So off we went into the wild blue yonder where, pretty soon, we were dubbed “the Fred and Woody show”—Woody insisting Patton’s death had been an accident pure and simple, and me saying well maybe it was, and then again, maybe it wasn’t. And -- I can't speak for Woody, but I certainly can for myself--we tripped off more than a couple of booby traps. On our first stop in San Francisco, at a “working lunch” with half a dozen or so local newspaper reporters, someone asked me why I’d written the book (meaning, Are you one of those shameless hacks who write books for money?). When I replied defensively, quoting Ian Fleming, that ‘my main aim was to keep heterosexual readers turning the page,’ the hackette who had asked the question (and looked like Rosa Klebb) snarled “Ya got sump’n against homosexuals?”  Oops. I’d forgotten which city I was in.

In Detroit, after a book signing session, I announced I was going to walk back to the hotel. “Ya wanna get yourself killed?” my horrified minder blurted.

In Dallas, the driver of my limo (it was pink) made a detour to show me a Henry Moore sculpture at the Civic Centre. “Whatcha thinka that thang?” he asked me. I said I wasn’t very keen, and he nodded agreement. “Looks lak a dinosaur took a crap ta me.”  

In Boston, I shared a spot on a talk show with General Patton’s daughter, the marvellously-named Ruth Ellen Patton Totten, who had no time whatsoever for me or my conspiracy theory. “In polite circles, if there were ladies around, my father always Latinized the swear words,” she said. “If he was sitting here now listening to this, he’d say it was ‘taurine excreta.’”

And then it was back to London for the British “premiere” of Brass Target on March 22, 1979 (nothing to do with MGM, who I suspect had also smelled turkey and decided to just let  it open without fanfare) at the Plaza, Haymarket (for some years between then and now converted to a supermarket but restored as a cinema, albeit without that huge signboard). My premiere was a block of seats in the balcony and a family-and-friends champagne party for about thirty of us at the Café Royal. My mother just ate it all up with a spoon, but I think maybe even my pals smelled turkey, too. But the show went on, and all around it, we did another hectic seven day round of press, radio and TV interviews—they’d flown Woody over and we did our “yes-it-was-no-it-wasn't” act again—to promote it. But even with competition as poor as the movies you can see in the picture above, Brass Target quietly curled up and died.

Well, not quite.
In fact, the Warner Archive
has reissued Brass Target 
for download to DVD.
You'll find all the details (including a not-too-friendly review)
at:
http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/6942-DVD-REVIEW-BRASS-TARGET-1978-STARRING-SOPHIA-LOREN,-JOHN-CASSAVETTES,-ROBERT-VAUGHN-AND-PATRICK-MCGOOHAN.html

   It was disappointing, but I understood now why Artie Pine had told me to take the money and run. So we did what we always do, and got on with life. By mid-April I was 140,000 words into a vast, complex novel—my Gone with the Wind— contracted for by Macmillan in New York and Hutchinson/Arrow in the UK . Set in the years leading up to and during the Russian revolution, and at first tentatively titled Like Water, Like Fire (one of the main characters was Vladimir, heir-to-be of the fantastically wealthy Smirnoff family, vodka-makers to the Tsar of all the Russias, who ended his life driving a taxi for a living in Cannes, France—in fact, Smirnoff flew me there to meet his widow, Tatiana) it eventually became White Nights, Red Dawn.

   Among the many other things that happened that summer there was, I recall, a talk at the Writers’ Summer School (one of my favourite "secret places"), I wrote the scripts for and appeared in the first two of a series of Tyne-TV series called “A Better Read” on “Westerns” with J. T. Edson and John Harvey (yes, the [later] fine crime writer), and “Spies” with Brian Freemantle and Ted Allbeury. Then at the end of 1980 I really hit the jackpot with a contract with Bantam Books in New York (which they later reneged on) and Arrow Books in London, for a five-book series A Call to Arms, which was to be about an American family living through the War of Independence, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and World Wars One and Two. Never did the two world wars and always regretted I never did. Plus c'a change: Ken Follett is doing something similar, right now with his "Century" trilogy -- but on a much grander scale (and far more successfully).

   So as you can see, I was having a marvellous time—plenty of work, plenty of fun, plenty of life's ambition boxes ticked. But it’s in the nature of the writing business that there will be some disappointments, and sure enough there were, one of the biggest of which was a project that came my way in February, ’84 when I was picked to ghostwrite a book with Elvis Presley’s stepbrothers, Rick and Dave Stanley, for which I came up with the title How Fast Does This Thing Go? (one of the stories the boys told me about Elvis was that every time he bought a car--and he did that pretty often, sometimes for complete strangers--that would be his first question). I spent a week interviewing them in a motel in Waco, Texas, and when we were done I went back to New York and put together a dynamite proposal for what I was confident was going to be a sure-fire, big-time bestseller. Then, the bombshell: just as Artie Pine began showing it to publishers, Rick and Dave confessed they had previously signed a contract with another agent. We had no option but to watch helplessly as that bottom-feeder took it over and put a price tag of no-less-than-$2 million on it, whereupon (this was hard on the heels of the "You crazy or something?" reaction every agent in the business experienced trying to sell high-advance projects in the wake of what (then) was considered then to be the “insane” multi-million dollar advance Bantam Books had paid upfront for Judith Krantz’s novel Princess Daisy) the project dropped stone dead. Rick and Dave went back to Texas and became Baptist preachers, and I never heard from them again.

Richard "Rick" and Dave Stanley, Waco, TX. February 1984

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And then there was Nazi Gold.

   During the excitement surrounding the publication of The Mittenwald Syndicate, I was contacted by a young fellow named Ian Sayer, who owned a trucking company and seemed to be very wealthy (he had a Ferrari, as I recall) who, with a friend, Harry Seaman, had been industriously and with some success investigating the Reichsbank robbery, in the course of which he amassed a transatlantic phone bill the size of the national debt. He was interested in what I’d found out, and I likewise in his research. He had documents, photographs, names and numbers, and we all agreed there was a marvellous book in there, and that although all our names would be on the masthead, I would be the one who actually wrote it.  On the heels of my novel it was a natural, which Sphere Books signed for a substantial advance. It was an enormously complex story and I did what I thought was a masterly job of making it concise and yet pacy, comprehensive but not bean-counting. Sphere were delighted and the book was announced for November, 1980 publication—in fact, here’s the cover they were going to use.

   Frankly, Scarlett, I didn't give much of a damn--I was writing what I wanted to write, travelling wherever I wanted to go, realising ambitions -- some of them quite mad -- I'd waited all my life to fulfil. With the backing of the Society of Authors, I spearheaded and masterminded the first-ever survey of the promptitude (or otherwise) of publishers’ royalty payments in a landmark article ("The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly")  which appeared  in The Author and was then reprinted in The Bookseller and Publishing News. I remember the late, much missed literary agent Abner Stein shaking his head and telling me what a schmuck I was for doing it -- and he was right. So I tried something new, and with my friends Bill Barrow and Dennis Moore I co-produced LPs of Rodgers & Hart's first musical Dearest Enemy and the "lost" score from the movie Hollywood Party (both now available on CD) and teetered on the verge of doing (but never actually did) a third, an album of "unsung" R&H to be performed by Denis Lawson and Sian Phillips, who were then starring in a London revival of Pal Joey. We enjoyed a fabulous launch party for White Nights, Red Dawn thrown by Hutchinson (well, the Smirnoff vodka people, actually) at the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall (with lots of champagne and real caviar and several genuine Russian princesses in attendance).

   And on the side, as it were, I wrote and fronted three more Tyne-Tees "Better Read" scripts; translated a dozen or so of the French-language Goscinny-Morris  “Lucky Luke” books for Hodder-Brockhampton Press; "novelised" a dire German TV hospital soap for Sphere called The Black Forest Clinic on Channel 4; wrote six or eight short books for children; served four years on the Society of Authors’ Management Committee; put together the first-ever “Crime Writers Road Show” which, featuring Harry Keating, Anthony Price, Simon Brett, Anne Morice and Lady Antonia Fraser, toured all over Buckinghamshire; was writer in residence at the Wooburn Festival; helped set up the All-Bucks Literary Festival; held a weekend seminar “So You Want To Be A Writer?” at my home; wrote a weekly column in The Bookseller that ran for almost three years ...

... and, oh, yes, I nearly forgot, wrote another dozen books. And here they are …

 
CARVER'S KINGDOM
(London: Macmillan, 1980; New York: Warner, 1980)

"Fortunes are seldom made by men who care overmuch about keeping both hands and consciences spotless, and the go-getting Carver brothers, Theo and Ezra encountered plenty of skulduggery when they joined the gold rush of ’49. Love was regarded as a weakness by such men, and one which could lay them open to blackmail, but the lonely woman whose fate crossed theirs was by nature more of a victim than an executioner. Wild adventures befall the Carvers, but in spite of murder, rape and lynching the tone of this novel remains immensely respectable – a meaty read."
- London Daily Telegraph. 

"It is a lusty, colorful yarn about the first American railroads in the middle of the 19^th century, the carving of a fortune by a man made to succeed despite all opposition, and a woman destined to become a great actress. I think it will be bought by thousands." - Eric Hiscock, The Bookseller. 

“A rich, sprawling story of an America going places during the middle of the last century, it proves Frederick Nolan has lost none of the literary skill which served him so well in novels like The Mittenwald Syndicate. The book takes in most of the memorable features of life in the States during that period and represents excellent value.”
- Bolton Evening News. 

“Business ethics in the United States in the middle of last century left a lot to be desired, and Frederick Nolan paints a pretty grim picture of the methods employed then to secure personal advancement. In his story no holds are barred and little mercy is shown for those who stand in the way. It is a gripping story and deserves the sequel now in preparation.” - Aberdeen Press & Journal. 

“An absorbing novel of 19^th century America when every bright young man was out to make a fortune. The action ranges from Wall Street to the splendour of Southern plantations, but the author excels in his descriptions of the West: the goldfields where men died in the mud, and Dodge City, a cluster of tents and crumbling adobe shacks with a ‘smell of no sanitation, of rotting meat, of filth.’”
- Bristol Western Daily Press. 

“A fast moving novel of American life in the middle of the 19^th century. It is the story of one woman, Sarah Hutchinson, who became one of the greatest actresses of her day, and of the men whose lives werte changed by knowing her. The settings of this long and powerful novel range from the California gold rush to the Wall Street of the Robber Barons, from the glittering Broadway stage to the Kansas frontier.”
- Scunthorpe Star. 

“A drama on the majestic scale set in the America of a century ago, a time when fortunes were made and lost overnight. Money, power, love – all the makings of a best seller are here.” - South Devon Journal. 

“One of those deep, delightful family histories, this time in America a century ago with the principals being two brothers with quite different characters but with one beautiful actress able to hold both their reins.”
- Manchester Evening News. 

"A major achievement, a significant historical novel which confirms Nolan's reputation in the genre."
- Geoffrey Sadler, 20th Century Romance & Historical Writers.         

Also published in Dutch, and in British and American paperback editions.

*** 
  
WHITE NIGHTS, RED DAWN
(New York: Macmillan, 1980; London: Hutchinson, 1981) 

"A powerful, sweeping saga of the lives and loves of real and fictional characters
who shared this tragic era."
- Kansas City Star

"There is plenty of colour and drama and romance in the telling of the tale."
- Irish Times.

"Perhaps the most unusual of  Nolan's creations; it is also one of the most satisfying."
- Geoffrey Sadler.

Also published in Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and in British and American paperback editions. 

***


The "A Call to Arms" series: