I have just finished the final draft of The Quadrant Conspiracy, a novel of World War II set in Ontario. I am now in search of an agent and publisher.

My first three novels all required hours of research, although the first two were based in part on my personal experience. But Quadrant involved more than interviewing attorneys, reporters, and police officers. A lot more, as you can see below:

The table contains twelve books, all of which I read in their entirety. The most important is Philip Padgett’s Advocating Overlord. The collection also includes two notebooks, an Ontario atlas and province-wide roadmap, CN rail’s General Operating Instructions, and a 1940’s era railway timetable.

The two notebooks contain newspaper articles, maps, and pages of research Padgett gathered for his book. He also lent me an out-of-print volume, The Gilded Cage, by Cecil James Porter. Padgett’s history of D-Day strategy and Anglo-American tangling over atomic research mentioned an incident in July 1943 that inspired my book. I read one paragraph and asked myself, “What if…?” When I contacted Phil suggesting there was a novel hiding in his historical record, he knew what had sparked my interest without being told.

I cannot show you the hundreds of bookmarked pages from online resources such as the Canadian War Museum, FDR Presidential Library, the Eleanor Roosevelt Digital Papers, daily newspapers in Washington and Ontario during the 1940’s, and historical weather reports. Friends and people I’ve never met answered questions in areas of their particular expertise.

The product of all these hours of research, writing, and editing can be summarized in a single sentence:

With the conduct of WW2 in the balance, a disabled Canadian veteran puts his life and marriage at risk to prevent an escaped German prisoner from assassinating President Roosevelt during an Ontario fishing trip.

I will shower you with more information on such minor details as publication date when I have them.