I've started work on these three:
- The British Spring (22 pages in): A story about the contempoary far right in Britain. Basically looks at two groups of characters; one group from a (fictious) mill town on the Yorkshire/Lancashire border, the other from Essex. The two groups meet through their shared love of football, with both playing for hteir local teams. Wanting to prepare for a race war and creating an ethnostate, one group heads out to Poland with their Polish friend to do weapons training at a militia camp; the other group jets off to Northern Ireland to buy guns from the IRA and loyalist groupos (with diastrous consequences). Book progresses climaxing in some kind of terror attack.
The main character, Oscar, is an introverted, 28 year old northerner who also, ironically, happens to be gay. He faced homophobic bullying in the army and went AWOL, but tells everyone else he was a war hero. The other main character is Alf, a reactionary Cockney from south Essex who runs a florist that is actually a front for drug dealing. He's less intelligent, more stupid, like running as a councillor whilst promising to declare independence for his borough and blow up the Dartford Crossing to stop immigrants and people from Kent entering the borough. He's assisted by Steve Radford, the manager of their hapless football team who is a thuggish white supremacist.
I'm about 22 pages into it. Just not sure how the vibe is.
Second idea - not sure of the name. It's centred around a main character, Deniro, a 17 year old boy in London who gets sucked into gang crime. Very relevant, looking at knives, drugs guns etc. Wrote crime novels before but this would be the first looking at this type of crime.
Third idea - The Man in Grey. Started writing something similar a few years ago but had a dream about it last night and now it's come back to me. About a counter terrorism police officer who gets put on leave after a botched police operation in whcih an innocent man was shot dead. Whilst living in the safe house in which he has been relocated to, he discovers the neighbours are planning a terrorist atrocity. When I started writing this a few years ago it also involved his son, and was about two neo-Nazi teens planning an attack on Canary Wharf and the British Parliament, but could equally be Islamist.
Thoughts?