Peter Abram

I am a teacher of English Literature who writes Crime Stories. On my blog page here are a collection of different short stories and flash fiction. First and foremost I am a teacher so I would like to start by advising that my stories are adult stories and I’d rather my students and anyone else under 16 years of age didn’t read them. Much of the world’s great literature explores dark themes and that which is extreme but when one is not old enough to process the darkness it merely becomes mind pollution. Stay within the light. Hold on to your innocence.

One of the best novels I’ve worked on with my students over the past twelve months is Tuesdays with Morrie by Albom. It has its place on the curriculum because of the pacing and vocab. My personal favorite is Miss Lonelyhearts by West, simply because it’s completely outrageous. The best for lower level English students is Secret Garden by FH Burnett–such a wonderful story. Most difficult is Brideshead Revisited by Waugh because there are so many allusions to the classics only really top level English speakers can get through it. Other books we’ve loved are The Outsiders by SE Hinton, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by Boyne, and titles by Edgar Allen Poe, Tennessee Williams, and Hemingway.

2024 is well underway and I haven’t uploaded anything for awhile as I’ve been working everyday with my students in Taiwan. You learn a lot writing crime. Robbing banks and making gunpowder. My latest character is a bookish birdwatcher called Bernard Halibut. You can read the story of his one night in lawless Phnom Penh and his descent into psychopathy by purchasing it on Amazon:

Click on the link above.

I’ve written a lot for magazines, had a non-fiction work published, have self-published a crime novel called Try Catching Thunder (sold about 5000 copies) but after learning my trade I wrote a three book series. I suppose you would collectively call the series, The Aristocratic Assassin Viscount Hastings and his Adopted Chinese Daughter Sedona Li. He’s in his late forties. Decadent…determined…deadly… Sedona is his 20-year-old partner in crime. They do pop up in the short stories but the novels aren’t on this site.

Book 1 is The Suicide Race. It’s set in contemporary England:“A terminally ill assassin accepts a massive payday for his wife in return for one final mission. His adopted daughter sets off on a mission of her own. To stop him launching a deranged suicide attack.”

In Book 2, Execution of the Beloved, Hastings throws in with Sedona to avenge her mother’s murder. Their pursuit of the killer spirals into a war with a gang of homicidal treasure hunters, deep in the heart of Cambodia. I spent a year in remote parts of Cambodia researching the story and eventually writing it.

Book 3, Night of the Infidel, takes us back to where it all began, in Melbourne three years earlier. Viscount Hastings fulfills a promise to his late cellmate and rescues 18-year-old Sedona from the clutches of a pimp, but the confrontation turns fatal and the pimp is killed. The dead man’s radicalized brother Caspar Salazarski swears to avenge his loss and comes after them with all guns blazing. Hastings has a ton of old-world felonious sophistication and Sedona is street smart, but will it be enough to overcome such a dangerous, practically unstoppable enemy?

The Hastings chronicles began in 2008. Christ, that’s 16 years ago. I saw an English aristocrat arguing with a religious extremist on a YouTube video. The total contrast in their characters, outlook, speech patterns –everything, it amazed me, and I got to work writing about them. My outline boiled down to a 3 paragraph blurb, which I shoved into a suitcase along with the hundreds of songs, poems, scripts, treatments, and a 220-page novel written about my Berlin days -all of which are strictly for my eyes only.

On a cold, wet Sunday early in 2015, I opened the suitcase, pulled out the blurb and got to work.

Research.

Legislation, firearms, government counter-terrorism policy, airport security, extremism, bare-knuckle-boxing, substance abuse—at the end of week one my head spun. The only area I was reasonably well informed on was firearms, which I got my head around back in my military days. But I do so enjoy research. My Masters Degree is Educational Management, and learning how to be a professional researcher doesn’t hurt when it comes to planning my works. The writing bit is the culmination of a ton of research.

My stories have lots of glamorous, dark, estranged characters with spikes, and events based on actual events. I flash it all up with a bit of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal.

That’s gunpowder…

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