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It is 1888 as I write these words. I am an old man now, scratching syllables by candlelight at an old desk in a dingy room in Whitechapel . . .

Sometimes I write of the Devil, and of his activities amongst us in London some decades ago, my connection to which may grow more clear as we proceed. But mainly I write of a man named Daniel O’Thunder, who was—who remains— the most remarkable I have ever met. . .

I may here and there have invented certain facts, but always in the service of a greater Truth. As indeed did Matthew and Mark and Luke and John—and every single word they wrote was Gospel.

This, then, is my Book of Daniel. In writing it—in telling you the tale of Daniel O’Thunder, and his deadly Enemy—I am of course telling the tale of myself as well. And to tell my story we must begin where it all began to go so wrong.

Synopsis
Set in the 1850s in London, England, Daniel O’Thunder interweaves the voices of several narrators to tell the story of a troubled but charismatic prize-fighting evangelist who challenges none other than the Devil to a battle in the ring.
A former pugilist with a right fist known as “The Hammer of Heaven,” O’Thunder disappeared for years before resurfacing as a crusading street preacher. He pursues a life in Christ, serving those in need, whether they be poor, homeless or in need of guidance. But on London’s dark streets, an evil presence is wreaking havoc and throwing into peril the lives of O’Thunder’s most vulnerable souls.
The novel inhabits the world of the theatre, the criminal underworld and the world of bare-knuckle prizefighting, then shifts to the wild west of North America, where O’Thunder meets his ultimate opponent in the desert of the B.C. Interior.


How Daniel O’Thunder Came To Be Written

In the early spring of 2008, I received an email from Chris Labonte, who had been a highly gifted student of mine back in the early 1990s, when I had done a two-year stint teaching screenwriting in the UBC Creative Writing Department. We had stayed in touch over the years, and Chris was familiar with my work as a dramatist. Now he was emailing to let me know that he was heading up a new line of fiction as Literary Acquiring Editor at Douglas & McIntyre, and to ask: had I ever considered writing a novel? I replied: funny you should mention that…

I had wanted to write a novel for years. In fact, I had been jotting notes on one particular idea, off and on, for a quarter of a century. I had indeed taken a run at the first forty pages a year or so earlier, before being sucked back into the vortex of my screen projects.

Chris asked me to send him a couple of sentences describing the nub of the idea, so I did. He emailed back to say that he was intrigued, and suggested we meet for coffee. We got together and spent a splendid couple of hours discussing writing, our families, the world in general and this idea in particular. At the end of the meeting, I expected him to assure me that he’d be happy to read the manuscript if I ever finished it, after which we’d shake hands and return to our respective corners of the real world. Instead, he said: “Okay, I’ll get a contract to you on Monday. Can you show me a first draft by Christmas?”

There are times when the universe whacks you with a plank. If I was ever going to write the novel, evidently now was the time. I retrieved my jaw from the floor, and said: yup.

The idea that became Daniel O’Thunder first glimmered when I was a graduate student at King’s College, London, and found myself mulling a vague notion about the tortured antagonism between a failed evangelist and a Devil who was feeling diminished and disoriented by the modern world. I’m not sure where the idea actually came from, since I never do – I just wake up one morning and realize an idea is there. In this case, I presume it had to do with my being a kind of Lapsed Anglican with foggy spiritual questions and a hobbyist’s interest in New Testament scholarship.

A number of years later I began to realize that the evangelist lived in London (my favourite city), during the Victorian era (Dickens happens to be my favourite novelist), and that his story connected somehow with the world of theatre (a lifelong love). About three years ago I suddenly discovered that my evangelist was also a bare-knuckle prizefighter, which meant that my fascination with boxing history had plunged into the mix. It subsequently turned out that he was Irish. How that happened, I’m not sure.

The first draft was written in a seven-month blitz, and then rewritten over a feverish four months (day-shift in the basement, followed by an evening-shift at the coffee shop, since the trick is to persuade yourself that you’re taking a break and have gone out to relax all by yourself in a corner with your laptop).

It almost killed me. I had the time of my life.

Young Adult Fiction

Crossroads - young adult novel (Greey dePencier Books, 1991)

The Video Kid - young adult novel (Scholastic-TAB, 1988)

The Video Kid Rides Again - (Scholastic-TAB, 1990)