A NOVEL
Aside from film and TV projects, of which I have many both optioned and in the proverbial bottom drawer, I do just love writing. These are two of my more advanced projects, a novel I'm writing the final pass on at the moment and will be publishing later in the year, and a musical I've written a few drafts of the book for, but am currently stymied by my complete lack of talent in the glorious arena of music (and forethought, this oversight would suggest). Still, when I come across the right collaborator, this one'll be a corker.
A MUSICAL
When Gray Bannister, a forty something family man and accountant, tries to fulfil his lifelong dream of being an entrepreneur, his life falls completely apart, sending him into a cascading quagmire of denial, deceit and murder, a descent mirrored by the fracturing of his close knit friend group and the apparent collapse of the current iteration of global empire he'd always been a slightly resentful cog in.
A story of the folly of ambition, a rapidly swinging emotional pendulum and our inability to really comprehend ourselves except in hindsight.
The French Agent tells the story of the Hartlepool Monkey, an apocryphal tale in which legend has it that during the Napoleonic wars, a monkey, dressed in a miniature French officer's outfit, washed up on the shore of the Northern English coastal village of Hartlepool, the only survivor of a French warship the locals had spent the day watching sink on the horizon.
Legend further has it that, given that this waterlogged interloper didn't speak English and the locals had never seen either a Frenchman or a monkey, they tried it as a French spy, found it guilty, and hanged it.