Beirut - An Explosive Thriller

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller follows Olives - A Violent Romance and opens with two of the main characters from Olives, English journalist Paul Stokes and Northern Irish spy Gerald Lynch. The events in Jordan behind them, Lynch has taken Stokes under his wing, rehoused him in Beirut and found him a job on a local paper in the city but isn’t beyond using his young contact to do a little ‘research’ now and then.

British intelligence picks up a stream of ‘micro-transactions’, hard to trace internet fund transfers that purport to be from a German ecommerce site but turn out to originate from Beirut - implicating the leading candidate to become the next President of Lebanon in a large scale money-laundering operation. The hunt for Michel Freij and his motivations soon turns deadly and as Lynch peels back the layers of onion skin, he uncovers something altogether more rotten than anyone could have suspected.

Gerald Lynch is pitched into a race across Europe as he spearheads a multinational intelligence operation to search for missing 50-metre superyacht The Arabian Princess and stop its deadly cargo reaching Freij in Beirut - even as Freij and his militia thugs threaten to snuff out everything Lynch holds dear.

Writing Beirut - An Explosive Thriller

I started writing Beirut in late 2009 (a process that saw me, not for by any means the first or last time, starting with a short story), just after a British literary agent rejected Olives - A Violent Romance after a ‘full read’ with the comment that it wasn’t dramatic enough.

Right, I thought. If you want dramatic...

I finished in June 2010, but it wasn’t until spring 2011 the book was picked up by London-based literary agent Robin Wade, who signed me and shopped it to fourteen of London’s finest. Seven months later, to a man, they rejected it. The rejection that hurt most praised the book’s qualities but noted the editor in question ‘couldn’t see it selling in supermarkets’.

"There are lots of elements to it that I like – there’s an austere, almost Le Carre feel which I like and the author can clearly write. The dialogue and plotting stood out for me in particular. I’m afraid though that it is – for my purposes – a bit too low-key; the ‘commercial’ bit of my job title requires me to pick out titles which are going to appeal directly to supermarkets and the mass-market, and I feel that this would be too difficult a sell in that context."

It was that reaction pushed me over the edge into self-publishing. There was clearly a major change – and massive contraction – taking place in the world of ‘traditional’ publishing and it wasn’t favouring a new author writing hard-to-peg books about the Middle East. Some of the editorial feedback had mentioned the book as ‘Set in Beirut, that war-torn city’. This was infuriating, as Beirut – An Explosive Thriller is set in contemporary Beirut, well over 20 years after the civil war ended. 

Beirut today is a complex city, sexy and shabby, filled with promise and hopeless, vibrant and drab, it rarely fails to entertain and challenge. Plagued by power cuts, creaking infrastructure and endemic corruption, Beirut is full of life, creativity and celebration – even if that celebration sometimes takes on a brittle, desperate air.  

It has, sadly, been increasingly desperate since the city became the first in history to actually bomb itself, that huge and damaging explosion of fertiliser stored in Beirut port accompanied a run on the Lebanese Lire that wiped out fortunes and send thousands fleeing anywhere just to get away from the hopelessness and corruption.

And Beirut still bears the scars of the war – although they’re fading with the years, the deep-rooted problems of sectarianism and vested interest frequently combine to frustrate attempts to make the most of Lebanon’s rich natural and human resources. All too often, both are squandered. 

Lebanon itself remains a country of three parts – to paint it with an impossibly broad brush, Muslim in the south, Druze in the mountains and Christian to the north. It constantly teeters on the edge of a precipice of its own making. Israel to its south and Syria bordering inland are rarely helpful influences. 

It’s the perfect place for Gerald Lynch, wilfully unconventional and wild as he is. 

In Olives - A Violent Romance, the reader only saw Lynch through Paul Stokes’ eyes and that certainly wasn’t a sympathetic viewpoint. In Beirut - An Explosive Thriller we get to see Lynch in the round, including his own circle of friends and colleagues, from tired-eyed policeman Tony Chalhoub through to smouldering beauty (and cathouse madam) Marcelle Aboud. And then there’s fat Palmer from the embassy and the wily Brian Channing, deputy director for security and public affairs. We also start to uncover some of Lynch’s backstory, the kid on the Falls Road they called Gerry.