All The Write Stuff: Graveyard of Spies

An Espionage Novel of Iran

Graveyard of Spies

by James Quinn

Genre: Espionage Thriller, Suspense

An MI6 network betrayed.

A spy on the run.
A Father’s hunt for the truth.

David Harkness, retired MI6 field agent and once a top operative in Tehran, has been out of the espionage game for decades. Now living in self-imposed exile in Barcelona, he has cut himself off from the cloak-and-dagger world he once knew.

But when a contact from his past tells him that his daughter has gone missing in Iran, David is plunged back into a world of conspiracy, double-cross and espionage.

Set during the maelstrom of 1970’s Pre-Revolutionary Iran and the modern terrorism war between East and West, James Quinn’s Graveyard of Spies is a thrilling story of one man’s quest to discover the truth and protect what he loves the most - no matter what the cost.

GUEST POST

Five Minutes With James Quinn; Q&A

What is something unique/quirky about you?

I’m a mimic. I can replicate accents and voices. I also have this skill where I can remember a face and where I know it from, sort of a Human Facial Recognition System. My kids used to say I probably should have been a mutant X-Man!!

What are some of your pet peeves?

Tailgating on the motorway – in fact anyone that drives dangerously. Oh and noisy people in the cinema...GRRRRR..

If you knew you'd die tomorrow, how would you spend your last day?

Oh with all my family and friends, holding each other, laughing, eating and drinking the best wines – preferably on a beach somewhere!

Who is your hero and why?

My Kids. Its a lame answer I know, but honestly they just are completely fantastic and inspiring to me. I’ve met my hero’s in the past and I’ve found them wanting. Although if Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day popped round for a coffee that would be cool – I feel that we would be great friends.

What are you passionate about these days?

Travel. I love to travel. Sometimes with work, sometimes to research a book, but mainly just to travel and see and experience new and exciting things. More recently I’ve been passionate about music. I can play the drums but I’m also learning how to play the guitar.

How do you find time to write as a parent?

These days its not too bad as my children are older and teenagers. But when I was writing my first book it was a nightmare!! I was working, a single parent and trying to get a story published. It was about finding a balance and an awful lot of late nights once the children had gone to bed.

Describe yourself in 5 words or less!

Intelligent. Cultured. Gentleman. Personable. Modest ;)

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Honestly I think it only really hit home when I received my first Five Star review from a complete stranger. Up until that point none of it was real.

Do you have a favorite movie?

I hate this question because I can never answer it. Its like saying which of your children is the best. It’s unfair. I have lots of favourite movies but to pick one would be unfair to the rest of them. I love cinema and movies of all denominations.

Which of your novels can you imagine made into a movie?

Well….at the moment an L.A. movie production company is working on a version of my Gorilla Grant novella, “Gorilla Warfare.” It’s very exciting and flattering, but I’m realistic about it. I know many movie developments fold, but if nothing else its a cute after dinner story for the future. Of all of my books Gorilla Warfare would make a great intro movie to the character. It’s the story of Gorilla being hired to take out a Glaswegian Crime Family in the early 1980’s. It’s a very bloody and violent revenge drama!

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?

I haven’t really. I don’t tend to do that. Probably the closest I’ve been is when I visited the Dante Aligheri museum and tomb in Florence several years ago. It was actually quite moving, you can see the church where Beatrice was buried.

As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal?

That’s easy – the Raven. They are the spies of mythology. They are always, always watching……

What is your next project?

Well next year – 2025 – is the 10th Anniversary of the release of my first book, A Game for Assassins. It introduced my main character, they spy/assassin Gorilla Grant.

I’d pretty much rounded up the Gorilla Grant stories with the final book – Berlin Reload – but I was persuaded to bring Gorilla out of retirement for one last mission for the anniversary. The book will be called Assassini and will be set in Sicily in 1965. I’m looking forward to it.

After that I have a future character planned which I’m very excited about. I don’t want to give too much away but I think it will be something unique to the spy/espionage genre. Hopefully that too will be out in 2025.

“A spy thriller with heart and soul.”

“What a terrific addition to the spy genre”

“If you like political thrillers, you'll love this one. Once again, James Quinn has penned a terrific tale.”

“An emotionally driven spy story”

“James Quinn continues to show he can really, really write!”

EXCERPT

Iran, 1977 -1978

The moment my feet touched down on Iranian soil I knew that I was home. I could feel it, taste it, and smell it. It permeated my very soul. I knew because I had never felt that way about anywhere else in the world in all of my twenty-six years. And who was I to make this definitive proclamation?

I was David Richard Harkness, a twenty-six-year-old newspaper journalist/photographer, linguist frequent traveller and spy. I had embraced the ethos and style of 1977; my hair was longish in length, dark (the grey of my future self had not yet taken root), I was slim, fit and looked like a hundred other young war photographers in the world in the non-uniform uniformity of jeans, sneakers, open-neck shirt and the sometime addition of a leather jacket. Occasionally, I would wear a lightweight summer suit for more formal occasions, hoping that I looked Graham Greene-esque, and always open-necked and never with a tie. The hope was that it would give me an edgy, dangerous feel to my persona. In truth it probably didn’t, but it was all I had.

And now, after a yearlong recruitment and training drive, I was the latest off-the-books field agent for British Intelligence in the Near East. I had initially been spotted, I later learned, just fresh out of university, not one of the prestigious ones that the high-level Intelligence Officers came from; no Eton or Oxford for me. Instead, I had graduated from Bath with a very respectable degree in Journalism and Languages, which in this case was Farsi.

I had always wanted to write, ever since I was a little boy, and being naturally inquisitive I had an investigative nature. I would wander around our little village on the outskirts of Bath with my notepad and pen, alternatively drawing or writing made-up stories. My mother encouraged me, my father did not, until it had burst at the seams and I had impressed everyone at grammar school with my literary prowess. It was only a matter of time before I decided what I wanted to do with my life in the future – in short, write! I was taken on as a cub reporter for a local rag before hitting the big leagues of the London papers, mainly thanks to my language skills, and being sent overseas as a stringer in Beirut, eking out a living filing copy and selling photographs to the European dailies for a pittance.

Beirut was going through something of a rough time after its heyday in the 1960s, when it was known as the ‘Paris of the Orient’. Now, it was a tense environment with civil war and terrorism looming over the streets. But for a young war photographer it was a goldmine of experiences!

And it was in Beirut at the end of my first ‘tour’ that I was approached by a Consulate flunky who hinted he ‘vaguely had something to do with gathering information’. We had met several times in the hotel bars and he was a face known to most of the journalist crowd and there was nothing nudge, nudge, wink, wink about any of it. I was just in the right place at the right time.

I had spent the best part of year being trained at arm’s length, usually in hotel rooms or safe houses, in the dark arts of agent handling, recruitment and tradecraft. I was a deniable, not officially on the books of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, but rather someone who was paid from an offshore shell company and who could be trusted to do the odd little job here and there when the local Head of Station couldn’t risk it. Crash recruitment, source handling, all the bells and whistles of tradecraft, bit of surveillance here and there, were all within my remit as a ‘non-official contract operative’ – or, as the trade called us, ‘Blow-ins’. I was a part-time spy

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Book Links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DJ8V9DMC

Apple: https://books.apple.com/us/book/graveyard-of-spies/id6736441295

B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/graveyard-of-spies-james-quinn/1146388986?ean=2940168176910

Google: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=xyQnEQAAQBAJ

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/graveyard-of-spies

Books2Read: https://books2read.com/u/47BPXN

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/books/graveyard-of-spies-by-james-quinn

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219866177-graveyard-of-spies

Book Trailer:

https://youtu.be/ZM51-8s6A1g

**Join the Spy Games Treasure Hunt!!**

WELCOME TO JAMES QUINN’S SPY GAMES

Do you have an investigative mind? Can you solve puzzles?

Do you think you have what it takes to be a secret agent?

If the answer is YES – then join our spy game and win a prize.

Over the next several months we will be leaving clues on our website that will lead you to a prize located in several geographical locations around the globe.

The prizes will be left in our carefully selected Dead Letter Box Drops. For espionage aficionados knowing what a DLB is should be a prerequisite. A knowledge of general espionage history is also useful but not necessarily a must.

If you choose to accept this mission, then protocol dictates that you should check in on our website and social media for the latest clue updates. Links can be found in the author’s bio following this post!

The first location will be announced in late November followed a few days later by the clues needed to find the DLB.

Good luck to all the fledgling secret agents taking part.

About the Author

James Quinn is the author of the "Gorilla Grant" series of spy novels including A Game for Assassins, Berlin Reload and the novella Gorilla Warfare which is currently being developed as a Hollywood movie. He has also written the spy story The Fisherman and the short story anthology Clandestine.

A professional intelligence and security consultant, he currently resides in the UK but likes to travel extensively around the globe; partly to research his books and partly for the adventure of it all!

In his spare time he likes to play the drums, learn the guitar and enjoy the finer things in life.

Visit the official James Quinn author website for more information about upcoming projects and events;

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