Böcker av Martin Hancock

Nineteen sixty-eight is a time of great change in Los Angeles with Civil Rights, the oral contraceptive pill and Rock and Roll. But more than anything, it is the Vietnam War that is blowing generations apart. A retired private detective with something on his mind gets suckered into a job that leaves him wishing he'd closed shop a decade before. Caught up in the shady world of secret programs designed to destabilise the Viet Cong, he finds his old-world detective skills are no match for a CIA-trained killer who seems determined to reap some sort of revenge. But revenge for what? And, behind the killings there seems to be another motive. But what is it, and who is perpetrating it? Nothing is what it seems. The case appears as meaningless as some would say the Vietnam War is as it threatens to blow up in the face of the US government. And at the same time, he is not immune from the inexorable ticking fuse on his own time-bomb.

In nineteen thirty-seven the Monte Carlo gambling ship runs aground in a storm off the Californian coast and a hundred thousand dollars-worth of gold and silver coins belonging to the Mafia go missing. But how did the coins turn up hidden in a house sixteen years later? In the mind of a private detective the coins seem inextricably linked to the brother of a young woman client. He went missing at the same time. It's a cold case, but things get hot when the boss of the LA mob steps in and demands the return of the coins. And things get even more complicated for the detective when a new client insists that the cops want him to swing for the murder of his wife even though he and his gun were fifty miles away at the time of the killing. And he's got witnesses. The problem is that the pursuit of the truth can often create its own victims. The question becomes: is the truth worth it when it's all down to the toss of a coin.

Los Angeles is reeling from the paranoia caused by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Everyone is expecting an invasion of the Californian coast. But where crime is concerned, life goes on as before. A private investigator, struggling with his own demons, gets a call for help. Or, at least, it seems that way. There's only one problem. When he gets caught in a dangerous web of deceit and murder the only clue he has is a room covered in blood. When a young boy is found dead in his zoot suit, all eyes turn to the city's young Latino population, but the detective knows there's more to the story. As he delves deeper into the case, it's not obvious just who is who in a masquerade that would play out well in a Hollywood movie

Los Angeles, 1932, and a town recovering from the chaos of the Olympic Games. What do you do if a respected paragon of LA society asks you to investigate the theft of her dog? But then, after the violence of your previous case, maybe searching for an old woman's pooch has its own rewards. A simple case, easy money. Who would expect that the lost dog wasn't what any reasonable person would expect? As a private investigator, you need to be careful what you sign up for. Even the most straight-forward of cases can turn into a mind-bending puzzle, especially when your client gets murdered before an investigation can even start.Set in the roasting dust of Los Angeles, this case turns from an investigative cliché into a dangerous game of pin the tail on the donkey. Faced with an impossible murder and the theft of a valuable piece of ancient art, what started as easy money soon turns into a young private eye paying a high price.

Los Angeles in nineteen sixty-eight is a troubled place. Assassinations, school walk-outs and student sit-ins have stirred up that famous LA dust and created an atmosphere where it is hard to get your breath, especially if you're a sixty-five year-old private eye. The trouble with thinking that you're at the end of your career is that others might not necessarily agree. A young British archaeologist with a mystery that at first sight seems not to be a mystery at all needs help. Her boss, a senior archaeologist at the university is missing. Has he just absent-mindedly gone off on some wild academic jaunt? Or has he dug something up from the past that somebody doesn't want to see the light of day? In his unexpected last case, a detective has to confront the fact that life and crime in late-sixties Los Angeles can be as complex and troubled as the city itself, and that his successes in the nineteen-thirties carry no guarantee of success in the nineteen-sixties.

Los Angeles was supposed to be the start of a new life after years of unfulfilling work. Starting a detective agency was meant to be a return to a younger time when, as a disaffected ex-student, Philip had been able to help a young woman find the truth about her murdered brother. Now, eight years later, opening a detective agency was always going to be a gamble. Almost immediately, Los Angeles proves to be a trap in a case that puts the pursuit of truth to the test. Set against the backdrop of the 1932 Olympics the detective's first proper case demonstrates that history is sometimes a gamble. There are winners and losers, but when losing means being murdered, it's not a game.

What do you do when you discover that a relative turns out to have a surprising past? Clearing the house after his uncle's death, one man unearths evidence that sets him on a quest to uncover who his uncle really was, and what role was played by the mysterious HM. What begins with the discovery of one man's lifetime of folly ends with a story that exposes just how possible it is to live a life that is a complete lie. The question is - who else is lying?

Attending a university fancy dress ball should have been a matter of grinning and bearing it. Fancy dress isn't everyone's idea of a good time, after all. For one man, however, the act of hiring a costume is to have consequences far beyond what any reasonable person could expect. What he hires is far more than just a costume. It is a mystery.A forgotten secret begins to emerge that has lain hidden for more than seventy years. What begins as a curious discovery quickly becomes a quest, and then the quest becomes an obsession. But whose secret is it?With almost nothing to go on, uncovering the secret is a trial of will that has its own cost. What the man discovers brings to light the story of a battle against evil fought in the dust of Southern Rhodesia before the Second World War, but it also exposes something else, something nobody could have expected.

The digital revolution should have democratised the process of writing whereas, by virtue of the computer, it has only democratised the means of writing. The rest of the process is still largely in the hands of an elite that owes its existence to an era where writing was the preserve of those with an independent income. In a desperate move to avoid the chaos that the digital world has supposedly brought to the music industry, the fiction publishing world has become entrenched, and employs so-called experts in the use of English who are, themselves, entrenched. Unlike a music industry forever changed by the advent of rock and roll, the publishing world has wielded its secret weapon. Namely, the so-called rules of writing in the English language. Rules that, while useful for the factual world, are fake-facts in the world of fiction writing. While icons of the rock and pop world ranged far and wide, exploring everything and anything that might possibly appeal to our ears, the publishing world tries to standardise what we see with our eyes. Like a staid and haughty old aunt, harrumphing at anything that challenges the status quo. Had popular music suffered the expertise of the copy editor, then most song lyrics would have all the appeal of an instruction manual.

The thing about photography is that, sometimes, it captures an accidental reality that was never the intention of the photographer. The grinning idiot in the background, the unfortunate reflection in a mirror. But what do you do when an old photograph shows something in the background that challenges an accepted truth about history? Fate drops just such a photograph into the lap of a man who already owns another piece of the same jigsaw. Drawn by an increasing obsession to solve the mystery of the old photograph, he unwittingly uncovers a different kind of truth. A truth about what it really means to live in a free democracy, and which has been active for a hundred and fifty years: a truth that deals in state-sponsored intimidation, blackmail and murder.

You might think that an innocent member of the public might be far removed from the darker side of human existence. However, cause and effect would have it otherwise. For a retired university lecturer, the uncovering of a 19th century aviation mystery exposes more than he bargains for. An organization known as The Sails and Rigging Committee, the onetime super-secret service dedicated to protecting the British Navy's world dominance, has morphed into something more sinister than anyone could possibly comprehend. As an academic devoted to the facts, he feels compelled to write the truth about this renegade group, and, in this way, he will expose an organization out of control. However, there's a problem. The Sails and Rigging Committee want him silenced. Should he disappear for a while? What transpires is as shocking as it is sickening. In his attempt to hide from an agent of what he perceives as a morally corrupt part of British history, he steps right up to his neck in one of the most evil crimes that humankind can engage in. And who is perpetrating this crime? It's not who you might think, and it certainly isn't where you might expect.

In the sequel to Cause and Defect, the cost of being true to himself is brought into sharp focus for Zack when Carl Muller, the man Zack thought he had beaten, rises from the ashes like a digital phoenix. And he wants revenge and his company restored, not just to its former glory, but re-cast as a world-dominating power. The sort of power that big data can put into the hands of those who know how to use it. In a world recovering from one of the most devastating viruses in modern times, there is a lesson here about just how vulnerable human beings are. Living in an advanced technological world doesn't guarantee immunity. Sometimes it just makes us more vulnerable.

Getting a puncture is irritating at the best of times. But when you're not sure how to mend it, the last thing you need is a stranger turning up out of the blue and questioning your self-belief. This short play poses some difficult questions concerning the nature of belief in God. It is, in essence, a dialogue between the past and the future, between the unknowable and the knowable, theun-provable and the provable. The shadow cast by faith over truth.

Five rock musicians turn up at a village hall for a reunion nearly fifty years after their one and only hit single. What could possibly go wrong? But past enmities are not forgotten. What transpires next exposes a secret that shocks them all. This short play takes the lid off the price that was paidby the girlfriends of rock musicians during a time that has been called the greatest decade of musical creativity of all time. Was it a price worth paying?

A chronicle set both in the current day and in history about the Beale treasure and the mysterious coded letters that hold the secret of where it is buried.