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There was something left unfinished with the characters of "Deeply With The Sun In Our Eyes" sailing off into the unknown.
Major Newton had burst into the last days of Singapore and shaped the denouement but where did he go and from whence had he come? There were other loose ends. So he emerged as the colonel in "The English Colonel's Wives."
Malayan communist insurgency after the war had led a great Australian, Lieutenant-Colonel Sydney Kyle-Little, to command 12,000 part-timers and a regular force in the state of Negri Sembilan between 1950 - 1957.
I met Syd in 1997 and we became close. He knew the meaning of leadership and hand-to-hand mortal combat. Syd also introduced me to the history of Field Marshall Sir Gerald Templar under whom he served.
Thus formed the backdrop to "Wives" though Newton and Kyle-Little were as disparate in composition as chalk and cheese.
My novel is about a man willing to give all in supposed atonement for the past and, seemingly, never quite able to move on.
Me? Many days at sea on the world's great oceans as a marine engineer and passenger earns some literary baggage. What better reading than an open deck in the Pacific and Indian oceans?
Thirty years of legal cases as a barrister, the challenge of rooting out the truth from fiction or conflation, usually both, an expectant jury, crusty judges and a prosecution determined to win, sometimes at all costs.
A life inhabited by multifarious characters, good, bad and fascinating.
Reviewed by Grant Leishman for Readers' Favorite
The English Colonel’s Wives: Inspired by True Events by A.C. Smith takes us back to the first half of the twentieth century but predominately to the period post World War II, as the great British Empire began to disintegrate under the weight of native dissatisfaction and colonial over-reach. It is 1949 and an eclectic bunch of passengers is aboard the New Zealand Star, heading from Singapore back to Britain via South Africa. Colonel Newton, after a successful military role but a less than stellar political performance in Malaya, is heading back to Britain with an extremely important planned visit to someone in Port Elizabeth (SA) along the way. He strikes up a shipboard friendship with an attractive young Eurasian widow Nancyng Jenkins and her daughter. Together, on the long journey to South Africa, the pair begin to share their life stories with each other; however, both it seems are holding secrets back – secrets that may in fact be intertwined in some way. Also aboard the ship is a willful young heiress, Henrietta, who is also set to play a part in the couple's past, present, and future. When Colonel Newton is recalled to Malaya to help in the search for the elusive and deadly communist rebel, known as “the Huntsman”, all of the characters' carefully crafted and shrouded pasts will explode into their presents and their futures.
The English Colonel’s Wives is an artfully crafted and cleverly plotted novel of love, life, and drama that draws the reader into the twisty events from the very first page. A.C. Smith is a master at creating a jigsaw puzzle that, at first, seems simple but ultimately proves to be deeply challenging. I love a story where synchronicities abound and each character is somehow linked to the others, even if they and initially you are unaware of it. This is definitely one of those stories that shock and surprise (delightfully so, at times) as each coincidence and synchronicity is revealed. I will admit to guessing one of the main premises of Colonel Newton’s story but many more left me open-mouthed and speechless at times. The two main characters were beautifully drawn. Colonel Newton was everything you would expect from a British Army Colonel, brusque, overbearing at times, stiff, and deeply conservative and yet the author managed to imbue him with such depth of warmth that it was a true credit to his literary skills. Nancyng, equally, was wonderfully drawn as a Eurasian woman caught between two worlds with a foot in both and a place in neither. The harbinger of a deep, dark, past, she was also every bit a European lady, with style and manners so befitting. The plot is complex and exciting. This is a book you will not want to put down. I thoroughly enjoyed it and can highly recommend it to anyone who loves intrigue.
