The following books are available
Published :- 2023
Available at :- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Contractor-Jonathan-Frame-ebook/dp/B0CK4KMSBY
Blurb:-
“Criminal Contractor Zack McCarthy is scammed out of £50 by the Delaney family, so he kidnaps them to use them in the next 3 jobs he has as a punishment for them for defrauding him.
The relationship between them grows but the world of the Contractor is very different to that of the Delaneys and they find themselves immersed in situations far more dangerous than they could have imagined.”
Each chapter is told in the first person, by one of the four main characters. The story itself was inspired by an incident that happened to me last year when I was ripped off, basically the first half of the first chapter.
Author’s Notes:-
The first scene, at the motorway service station, is essentially what actually happened. Except, of course, including the mysterious blanket-covered figure on the back seat. Instead of me catching up with them to exact revenge, I worked out the entire story while I was completing my journey.
The initial draft was written on my phone and completed in six months or so. Then it was another six months of drafting and redrafting so I had it all completed in just over a year, the quickest I’ve ever produced a book.
THE LONG ECHO
Published :- 2021
Available at :- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Long-Echo-Jonathan-Frame-ebook/dp/B09KCJML94
Blurb:-
A cold case, a Private Eye compelled to take on almost any offer of work just to earn his living, and a woman who appears to be trapped in time.
Private investigator Isaac Defoe is asked to look into the conviction of a client’s aunt for murder, a case he had worked on twenty years earlier when he had been starting his career as a police detective.
He discovers the aunt is housed in a secure unit where she relives the day of her arrest over and over again. Perfectly. Without interruption. Oblivious to the rest of the world.
Isaac’s investigation throws up new clues and he realises the conviction is unsafe. And then everything about the case begins to unravel and a new, very different picture emerges. Putting Isaac in fear for his life.
Author’s Notes:-
I have the memory of reading about a women in Victorian England being held in prison for a number of years but never apparently ageing. I wondered how that could happen and created a similar situation in a modern setting. Initially, I had the idea of offering an explicit supernatural explanation but in the end I decided to leave it open-ended
This book took longer to write than I expected. I made consistent if slow progress. Sometimes during the writing phase, I’ll hit a sweet spot from time to time where I can write and write. That never really happened with this one.
Schrödinger’s Elephant
Published :- 2018
Available at :- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Schr%C3%B6dingers-Elephant-Jonathan-Frame-ebook/dp/B07GTFDKKX
Blurb:-
The End of Man. The Future of Woman.
The Climate Emergency. More and more humans consuming the planet’s resources, societies struggling with ever-increasing amounts of violence. How does our world react against this?
Schrödinger’s Elephant is collection of five novellas, inspired by the work of ethologist John B. Calhoun who defined the term Behavioural Sink to describe the collapse of society resulting from overcrowding. These stories take points in a history where the crisis of overpopulation is resolved by women uniting to eradicate men completely from the world, to continue humanity’s journey as a single-gender species. And the resulting consequence of that.
Why Schrödinger’s Elephant? The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger said “Imagine a cat in a box. Quantum mechanics implies the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened and its state can be determined”. And with that, the thought experiment Schrödinger Cat was conceived.
Schrödinger’s Elephant takes the idea of the Elephant In The Room, the subject no one is prepared to discuss, to be the ever-expanding global human population and the resulting environmental and social consequences – depletion of natural resources, the increase in violence as more and more people compete for survival. Only that particular Elephant is in the next room, the room politicians and world leaders ignore, the room no-one dares open the door to, for fear what state they may find.
The five novellas are
Universe N :- A scientist despairing of the human race attempts to introduce a virulent flu epidemic to cull the human population to a more manageable number.
Spark :- A series of attacks on women ignites the switch where women first band together to defend themselves against the rising tide of crimes against their gender by men.
Born of Woman :- Set several years after Spark, a group of men are on the run and being hunted down by the authorities. They believe they are some of the last men left alive on the planet.
Alphabet :- In a world populated by women, one woman investigates a Collective in the belief its members are illegally trying to create male babies. At the same time, the world’s paediatric scientists are trying to engineer foetuses to produce women who are capable of reproducing parthenogenetically, that is the ability to self-fertilize.
Only Human :- A lone woman travels through the world, pursued by a vicious pack of creatures that threaten to kill her.
Author’s Notes:-
The original idea was just for Universe N and there is still an underlying theme I would like to explore in future work. But as I was working on it, other ideas began to emerge. First Only Human, then Born of Woman and Alphabet. Finally Spark. I actually wrote something like a quarter of a million words which were edited down to this number, about one hundred and fifty thousand.
Coming up with titles can be tricky but for this one, I was listening to a radio program not long after I had started the book. The phrases Schrödinger’s Cat and The Elephant in the Room were mentioned in the same sentence. At once, I said to myself Schrödinger’s Elephant, at the same time one of the contributors on the radio program uttered the same words. It had to be a sign!
Moving Pictures
Published :- 2014
Available at :- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Moving-Pictures-Jonathan-Frame-ebook/dp/B00IW7QMOG
Blurb:-
A fast-paced, smart and stylish thriller set in the worlds of art, fraud and deception and combining a pulsating story with flashes of dark, sardonic humour.
Artist Kathryn Castledine has a lucrative sideline in producing forgeries. Her activities are discovered by an MI5 officer who then blackmails her into producing a series of fakes to prevent an insurance scam involving a staged heist of a collection of Soviet-era art.
However, it becomes clear there’s far more going on than what Kathryn was told. With her life under threat, she has to uncover the truth about the operation, who is deceiving who. And why.
Deftly plotted with many twists and turns, the novel also explores the nature of relationships and asexuality through Kathryn’s character.
Author’s Notes:-
After finishing Cat’s Paw, I had two ideas floating around; this one and a narrative that eventually formed part of Schrödinger’s Elephant. After going for a run, I had a story for Moving Pictures fixed in my brain. A story, not the story, because as I wrote it, the details changed somewhat although the basic elements remained the same.
I knew I didn’t want her to be in any kind of relationship. I had read an article, in 2012 I think, by a woman talking about her asexuality and I thought it would be a good idea for Kathryn to be asexual. Plus I thought it would make the book stand out. An art fraudster who is also asexual. No-one else thought the same.
Cat’s Paw
Published :- 2012 – I created two versions, one set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; the other in Perth, Western Australia.
Available at :- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cats-Paw-Jonathan-Frame-ebook/dp/B008STPO2O
and http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cats-Paw-ebook/dp/B008STOSVC
Blurb:-
A man is found murdered.
There’s suspicion the computer system he worked with is involved in an ongoing fraud.
An IT consultant finds himself hurled into the middle of a nightmare when he discovers David Peacock’s body in his apartment . But that is the only the start of a horrific sequence of events that find him and his wife immersed in fraud and murder as they try to uncover the truth. Only one thing is certain, their lives will have changed irrevocably.
If they survive.
“The idea behind the novel is exciting; Suspense is built masterfully and the characters retain distinct edges.”
British Publisher.
In a similar vein to the films Let Me In & Let The Right One In, there are two versions of this intense thriller, one set in a non-English speaking environment, Saudi Arabia, (green cover); the other set in an English-speaking environment, Australia, (blue cover). The novels are as identical as they can possibly be, the main difference being some of the motivations behind the actions and the scenes.
Author’s Notes:-
Write about what you know, the saying from creative writing teachers, agents and publishers goes. At the time I was part of a team working on a finance application fraud detection system. And I thought, could it be used to enable people to commit fraud by allowing certain data to be undetected? In the book, there is hidden software. In real life, I’m not sure it would be that easy. It would be quite possible over time, for a developer to come across any malicious code so it would need to be a group of people involved.
As I state in the blurb there are two versions. A couple of years previously, the film Let Me In was released. This was the English-language version of the Swedish film Let The Right One In. Was setting Cat’s Paw in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, an unfamiliar setting for a Western audience, going to put agents and publishers off? I wanted the Saudi version produced so I decided to produce an English-speaking version too.
Although I have been to Jeddah, I’ve never been to Perth in Western Australia. Looking at it on Google maps, it seemed the perfect replacement for Jeddah. Other contenders were San Francisco and Bristol. I would say about 85% of the text is unchanged but the other 15% – there were amendments on every page and I’m still not entirely sure an error or two haven’t crept.
So if anyone spots a reference that seems out of place, please let me know so I can correct it!
To Become Like Gods
Published :- 2011
Available at :- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Become-Like-Gods-Jonathan-Frame-ebook/dp/B004LLIWWW
Blurb:-
What if Icarus survived his plunge rather than perish?
What if he was able to warn Theseus about the Minotaur?
What if he also had knowledge of a conspiracy to bring down Athens itself?
A ship is travelling from Athens to Knossos, carrying Prince Theseus and a group of soldiers who are destined to enter the Labyrinth, to fight the brutal and ruthless Minotaur in a tournament to the death.
They encounter a young man adrift in the sea. Hauling him on board, he claims he is Icarus, son of Daedalus, inventor of the Labyrinth and that he has fled from Knossos in fear of his life, using a flying machine developed by him and his father.
Icarus goes on to warn them of a terrifying plot by Knossos to poison the Athenian water supply, to annihilate the city’s population so Knossos can invade with little or no resistance.
Sceptical of both the man’s identity and his story, the soldiers must ultimately decide if in fact they do believe him and, if so, how they can defeat the Minotaur and prevent the attack on their home city.
The ancient Greek myths of Daedalus & Icarus and the Labyrinth have been told for many centuries and this pulsating adventure novel, overflowing with incident, unearths the incredible story behind those myths. A captivating, exciting book led by strong characters and dramatic battle scenes, it covers themes of military ambition, genocide and intrigue that are as relevant today as they have always been, making it a powerful work of contemporary fiction that just so happens to be set in the past.
Author’s Notes:-
About eleven years previously to starting To Become Like Gods, I had written a novella about Daedalus and Icarus called Riders In The Blue, which dealt with them both surviving their flight. I wasn’t able to place it anywhere but the basic concept stuck with me. After returning to writing following a break, I was able to pull together the story together. It took a while to produce and at one point I was working on this and another book at the same time.
The first draft was about eighty-thousand words or so long. And then after finishing the second draft, I was suddenly inspired to write a great deal more, including a sea battle, so the final word count is just shy of one hundred and twenty thousand words.
Trying to get the book published provided a valuable lesson. A number of agents responded they thought it was a good idea, something they would want to read for themselves. However it was a book that they didn’t think they would be able to place with any publisher – the market wasn’t there.
And The Rest
Blurb:-
Up until the beginning of the millenium, I wrote a number of other books, mostly science fiction, four novels and two collections of short stories. Although there was some interest, in the end I was unable to get any of them published. I then took a break from writing to focus on my IT career, returning after a few years to start work on two books, To Become Like Gods and a satire about the adult movie world called Can’t Buy Me Love.
Can’t Buy Me Love attracted the most interest from prospective agents, one in particular coming close to taking me on. I sent them To Become Like Gods but they weren’t so keen on that and their interest in me waned. I did eventually self-publish Can’t Buy Me Love, finding the process of getting it into print extremely educational. After a few years I reviewed it and decided it wasn’t as good as I had first thought it was. So it is no longer available although there are a handful of physical copies still in existence.
Jonathan Frame 