My tenth My Weekly Pocket Novel hits the supermarket and newsagent shelves in the UK, 4th March 2021. It’s a wild and exciting adventure/romance set in the outback town of Jerilderie, New South Wales in 1877. Join handsome and charismatic bushranger Major Midnight as he terrorises the Cobb and Co, stagecoaches and township. When school teacher Grace Stevens arrives, she’s determined to discover who the masked man is. But is it to bring him to justice or does she have other, more romantic, plans in mind?
The story behind the story;
Growing up in Sydney in the 1950s, my grandmother often fascinated me with tales of the bushrangers who rode and robbed the coaches and towns of New South Wales’ Wild West. Victoria too. It was a lawless time with characters like Captain Starlight, Ben Hall, Ned Kelly in his iconic armour and others opposed to the establishment which they claimed to persecute them and their families. There was a TV show too, called Whiplash about the early days of Cobb and Co coaches. It starred Peter Graves (brother of Gunsmoke’s James Arness). Greaves had starred in a Black Beauty series in the States called Fury. Later he’d be in charge of the Mission Impossible team in the 60s returning to an Australian reincarnation of the show in the 80s.
At school we learnt poems like The Wild Colonial Boy also about a bushranger. They’d cry Bail up! Bail up! as they attacked the coaches. I prefer ‘Stand and deliver’ like Dick Turpin and Adam Ant but that was an English expression. So, sixty odd years after my grandmother’s tales, here’s my version.
Alan C. Williams - Author 