty-six years later, time’s equivalent of a marathon, I have finally completed a novel, but it’s not about Nicaragua – the ideas in that notebook never went any further. Over those years, I’ve filled many notebooks, written a few short stories and even churned out more than forty thousand words of an unfinished novel. I kept saying to myself that the pressures of the day job would ease and I would, sooner or later, have time to write a book, a whole one.

About two years ago, I realised I was deluding myself, that I would have to make time or never do it. I had by then already done the research for Over The Line and was clear about the main characters and the issues they were going to face, but I was struggling with the plot. Jane Campion, the screenwriter of The Piano and Top Of The Lake, once said: “Creativity is like a visitor to a relaxed space inside you – it comes when you’re not trying”. That summed up my problem, and I have that quote posted on the wall next to my desk to remind me you cannot approach creative writing like every other task on the ‘to do’ list: your brain needs to switch off and then on again like a computer re-booting.

The core of the plot came to me when I was on holiday. I still have the notes of that moment as well as jottings from many others in the 12 months or so that followed where ideas for back story, dialogue or character would come to me unexpectedly when I was relaxed. That was often while I was out for a run or walk but it could be when I was cutting the grass, cooking a meal or reading the papers. The main ingredient was being away from all the noise of social media and e mail.

Those creative ideas shaped and propelled the process, but I still had to put in the hours in front of a screen to produce 85,000 words. I have never run a marathon and can only imagine what it’s like to complete one. I suspect my euphoria at finishing Over The Line was similar and, like a person addicted to distance running, I’m now preparing for the next one. It isn’t going to be about Nicaragua though. I do still have the notebook from that plane journey and may return to those scribbles one day but, for now, my Jane Campion moments are taking me in a different direction.

The case of British cyclist Lizzie Armitstead embodies the best and worst aspects of the doping crisis that continues to engulf almost every sport and nation.

The 2012 London silver medal winner was banned by the UK Anti-Doping Agency (UKAD) in July after missing three out-of-competition drugs tests last year and then had one of her ‘whereabouts failures’ ruled out on appeal to the Court of Arbitration in Sports (CAS).

CAS has yet to explain its decision, but Armitstead accused UKAD of “not following proper procedure nor fully attempting to make contact with me”.

UKAD, meanwhile, said the onus is on the athlete “to make themselves accessible for testing anywhere and at any time and to provide sufficient information to be located”. It also pointed out that Armitstead did not originally challenge the whereabouts failure that was the subject of the appeal and only did so after a third failure meant she faced a two-year ban.

That Armitstead was given a proper opportunity to appeal is as it should be. Zero tolerance of doping has to be backed up by due process to ensure there aren’t miscarriages of justice.

That’s the best aspect of this case. But it actually only serves to highlight the worst – namely, the double standard in international sport now of some athletes enjoying a presumption of innocence while others don’t.

As Zac Purchase, the British Olympic rowing gold medallist, put it on Twitter: “Imagine what we would be saying if she was Russian”.

For one thing, the tone of the media coverage would be different and not portraying Armitstead as a victim who had heroically won a fight against injustice.

The Daily Mail described Armistead as having “taken full responsibility for her latter two (whereabouts) failures” as if that was to her credit when she must have had no basis for challenging them, otherwise she would surely have done so.

As for Armitstead herself, the statement put out in her name showed a staggering lack of contrition and respect for UKAD.

Without a hint of the self-awareness you might expect of someone who has twice failed to comply with the testing rules, she offered to “explore” with UKAD how it could “better address” being “clearer” in its guidelines.

“Meanwhile”, she added, “I hope that UKAD can now return (my emphasis) to the important job of making sure all athletes are clean.”

Return? Is Armitstead implying that trying to test her is somehow not part of UKAD’s job just because she says she’s clean?

Or perhaps Armitstead’s advisers are preparing public opinion for future wrangles with UKAD, knowing that she is, until October 5, like a driver with nine penalty points: one more whereabouts failure in the next two months could mean a two-year ban or another trip to CAS to face a more sceptical panel.

Steve Howell

The opening chapter of Over The Line is, as some of you will know, set at the British athletics championships, which also serve as a way of selecting a team for the Olympic Games in Rio.

Those trials actually took place at the weekend, and it was eerie being at the real version of a scene I had written three years earlier.

The fictional event features my protagonist Megan Tomos behaving oddly because of an emerging crisis in her life. The crowd don’t know why their favourite athlete is not herself, but the following week sees her troubles laid bare.

At the real trials, there were plenty of tears as brutally-uncompromising competition settled who would go to Rio and who wouldn’t. However, I am not aware of any athlete facing a total personal meltdown of the kind I conjured up for Megan.

When I wrote Over The Line, I was certain – sadly – that doping in sport and the use of drugs for appearance-enhancing body-building would be growing problems. But I did not attempt to second guess the exact form this would take. Instead, I tried to create a story and characters that would show what can happen when young people face huge pressures to succeed in sport or to achieve an ‘ideal’ body image. I also wanted to explore some timeless themes that interested me - suspicion and guilt, remorse and redemption, and trust and betrayal.

This is probably beginning to sound more high-brow than I mean to be or the book actually is. After all, it’s a thriller and relatively straightforward in form. My aim, first and foremost, was to produce a novel that would be entertaining, and I do hope you will read and enjoy it.

Many of you took part in the giveaway that has just closed. If you were successful, Good Reads will by now have notified you, and a signed copy of Over The Line will be posted this week. For those who weren’t successful or missed the giveaway, the book at £7.99 is on sale via Amazon and most bookshops in the UK, including Waterstones, as well as being available on Kindle at £1.99 and to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

Signed copies of Over The Line are also on offer at the special price of £5 including UK postage through my own website – www.steve-howell.com - from now until the end of the Rio Olympics (21 August, 2016), with payment through a secure PayPal facility. (Readers overseas will find rates on my site’s order page that can be checked against current Amazon deals.)

Whichever way you get hold of a copy, I look forward to seeing your reviews or answering any questions you have.

Best wishes,

Steve Howell