“Customers find the storyline well-laid out and engrossing to read. They also appreciate the well-drawn characters and Lynch as an anti-hero.”

Amazon’s AI summary of reader reviews…

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is about British diplomat Jason Hartmoor and his return to Lebanon after years abroad to rediscover his lost love and meet her before he dies of cancer, and how his search for her goes terribly wrong. It’s really about pain and loss, missed opportunities and the decisions we take that shape our lives - and about regret and how we can never really go back.

It’s also about how state actors shape the lives of the people they use and manipulate to achieve their ends. There’s tremendous sadness in the book, and that sadness is layered as far as Jason is concerned: an unremarkable diplomatic career, a failed marriage, the destruction of his reputation and now cancer - Jason doesn’t really have an easy time of it.

The trouble really starts with Jason’s return to Beirut and his life-long regrets about the life he he perhaps should have led and the love he should have gone back to instead of staying away as he did. Sick and exhausted, Jason finds himself caught up in a sudden whirlwind of deadly reaction to his unwelcome presence in Beirut as he unwittingly stirs up the secrets of the past.

At the core of the book is Jason’s lost life, the brief splash of colour he enjoyed in Lebanon as a young man, excited by the constant newness of the world that’s unfolding around him before the years and disappointments turned him to unyielding stone. And that splash of colour was provided by his time studying as a young man at MECAS, in the glorious mountains above Beirut…

Beirut’s British Spy School

The concept of MECAS - the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies - has long fascinated me. Somewhere up there in the Chouf mountains above Beirut was a building that had for thirty years housed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Arabic language school - known to the Lebanese as the British Spy School. Founded by Bertram Thomas and closed by the Lebanese Civil War, MECAS is an enigma and a minor marvel to me. It was from here the infamous George Blake was taken to London to be arrested on his arrival, finally unmasked as a Russian double agent, in 1961. The Lebanese, unsurprisingly, refer to it as the British Spy School.

The idea of setting a spy thriller around someone who had studied at the school - around the school itself - had long nagged at me. I bought books about the school and sought out memoirs written by people who had studied there, life-long diplomats like Ivor Lucas, whose self-published memoir of his career was to inform Jason Hartmoor's overwhelmingly unremarkable diplomatic existence (modelled lovingly on Ivor’s, whose career was wholly mundane). Eventually, on a misty, rainy spring morning, I travelled up into the mountains with lovely colleague and pal Maha Mahdy and we tottered around the dripping village of Shemlan looking for the school. Or rather Maha tottered, wearing her usual mad heels and complaining that I was responsible for ruining her McQueens as we squelched around.

She found my comment about how she should have worn trainers unhelpful for some reason.

The locals didn't think much of being asked about the spy school by some Egyptian chick with a camera-toting Brit old enough to be her dad in tow. But we eventually tracked it down. I've been back to Shemlan a few times now - the village is lovely, nestling in the mountains high above Beirut, uphill from Aley and  Bchamoun, home to a few shops, the mildly famous Cliffhouse restaurant and an orphanage.

Looking out over Beirut from Shemlan never fails to take my breath away. The city is spread out like a glimmering carpet below, the airport runways sitting by the infinite blue Mediterranean.

It’s a bit of a hike up the mountains past the village of Choueifat (home to the eponymous school) - very much the journey Jason took as his battered Mercedes taxi groaned up the hilly road.

The Cliffhouse Restaurant

Lunch at The Cliffhouse is a fairly traditional Lebanese affair, you can sit by the window popping pistachios and drinking Al Mazas as you look out over Beirut below, dishes appearing from the kitchen with satisfying regularity to populate the table. The restaurant itself is fairly large, a favourite meeting place for couples being 'discreet', but also a popular place at weekends. You’ll often be joined by a noisy party filling one of the long tables set out in the conservatory, celebrating one of life's events with cloudy glasses of arrak.

I had actually started writing Shemlan just before I published Olives - A Violent Romance. The book was shelved, paused about halfway through, while I got publishing Olives and Beirut out of my system. Originally called Hartmoor, the title was quickly changed when I discovered Sarah Ferguson's 'planned' historical novel of the same name was scheduled to publish in 2015.

Having sent Beirut bobbing into the wide open sea in 2012, I took up the reins on Shemlan again in 2013 and finished the novel in a mad burst of frenetic activity, pumped on death metal and alternately smacked down by Arvo Pärt like a twisted druggie shredded by a mouthful of French Blues chased down with slugs of chilled vodka and warm dark rum.

And just in case you're interested, yes - I do know precisely what that feels like...

The story of Shemlan was, from an early stage, fated to travel to Estonia. We went to Tallinn for a magical week a few years back and I dragged Sarah across town to the British Embassy so I could photograph it for use in the book later - as it turns out, Lynch never does go to the Embassy to fall out with the ambassador in the final version of the book and so I didn't need the Embassy at all, but you can never be too careful.

Sadly, the other major location for Shemlan was Aleppo and the marvellous C14th Ottoman souk has been destroyed. In the overall devastation the last few years have brought, the loss is a small one, I know.

An odd footnote of interest to absolutely nobody but me is that the Urfalee church of St George's in Aleppo was somewhere you could still hear very early plainchant - the root of all European music lived on in the preserved practice of the Urfalee community. I use the past tense only because I don't know if it - and they - are still there.

The little green orthodox church (Estonia is the most secular country in Europe - you don't get a lot of working churches there!) down by the port in Tallinn is also somewhere you can hear Estonian Orthodox singing, a rare and beautiful sound that is not only similar to the haunting plainchant echoes of Aleppo, but also the inspiration for Pärt's sparse, spine-tingling music. And it was to the aching soundscape of his 'Für Alina' I finished writing the last few pages of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy.

Aleppo’s souk was timeless, ancient and bustling with the manic energy that it sustained over hundreds of years. It was totally destroyed in the Syrian Civil War.