Dr Robin Callender Smith on LinkedIn: I’ve just started to correct the proof copies of my first two very… (2024)

I’ve just started to correct the proof copies of my first two very different historical novels.One isAn Infamous Suggestion: King George V’s Bigamy Ordeal. This is about the criminal libel trial in 1911 of former clerk turned revolutionary pamphleteer Edward Frederick Mylius. He had the temerity to keep insisting that George V was bigamously married to Queen Mary. I came across the case when I was doing my PhD 10 years ago. He was met with an in-form Sir Rufus Isaacs KC, the newly appointed King’s Attorney General. On his team were Sir John Simon KC, the Solicitor General, and Richard Muir, prosecution nemesis of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen. Winston Churchill, the new Home Secretary, couldn’t believe his luck.At issue – no surprise to anyone who knows me – was whether the King could give evidence in his own High Court before his own Lord Chief Justice.The other, which has nothing to do with the law but which is also based on real events, isRising Tide: USAF and the Great Flood of 1953. RAF Sculthorpe, the former spy plane and nuclear jet bomber base in North Norfolk, was part of my beat when I started work as a journalist on theEastern Daily Press. Hunstanton, my then home, has the memorial to the 31 people who died there on 31 January 1953- including 16 US men, women and children - with a total of 65 people perishing down that five-mile coastal strip of northwest Norfolk. In England it made 30,000 people homeless. In Holland it killed over 4,000 people. Two extraordinary US airmen were awarded the first-ever George Medals to be given to non-British recipients for “courage not in the face of the enemy”. The novel mixes the Tornado RB-45 jet bomber spy flights into Russia from RAF Sculthorpe, the first of which was crewed by an RAF ‘Dam Busters’ team, with the ever-present risk of severe and catastrophic flooding on that coastal littoral.I’m using Amazon as the marketplace and the books are available in Kindle and as paperbacks at the moment, published by my company Arbita. Audiobooks will follow. On that, any suggestions for narrators for two such different projects would be appreciated.

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