My elevator Pitch For ‘The Wrong Leg’
Superannuated spymaster links a dumped, booby-trapped prosthetic leg to the Ukrainian War Russian Oligarchs, mismanaged IRA weapons dumps, stolen gold bullion, a trail of corpses and a scheming middle-aged seductress.
This is the first of 3 novels (manuscripts all written and being read, revised and edited before submission to agents.) My family have worked with, crossed swords with and occasionally got under the feet of a number of agencies over the past 250 years. The surpising thing is how often really relevant intelligence is not dependent upon Bond like characters or even an army of Smileys, but well placed amateurs who can assemble information that is often in the public domain. This information is processed and viewed in the light of intelligence intercepts. That has been written about a great deal. My starting point is what happens to those amateurs caught up in great intelllgence events whern catastrophe looms. It may surprise you to know how close msny of you pass to major threats and are unaware of anything.
Hi Andrew, The pitch and brief synopsis are both intriguing and exciting to me as a reader. ‘Superannuated spymaster’ possibly provokes too much thought for me, and I’m tempted to google it to help me understand the intended meaning. I imagine you could replace that with more unambiguous wording.
‘Ukrainian War Russian Oligarchs’ provides quite a mouthful (that leaves an unpleasant aftertaste). Maybe a combination of two of the four words would do the job, or maybe something like ‘Warmongering Russian Kleptocrats’? Having had a go at it myself, I see what good work you did there. Your wording is better.
I suspect you’re nearly there with your pitch. Well done.
Regards. Jim
Been knee deep in other far more mundane tasks over the past week and have only just retrieved your comment. Thank you. I love the kleptocrat idea. I’ve been matched with an agent: Imogen Morrell so we’ll see how it goes.
A bit of background. I’m the first in four generations who was not sent to Siberia. My poor old Dad was captured in 1939 and sent to the Vorkuta Gulag. He escaped, walked to Iran then flew spitfires with 317 (Polish) Squadron and met my mother who worked in Bletchley Park. I worked for MoD (Air) in the 1960’s in Met and crossed over into other things. One son works in Counter terrorism and the other did something vague with the Middle East Peace process and now lives in Northern Ireland, so you could say I know what I’m talking about especially have had dealings with a number of kleptocrats. Once again, many thanks. Andrew