The Bookmaker from Rabaul ..

I wrote a book once about this infernal mystery and when it was done I asked Misca, bless her, if a man could connect all the known facts about the Somerton Man could it be construed as being close to the truth. She laughed out loud all  the way from Canada, I could hear her brutal response ‘NO!’

But the thing is, nobody has done any better, small field that it is, but what do you do when you come in first in a two horse race? You brag is what you do. Kerry  Greenwood’s book was an outrageous fail. Read all her 300 hundred positive reviews then read mine less than ordinary, but it helps to have friends in the business. Lunches all round. Ì have two. Friends in need àre friends indeed.

It starts is in Hong Kong, the book, and you know what they say, don’t write about places yòu don’t know about and HK was a bit of a playground back in the day.. plus I couldn’t fit Gibraltar in which was  a pity because I knew that town pretty as well in 1964. Drugs, smuggling cigarettes and booze, belly dancers and nuggets of black hashish. Àdd to that trying to cook a Michelin 3 hamburger in a kitchen with only a card table and portable gas-burner in a nightclub of drunken English soldiers and equally aggressive sailors.. those happy days. Nevermind the boys coming ashore in Gib from a month waiting from North Africa to erupt … which it didn’t, but  Gib they did it did, erupt.. but then you had to be there.

Anyway, the book is here, read by just a few, but a thing of beauty nevertheless.

the bookmaker from rabaul

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