I'm continuing my journey following the Granville-Paris Express ...

... and today I'm in Flers, a town in the département of Orne (61) which is part of the region of Normandy.  Read on …

Flers is a typical northern town.  The D524 follows the route of the railway from Vire to the centre of Flers.  The population is around 14,500 and has been in a steady decline since the mid nineteen-seventies.  Not that you would notice this from a stroll through town.  On the day of my visit, it was Ascension Thursday, and the town was very quiet as this is one of the few holy days still remaining in the catholic calendar.  Most of the little shops were closed – apart from the bakeries, of course!  But in and around the church of St-Germain, the streets were lined with empty cars and just as I approached the steps to the main entrance, a sea of people emerged.  The quiet was disturbed, and suddenly the town came alive as families and friends began chatting.  I decided to leave them all to it.  Once a conversation starts in France, who knows how long it will take!

I make my way to the railway station, and I’m very surprised to see the original building still standing.  Built and inaugurated in 1866, it is a single-storied symmetrical building very much of its time and fashion.  Considering the blanket bombing that took place across this area of France in the nineteen-forties, it is something of a little miracle that this station has survived.

As I meander through town, the destruction caused by the bombing is much more obvious. Modern housing and business premises are interspersed with the oddity of a single building from the twenties or thirties.  A park surrounded by individual homes and gardens, mostly modern or recreations of an earlier style, with one sole property that had been there since it was built in the mid-nineteenth century.  At one corner of the park, I come across the war memorial, dedicated to those who gave their lives in the 1914-1918 conflict.  It, too, has survived the destruction that occurred in the forties, along with the chapel of remembrance, built between 1926 and 1932.

My stroll takes me back to the church.  And still some stragglers are standing on the steps continuing their conversation.  I nod and walk past and step into the silence of the neo-gothic nave.  Built in the early 20th century, it has the height and looks every centimetre of style from that much earlier period, when building an edifice this size would have taken decades rather than a few years.  Nevertheless, it is impressive, and the modern take on the art of the ancients who created the stunning stained glass of some of the most revered places in Christendom is a breathtaking meander through modern art.  The church interior opens up other windows on history.  There’s a small chapel dedicated to those who gave their lives in the Maquis and a second memorial to a man who was persecuted for his religion – Catholicism.

Back outside again, and the weather has taken on a chill, grey clouds are skudding across the sky, the talkers have left, and the last of the returnees are moving along the main street on their way home to lunch.

I have one last place to visit, and it’s just a few steps from St-Germain.  The covered market is a magnificent red-brick building that dates from 1883.  As it’s Ascension Thursday, the market is well and truly closed, but I can’t help but take as close a look as I can get.  I make a note to return on a market day when I’m next in this area.  There is also a fortified château here, which has become the town’s museum, and it is also closed.  I’ll save that for another visit on another day ...

There will be more from my journey following the Granville-Paris Express next month.

If you enjoyed this post, you can find the previous posts by clicking the links Granville part 1, Granville part 2, Vire, and my review of the book, The Paris Express, is Here

Please welcome, friend and author, Adrian Williams...

...to my blog this week.  Hi, Adrian and thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to be here.  Your recent release is Yesterday’s News, a crime thriller set in South Africa.  Tell me more ...

Acrian  I was looking to write something with international appeal.  With that in mind, the period from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the next decade was fertile soil to plough, with the Velvet Revolution in eastern Europe, the first Gulf War in Iraq, and the end of apartheid in South Africa signalling huge social and political changes across the globe.  While plotting a course through that history, I also wove a narrative that confronted the personal impacts upon my characters from the spread of HIV/AIDS, the infected blood scandal and the Hillsborough disaster in the UK.

I needed to put news gathering and reportage at the centre of my tale, and the emergence of satellite television gave me an opportunity to pit two newspaper proprietors against each other in a battle for control of this new broadcast media.  To that end, I created a larger-than-life puppet master in Johannes Botha, whose skirmishes with the real-life Rupert Murdoch form the core of the action.

AEW  What first got you into writing and why?

Adrian   When I was about 12, my mom scraped together the money to buy me a cheap typewriter.  She must have seen something in me, but unfortunately the bloody thing was useless and the keys kept jamming!  After leaving school, my ambitions were curtailed when real life got in the way and I ended up earning a living on the factory floors of the West Midlands.  Finally, at the grand old age of 42, I got my first PC and the world of the word processor was at hand.  Since then, I haven’t looked back.

AEW  You write crime fiction. Is it all imagination or do you do research?

Adrian  As my story is set in recent history (1989-91) I had to extensively research the events covered.  I’m old enough to vividly recall them, but I didn’t want to make mistakes (or end up getting sued!) so I was meticulous in my work.  Thankfully, a lot of my readers have complimented me on my attention to detail.

AEW  Have you tried/dabbled with other genres or writing for other forms of media?

Adrian  Yes, I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a crime thriller writer, so my next release will be an urban comedy called ‘Tenement Tales’, followed by a children’s story aimed at helping kids to make friends at school.  I’d love to try my hand at a screenplay for ‘Yesterday’s News’ – I can dream, can’t I?

AEW  Absolutely!  Making stuff up is the best bit of being an author for me.  But back ot my quiestions, famous authors such as Roald Dahl and Dylan Thomas had a special space for writing.  Do you have a writing shed of your own?

Adrian   I wish I could say I write from my villa overlooking the Med, but being an honest boy, the tiny box room of my house is my creative sanctuary.  I take a notebook with me on holidays and suchlike to scribble ideas or to make notes on locations that may be included in my stories.  Feeling particularly inspired during a holiday in Croatia, I wrote a rough draft of about 25 pages of Yesterday’s News.

AEW  And finally, if you had a whole afternoon to yourself and could choose to spend it with any one individual, living or dead, or a character from a book, who would it be and what would you discuss?

Adrian  That’s a no brainer!  I’d love to pick the brains of the fella who I consider to be the greatest Englishman of all time, Mr Charles Dickens.  We’re talking about the first international celebrity here, the first writer to perform his work on a theatrical stage. What must that have been like?  He was Elvis, Bowie, Freddie Mercury – the rock and roller of his day.

He gave the wealthy world a conscience and I’d want to glean his thoughts on social injustice and prejudice of all forms.  What would he think of today’s politicians?

Would he incorporate today’s innovations (AI for example) in his creative process? Would the convenience of Google be preferable to personal observation?  I’d be fascinated to see him include motor cars, mobile phones and the internet in a contemporary work.

Before we went our separate ways, I’d want to know why he felt the need to finish off Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop?  I’d tell him he owes me an afternoon of tears for that one!

AEW  Well, that’s a refreshing change from some of the comments I get about Mr Dickens.  He’s one of my writing heros too!

about the author...  Adrian is a proud son of Birmingham, England.  After leaving St Thomas Aquinas grammar school at 16, I earned a living with my hands, either in heavy industry grafting on the factory floors of our local motor manufacturers, or on (usually) freezing cold building sites.  In later life, I changed careers after acquiring qualifications in marketing and business management, while developing an interest in writing professionally.

With support from my long-suffering partner, Sheila, a love of travel, sports, history, politics and the arts have enriched my life in so many ways, and I live in hope that the innocent child who entered the world will eventually leave it as a well-rounded individual.

about the book... Marcus Botha, a ruthlessly corrupt mineral-mining and shipbuilding tycoon from South Africa, dramatically sells up and moves to 1970s London, reinventing himself as a UK media magnate.  For two decades his notorious national newspaper, The Horizon stirs the

imagination with its sensation-seeking journalism, whether luridly chronicling celebrity sex scandals or whipping up AIDS hysteria.

At the peak of his powers, the Botha brand suffers seismic damage when his paper’s inaccurate coverage of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster provokes national anger. To deflect criticism, he decides to stage two bespoke sporting extravaganzas in Las Vegas and Sun City to be broadcast on his fledgling satellite TV network, though both fail miserably.

When apartheid ends in his homeland, rumours of his deadly past emerge, leading to a murder investigation and charges. Compounding his problems, social unrest in the UK boils over via the Poll Tax riots, leading to the fall of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. As a vocal advocate of Thatcherism, his hopes for her support in his battle to avoid extradition go with her.

With his problems mounting, he is blindsided by a corporate betrayal which threatens to bring his dazzling empire crashing down.

Can the cunning Botha avoid justice and financial ruin?

You can get the book Here

You can follow Adrian on his author page on Amazon on his Website and on Facebook or on Instagram

I'm very pleased to announce ...

... that book 7 in the Jacques Forêt Mystery Series has a cover and is about to be released.  Read on for more info ...

The last eighteen months have been a significant trial for me and my books.  At the end of September in 2024, Crooked Cat/Darkstroke, my first publisher, decided to call it a day and closed their publishing house.  At that time, I had been with Crooked Cat since 2015, when the very first Jacques Forêt story hit the streets.

More importantly, had it not been for Steph and Laurence, these books may never have seen the light of day!  They took a chance on a complete unknown who quite definitely was not tech-, promo-, or marketing-savvy in any way, shape, or form.  Since 2015 it's been a long and steep learning curve.  But Steph and Laurence, and the wonderful family of authors they supported, were always there to answer questions, debate issues, and shepherd me along when I needed it.

It was with very great sadness that I found myself querying after almost ten years.  It was also quite frightening to see how many things in the world of publishing had changed from when I made my first submissions in 2014/2015.

In January 2025, I found what I thought would be a new and forever home for my Jacques books.  The first six stories were handed over, and the seventh was submitted in August last year.  And then, I waited.  And waited.  And waited some more, only to find that my second publisher had decided to re-organise internally, which meant that my books and those of some other authors no longer fitted their remit.  In December 2025, I was back submitting again.  To misquote Lady Bracknell from Wilde's play, The Importance of Being Earnest, it seemed to me that losing one publisher 'may be regarded as a misfortune,' but to lose two 'looks like carelessness.'  And yes, the news of the re-organisation hit me like a wrecking ball, and I spent far too long wondering what it was that I had done wrong.

However, like the proverbial 'plodder' that I am, and I have any number of school reports confirming that, I picked myself up and carried on.  Becoming living proof of the fact that I 'always get there in the end,' it gives me the greatest of pleasure to write the following words : Meyrueis, book seven in the Jacques Forêt Mystery Series, will be published on Monday, May 11th, in both e-format and paperback.  To give you a little taste of the story that will be inside the fabulous new cover above, the burb is below.

... about the book Whilst conducting a routine security survey at a business in the city of Mende, Jacques comes across some facts that do not add up. Further surveillance work leads to a complicated web of lies and deceit.

The release of an old adversary from prison brings further work for Jacques and danger for his team and his son. The discovery of a body in the quiet town of Meyrueis adds yet another facet to a difficult investigation.

Can Jacques weave the numerous threads together to resolve the case, keep everyone safe, and identify the killer?

You can get the e-book Here, and the paperback will follow in the next week or so.