Will Coe
ALLi Author Member
Location: United Kingdom
Genres: Crime, Historical Fiction
Will Coe is the pen name of John Wilkinson. John graduated MA in History from Edinburgh before embarking on a career in advertising. He founded and was Creative Director of a London advertising agency, winning several awards at the Cannes Advertising Film Festivals. In his fifties, with youth breathing down his neck in a young man’s game, he switched to being Head of Marketing for the Open University Business School. Now retired with his wife and no dogs to the Big Skies of Norfolk, John has returned to his original love, writing. His preferred genre is historical fiction and his approach to it is a little different than many of the big players. Rather than place new characters in an historical context, he uses real figures from the past to give them exposure the history books have denied them or to highlight aspects of their career or character which have gone unremarked. He is about to complete his Stuart trilogy. The first, ‘A Body in the Barn’, imagines Oliver Cromwell in his self-confessed ‘ungodly days’. The second, ‘Don’t Blame Oliver', rescues Secretary of State John Thurloe from the bin of history. The third, ‘Twin Furies’, (due for publication in 2027) focuses on the complementary role of two women in the 17th century English and French civil wars: the Countess of Carlisle and the Duchesse de Chevreuse.
Will Coe's books
Genres: Historical Fiction
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Age Groups: 18+
Die gloriously or be forgotten forever, that was the dilemma facing John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Secretary of State and spymaster. Make a defiant speech on the scaffold or save your life by helping a Restoration propagandist distort the history of the English Civil War and your role in it? Thurloe opted for survival while secretly penning a counterblast to Lord Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion. His rollicking account reveals how he exploited the birth of the popular newspaper and feminism’s false dawn, enabling a wart-nosed commoner to replace an anointed king. It captures the essence of civil war, where what happens on street corners, in parlours, bedchambers, churches, taprooms and brothels is as important as battlefield action.
Genres: Crime, Historical Fiction
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Age Groups: 18+
Handsome, naked and murdered in a barn on the edge of the fens. A fate that poses many questions. But who wants them asked, let alone answered? Certainly not the local lord anxious to keep his dubious land dealings out of the public eye. Luckily, he has a tame constable and a needy cousin who can be persuaded to dispose of the body decently but without reporting it. Unfortunately, that’s a hanging offence were it to be discovered. There it might have ended if the body hadn’t been that of a man who’d caught the king’s eye and the cousin hadn’t been Oliver Cromwell, in his “ungodly” days before Puritanism enraptured him. His problem – which he takes time to realise – is not that the debauched courtiers of King James also want the murder concealed but that they have ordered a marshal to eliminate anyone who found out about...