Elfrid’s Hole: Jake Conley, Book 1
By John Broughton
Jake Conley was irritated. Try as he might, he couldn’t rid his fiancée’s cutting remarks from spinning like a carousel around his head. As far as self-fulfilling observations were concerned, Livie—Olivia to her parents—was an expert. She had labelled him an oddball, always with his head in some distant century, and accused him of not listening to a word she said. Had he not stomped seething out of their flat and been so many streets away, she might have been justified in taking him to task now. He had no destination or awareness of his surroundings; he was striding to walk off his lousy mood…and think about the Dark Ages. He wasn’t considering their relationship. He wanted to work out a structure for the novel he had in mind. His greatest desire was to achieve international recognition as an author. Livie couldn’t understand this; he needed reflection and peace to create his masterpiece. She was creative, too, but her passion for the theatre was less reflective and more spontaneous.
Masterpiece? For sure, his ambition was to write a bestselling historical novel. Maybe she’d understand his needs more readily if, with his ability and the necessary luck, the feature film of the book appeared in high-street cinemas, and the royalties came his way. He wasn’t thinking of any of this when the accident happened. Instead, more typically, Jake wondered whether his main character should be a Saxon or a nobleman and ran through the pros and cons of each. If Jake Conley’s head was not in the twenty-first century, what could be said of that of the Jeep driver? He was so lost in thought that he failed to see the STOP sign at the junction and Jake, who was crossing the road without looking in either direction.
When he recovered from a coma seven weeks later, he was no longer an oddball but decidedly weird. The first unfocused face he struggled to see was that of Livie, with her milk chocolate complexion and black eyes, whose bedside vigils had gained the admiration of the nursing staff.
“Oh, Jake, thank goodness you’re awake! I’d better call the doctor.”
“Livie? Is that you? Where am I?”
“You’re in hospital, my love. You had a nasty accident.”
“Did you assault me, Livie?”
She gave a nervous laugh. Had she heard him right? Was he being provocative? Joking?
“Don’t be silly; you were run over by a Jeep on the corner of Percy’s Lane and Walmgate. The driver claims he didn’t see you, but how’s that possible? I expect the police will want to speak to you; they’ve been three or four times, but you’ve been unconscious for almost two months.”
“Two months! How am I?”
As he spoke, he groaned at a sharp pain in his ribs.
Concerned, Livie left her seat and hurried to fetch a nurse. She returned two paces behind a staff nurse in a dark blue, white-trimmed uniform.
“How are you feeling, Mr Conley?” She beamed at him.
“Lousy, and you can call me Jake.”
“Well, Jake, the doctors rule out brain damage. We did a CT scan, and everything’s fine, given the entity of the blow. You were badly concussed, but all in all, you’re a lucky man.”
Genre: Mystery/Detective
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John Broughton
Biography.
Award-winning author John Broughton was born in Cleethorpes Lincolnshire, UK, in 1948: just one of the post-war baby boomers. After attending grammar school and studying the sound of Bob Dylan, he went to Nottingham University to study Medieval and Modern History (Archaeology subsidiary). The subsidiary course led to one of his most outstanding academic achievements: tipping the soil content of a wheelbarrow from the summit of a spoil heap on an old lady hobbling past the dig. Fortunately, they subsequently became firm friends. He did many jobs while living in Radcliffe-on-Trent, Leamington, Glossop, the Scilly Isles, Puglia and Calabria. They include teaching English and History, managing a Day-Care Centre, being a Director of a Trade Institute and teaching university students English. He even tried being a fisherman and a flower picker on St. Agnes Island, Scilly. He has lived in Calabria since 1992, where he settled into a long-term job, for once, at the University of Calabria teaching English. No doubt his lovely Calabrian wife Maria stopped him from being restless.
His two kids are grown up, but he wrote books for them when they were little. Hamish Hamilton and then Thomas Nelson published 6 of these in England in the 1980s. They are now out of print. He’s a granddad, and the parents happily named his grandson Dylan. He decided to take up writing again late in his career. You know, you don’t have time for writing when you are teaching and working as a translator. As soon as he stopped the translations, he resumed writing in 2014. The fruit of that decision was his first historical novel, The Purple Thread, published by Endeavour Media, London. The story is set in his favourite Anglo-Saxon period. Subsequently, he published seventeen novels between 450 and 1066 AD, including two trilogies, with Next Chapter Publishers. They also published Angenga, a time-travel novel linking the ninth century to the twenty-first. This novel inspired John Broughton to write a series about psychic investigator Jake Conley whose retrocognition takes him back to Anglo-Saxon times.
To put his writing versatility to the test, he embarked on a series of detective mystery novels set in London with the Metropolitan Police, who have to deal with a criminally insane serial killer in The Quasimodo Killings; The London Tram Murders and yet to be published, The Thames Crossbow Murders. Heartened by this venture, he wrote an apocalyptic, The Remnant, a science-fiction novel. However, he returned to his first love with a historical saga, Expulsion, about the expulsion of the Vikings from Dublin and the subsequent diaspora.
John Broughton
